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Tom Steyer on Wednesday stressed the importance of giving every American a chance to succeed when asked about combating discrimination against people with disabilities.
“Mr. Steyer, I am a bilateral deaf student that wears cochlear implants in order to hear. My question for you is how will you end the negative stigma and discrimination against people like me that suffer from disabilities?” a high school student at the CNN town hall asked.
The billionaire businessman responded, “Probably the biggest thing that I believe in is the idea that we’re in it together, that we succeed together, and that looking down or not investing and giving a chance to anybody who’s an American is something that to me is deeply wrong.”
Steyer pointed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which outlaws discrimination and guarantees a free appropriate public education to all children with disabilities. Steyer said the federal government doesn’t fully pay what it says it will to fund the cost of education of individuals with disabilities.
He said it’s partly a policy question – one of getting proper funding for education and allowing people to succeed – “but beyond that there is a question here about attitude that goes towards people with disabilities, people of different race, people with a different sexual orientation, or however we want to cut the American pie.”
Steyer said President Donald Trump’s “attitude in terms of immigration is a straight-up racist attack on people based on ethnicity and race. I believe that what he does is separate people on all of those measures to try and succeed politically. And I think that every single one of those instances is deeply wrong.”
Tom Steyer sought to explain his poor showing in Iowa – despite spending $17 million on ads in the state – by arguing he got into the race late and hitting the person currently leading in the state, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“Look, I got in late to this race. I was the last person to get in Iowa. I’m going to compete everywhere, we are going to work hard everywhere,” Steyer said. “We’re now going towards the states where we’re going to build the kind of diverse coalition that is going to win not only the nomination but is going to beat Mr. Trump in November.”
Then Steyer turned to polls that show he has a strong base of support in Nevada and South Carolina, the third and fourth states in the nominating process that are far more diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire.
“I can put together the kind of diverse coalition that we need to have to beat Trump. And that’s something if you look at the people who are running for president, there are people who are struggling to do that, like Pete Buttigieg,” Steyer said. “We can’t beat Trump unless the diverse elements, including black and brown communities, come out and show up for Democrats.”
Steyer again hit Buttigieg in response to the next question about his business record.
In response, Steyer argued that business experience is an asset against Trump and named Buttigieg as someone who doesn’t have that needed business experience.
“He failed as a businessman, and he’s a terrible steward of the American economy for the American people,” Steyer said of Trump. “Whoever the Democrat is going to have to take him down, you can’t have a couple years in business like Pete Buttigieg.”
When CNN’s Dana Bash noted that Steyer brought up Buttigieg twice, the businessman said he had “three decades of private sector experience” that “you’re not going to be able to get by with a couple of years at McKinsey.”
Buttigieg works for the national consulting firm for three years.
Businessman Tom Steyer said he was not worried his push to impeach Donald Trump – which culminated in Trump’s acquittal by the Senate on Wednesday – would boost the President in his reelection bid.
“It is never wrong to stand up for what’s right,” Steyer said in a CNN town hall Wednesday night in New Hampshire.
Steyer spent tens of millions of his own dollars on his “Need to Impeach” push starting in October 2017, gathering 8.5 million petition signatures.
“What we’ve seen here is something shameful in American history,” he said. “Today, we’ve seen Republicans not do their duty by the Constitution.”
Andrew Yang, asked about passing gun legislation on Wednesday night in New Hampshire, spoke at length about raising boys, saying the country “has to face facts” that the overwhelmingly majority of school shooters are men.
Yang then pivoted to his own family. He has two sons, including a 7-year-old son, Christopher, who is autistic.
“As the father of an autistic son, I know if you have the wrong boy in the wrong school, very bad things can happen, generally just to that boy and his family,” Yang said. “But sometimes something that’s external in the community and too many schools don’t have appropriate resources for kids who are neurologically struggling and get pushed to the side, particularly boys who are in this position.”
Yang laid out other goals to take on guns, including technological advancements that make only one person able to fire a weapon and having an “evergreen buyback” so that anyone who wants to sell back their gun can do so.
Yang’s focus on the need to address issues with raising young boys is a unique take on a key Democratic issue – the desire to regulate the sale of guns – and is part of a host of distinctive policy focuses from the businessman-turned-candidate.
