Politics

Democratic debate 2016 live stream: time, TV schedule, and how to watch online

by Andrew Prokop

Updated Feb 4, 2016, 11:39 PM UTC

Virginia Sherwood/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty

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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

The next Democratic debate is tonight at 9 pm Eastern time and will air on MSNBC. However, if you don’t have a TV, don’t despair — an online live stream will be available at MSNBC.com.

This debate — just recently added to the schedule, and Democrats’ fifth overall — will pit Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders just days before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. And since Hillary Clinton has been trailing in most recent polls of the Granite State, she’s hoping a strong debate performance will help her close the gap with Sanders.

One interesting dynamic that has emerged in this race is that Clinton and Sanders seem to have starkly different views about how progressive change can actually be achieved. Sanders has been touting his hopes for a political revolution that will transform politics in America, as I wrote about here. (And check out some of our new polling on his revolution here.) But Clinton has laid out a far more pragmatic — some would say pessimistic — view that progress can only be made through grinding, difficult political combat, and well-chosen fights on what can actually get done, as Ezra Klein wrote recently.

Regardless of your views on whose theory is more plausible, though, Clinton’s seems less inspiring and hopeful — which may help explain why Sanders seems to be winning young voters so overwhelmingly. Her strength among traditional Democrats and older voters was enough to help her eke out a narrow win in the Iowa caucuses Monday.

But, as Matt Yglesias argues, Sanders’s success should be a wake-up call to a Democratic establishment that tried and failed to arrange an easy nomination for Clinton. We don’t yet know how long Sanders’s challenge will last, or how it will end up. Even a year ago, though, who would have expected that a “democratic socialist” would be neck-and-neck with the unanimous choice of Democratic insiders?