Tonight's DemDebate lineup: - Joe Biden - Cory Booker - Pete Buttigieg - Julián Castro - Kamala Harris - Amy Klobuchar - Beto O'Rourke - Bernie Sanders - Elizabeth Warren - Andrew Yang
The winnowing presidential primary field is five months out from the first ballots being cast – but Democrats all vying for the top of the ticket are still carving out their own paths to defeat President Donald Trump.
On Thursday, the 10 highest-polling candidates will appear for a single night of debate in Houston hosted by ABC News and Univision -- the smallest roster yet in the third matchup of Democratic National Committee-sanctioned primary debates, with a field that still counts 20. The divisions in the candidates' strategies were made clear at the second debates in Detroit, when several Democrats took aim at Obama's presidency -- both directly and indirectly -- and the very legacy Biden is running to extend.
"The reality is that our plan will bring health care to all Americans under a Medicare for All system," said California Sen. Kamala Harris, defending her plan which is more of a hybrid health insurance system that allows private companies to be able to offer health insurance plans within the Medicare system for consumers."Your plan by contrast leaves out almost 10 million Americans," she said of the Sanders.
"Mr. Vice President, it looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn't," said Castro, who served under Obama."My immigration plan would also fix the broken legal immigration system because we do have a problem with that." Those who took aim at parts of Obama's record -- either by backing Medicare for All over Obamacare or by rejecting certain aspects of his immigration agenda -- might run into a tougher road ahead as they seek to win back those voters who drifted from Democrats and turned to Trump.
"The purpose of the presidency is not the glorification of the president, but the unification of the people," he added. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, newly impassioned by a mass shooting in his native El Paso that killed 22 people last month, is on an unvarnished quest to fill the void in moral leadership he sees in the era of Trump.
For entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who is carving out his own base in the shape of an eclectic cult-like following, the debate stage is an opportunity to attract a wide swath of voters, across the ideological spectrum, as his substantive campaign seeks to make the masses"think harder."
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