Andrew Yang used a question about money in politics to sell his “democracy dollars” proposal and defend the electoral college, a system that a number of leading Democratic primary contenders have said they want to scrap.
Yang has called for reforms to the process, but again on Wednesday night described any effort to replace it, like with a national popular vote, as unrealistic and in defiance of the framers’ will.
Channeling one of the most popular arguments in favor of the electoral college, he asked: “Do you want presidential candidates just going to New York, LA, Boston and San Francisco and ignoring everyplace else?”
Critics of the current system, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, argue that it is archaic and undemocratic, while noting – in a nod to Democrats still angry over the 2000 and 2016 elections – that two of the last five elections have been won by the (Republican) candidate who received fewer votes nationwide.
Instead, Yang wants to target changes to the influence of big dollars in the campaign process and impose other reforms to make voting easier and, in his opinion, more reflective of voters’ preferences.
“We should have ranked-choice voting in this country, so that people can actually vote the way they want and not be worried about ‘wasting their vote;’ we should have Election Day be a national holiday; we should automatically register new voters to make it easier for people to vote, instead of having these obstacles,” he said.
Andrew Yang thinks he knows why President Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted about him yet.
“You know who is already figured out I’m his toughest match up? Donald Trump. I’m the only candidate in the field he hasn’t tweeted a word about,” Yang said on Wednesday. “He knows I’m better at the internet than he is.”
He added: “And number two, his most potent attacks are that you are a corrupt politician and none of this stuff works on me.”
While Trump has tweeted about a host of presidential candidates, he has not tweeted about Yang.
The answer came in response to a question about why Yang believes he is the best prepared to debate Trump.
“As more Democrats realize that I’m the candidate that is best situated to defeat him soundly in the general election, the stronger this campaign will grow and the more likely I become the nominee,” Yang said.
Yang, with 92% of precincts reporting, only won 1% of support in Iowa. And national polls of the Democratic primary find the businessman and upstart candidate in the low single digits.
Watch the moment:
Andrew Yang slammed the chaos in Iowa on Wednesday, touting the fact that the New Hampshire primary is expected to be smoother as the Iowa Democratic Party still works to get results out.
“I see you’re wearing a math pin. Did you offer some help with math to the Democrats in Iowa this past week?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked. Yang often wears a “MATH” lapel pin, which stands for Make America Think Harder.
Yang jumped on the question.
The Iowa Democratic Party is still working to fully report the results from Monday night’s caucuses. A string of issues have arisen during the reporting process, putting a spotlight on deficiencies on the Iowa caucus process and raising the possibility that the state will lose its status as the first state in the nominating process.
Yang, with 92% of the precincts reporting, garnered just 1% of support during the caucuses, an underwhelming result to many of his supporters.
Yang sought to explain away the result by comparing himself to Bill Clinton, who finished second in New Hampshire but dubbed himself the “Comeback Kid” before eventually winning the Democratic nomination.
“Bill Clinton got 3% in 1992. He went on to do great here in New Hampshire and become president for two terms,” Yang said. “We hope we can follow in his footsteps.”
Left unsaid: Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin ran for president that year and largely made the Iowa caucuses irrelevant because he won handily.
Elizabeth Warren did not say whether, as president, she would reverse President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. Instead, the Massachusetts senator argued that where the United States puts its embassy should be up to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“We need to encourage both Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate with each other,” Warren said. “The United States should not be putting a thumb on the scale, should not be saying in these negotiations, we stand only with one party.”
Warren took on the Trump administration’s ties to the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and argued that a two-state solution should dictate where the United States puts its embassy.
“The embassy is what they should be negotiating,” she said, referring to the Israelis and Palestinians. “They should be negotiating what constitutes the capital. That’s really my point, that’s what the parties should decide.”
She added: “The parties should negotiate whether or not the capital is in Jerusalem, where the capital is, and then the United States should move its embassy to be in the capital of each of the two states in a two-state solution.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday night made clear that creating a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants will be a central piece of her immigration agenda if she wins in November.
“I want to put the people who are here to stay – remember, these are our neighbors, these are people you nay work with, these are people who may be cleaning the room that you stay in tonight – those people should be on a path to citizenship,” Warren said.
“It needs to be fair, it needs to be managed, but it needs to be a path to citizenship,” she added, before turning to the more controversial question of what public goods those families and individuals should have access to before they attain legal status.
“If people are on a path to citizenship,” Warren added, “they should have health care and their children should get an education because that is how we build an America that works for everyone.”
When a woman studying politics at St. Anselm College asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren if men have a better chance of beating President Donald Trump because of their gender, the Massachusetts senator laughed.
Warren noted that people in the 1960s said a Catholic could not win the presidency, and then John F. Kennedy won in 1960. She then said how people believed in 2008 that the United States would never elect a black president and then Barack Obama won the presidency.
“Our party is better than that. And we proved that our country is better than that,” Warren said. “2020, we can and should have a woman for president.”
Warren has pushed forcefully against the electability argument that a man has a better chance of taking on Trump.
During the most recent Democratic debate, Warren took on the electability question by noting the win-loss record of each person on the stage, including Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the only other woman on the stage.
“So, can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on this stage,” Warren said. “Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women. Amy and me.”
Watch the moment:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren pointed to her massive national organization as evidence for New Hampshire voters to consider when they go to the polls next Tuesday.
Asked what she needed to do to in the coming primary to prove she’s a “top tier” candidate, Warren refused to set any concrete expectations.
Instead, in much the same way her campaign sought to temper early state expectations in a memo last month, Warren touted her team’s presence around the country.
“I’m delighted to be in New Hampshire right now,” she said, “but also building out all across this country. We’ve got 55 more states and territories (in the primary). I’m in 31 states now with a thousand (paid organizers) on the ground.”
Warren’s answer mirrored the message put out by her campaign manager, Roger Lau, in late January, a little more than a week before the Iowa caucuses, in which he charted a path to winning the nearly 2,000 delegates needed to secure the nomination.
But he also downplays the first round of contests, pointedly noting that those states provided less than 4% of the delegates, and took an early swing at how the results would be covered.
“We expect this to be a long nomination fight and have built our campaign to sustain well past Super Tuesday and stay resilient no matter what breathless media narratives come when voting begins,” Lau wrote.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is speaking to New Hampshire Democrats and independents ahead of next week’s primary in the Granite State.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said that because of his age – he is 77 – the most important qualification in a potential running mate is “that the person’s ready to be president of the United States.”
Biden said at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire he’d like to pick a woman or person of color as his running mate, though it would be “incredibly presumptuous” of him to talk in detail about it or name names at this stage of the Democratic primary.
He said he would want a close relationship with his vice president, and would want someone prepared to handle tasks “from beginning to end” – pointing to Obama assigning him to disburse federal stimulus dollars in the wake of the economic collapse.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has dealt with stuttering throughout his life, said he keeps in contact and works with many people who stutter.
“I deal with about 15 stutterers I keep in contact with all the time,” Biden said.
Biden was asked at the CNN town hall what advice he would give a college student who has struggled with stuttering since he was a young child. The question led the former vice president to open up more publicly about his own struggles than he has before in the 2020 race – and acknowledge that he still stutters at times.
“You know, stuttering, when you think about it, is the only handicap that people still laugh about. That still humiliate people about. And they don’t even mean to,” Biden said.
“The point I make to these young people that I still work with, is that in fact it’s critically important for them not to judge themselves by their speech. (To) not let that define them,” Biden said.
“What I say to anybody out there, and any of the people you work with, young people who stutter, I’ll give you my phone number, not a joke, and they can call me. I’ll give you a private number, ” Biden said.
Watch the moment:
Former Vice President Joe Biden forcefully accused Republicans – namely Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – of putting their “head in the sand” over election interference by Russia.
“There is a bill on the desk of Mitch McConnell” to take on election interference and strengthen US elections, Biden said on Wednesday in New Hampshire. “What are we doing? Why are we putting our head in the sand and pretending that these guys don’t want to interfere in our election?”
The US intelligence community assessed following the 2016 election that Russian intelligence agencies interfered in the election and concerns remain that the same could happen in November.
Biden said Democrats and Republicans should be “making available to all the states a way in which we will help them fund the change in their electoral process so that they can have the machines that are not able to be tapped, paper ballots, et cetera.”
And on Russia, Biden added, “They have, they are, and they’ll continue to be. It will be an overwhelming priority for me when I’m President of the United States to see to it that it ends and there will be consequences if it doesn’t.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that President Donald Trump awarding conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom was more about maintaining his right-wing political base than anything else.
First lady Melania Trump placed the medal on Limbaugh during Trump’s State of the Union address in a surprise move on Tuesday, one day after Limbaugh publicly revealed he has advanced lung cancer.
“Rush Limbaugh will spend his entire time on the air dividing people, belittling people, talking about how, talking about blacks in ways, African Americans in ways that — anyway, I do feel badly, and I mean this sincerely, that he’s suffering from a terminal illness. So he has my empathy and sympathy no matter what his background is,” Biden said.
“But the idea that he … receives a medal that is of the highest honor that can committed, given to a civilian, I find, quite frankly, driven more by trying to maintain your right-wing political credentials than it is anything else,” Biden said.
Biden himself was awarded the Medal of Freedom by then-President Barack Obama in 2017. Biden served as Obama’s vice president.
“I mean, if you read some of the things that Rush has said about people, their backgrounds, their ethnicity, how he speaks to them. I don’t think he speaks, I don’t think he understands the American code of decency and honor,” Biden said.
“But, look, this is Donald Trump,” Biden said.
Watch the moment:
Faced with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ criticism of his record on Social Security, former Vice President Joe Biden promised to protect and expand the program, then called out Sanders’ supporters for distorting his position in a misleadingly edited video.
Biden touted his own campaign’s plan before responding to a single clip in which he appears to be agreeing with former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“Well I just have (doubters) look at the facts,” Biden said. He then cited Politifact, which wrote that the video in question “misrepresented my position on Social Security.”
But Biden stopped short of directly criticizing Sanders.
“Whether he did it or not, his supporters put out a clip that took out of context what I said,” Biden said. The Sanders campaign played up the video, but did not cut or create it.
“Folks, I’ve been a strong supporter of Social Security my whole career,” Biden added, “and the fact of the matter is I’m the one that has a concrete as to how to make it work and I think I can get it done.”
Still, beyond the controversial clip, the questions over his past record are less easy to answer.
Many high-ranking Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s – like Biden – sought to signal their seriousness about the deficit by expressing a willingness to negotiate with the GOP over plans to slow its growth or raise the retirement age.
Despite having gone on the record in the past decades saying he would be willing to buck his party to strike a bipartisan deal on Social Security, Biden drew a clear line on one of the most aggressive GOP proposals: The George W. Bush administration quickly abandoned a 2005 move to privatize it.
Former Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged his Iowa finish – which appears on pace to be fourth place, behind former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren – was a disappointment.
“I expected to do better and I expected that our organization would perform better. But the fact is, I’m happy to be here in New Hampshire,” Biden said during a CNN town hall Wednesday night in New Hampshire.
Iowa is a marquee state for candidates hoping to generate momentum, but Biden minimized the state’s impact, pointing out that it awards a tiny share of the overall number of delegates required to win the Democratic nomination.
The former vice president is addressing New Hampshire Democrats and independents who say they are going to vote in Tuesday’s primary, as well as Saint Anselm College students.
Ahead of Wednesday night’s town hall, Joe Biden warned attendees at an event that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders would hurt Democrats running in down ballot elections because he is a democratic socialist. And he admonished former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg for what he described as criticism of President Barack Obama’s presidency.
The attacks come after a poor showing in Iowa for the former vice president.
Biden’s comments were a notable shift in tone for the former vice president, who had a disappointing showing in Iowa behind Buttigieg, Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Buttigieg is currently leading the Iowa caucus with 71% of precincts reporting, with Sanders close behind.
Four candidates will speak to New Hampshire voters on Wednesday night. All times are ET:
The Democratic presidential race has shifted to New Hampshire, with the full field of 2020 contenders blanketing the state ahead of its Tuesday primary.
But in Iowa, they’re still counting, after technical issues with the app used to report results led to a complete breakdown on caucus night.
With 86% of Iowa’s precincts reporting, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg remained the leader of the race, with 26.7% of state delegates. He’s closely trailed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 24.9%.
They’re followed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 17.9%, former Vice President Joe Biden at 15.9% and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar at 12.1%.
