Primary Debates

        Third Debate: ABC News
            Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019 in Houston, TX.

8:00 to 11:00 p.m. ET at Texas Southern University.

Sponsor:  ABC News in partnership with Univision.

Candidates:  Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, Sanders, Warren, Yang.

Moderators:  Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos, “World News Tonight” Anchor and Managing Editor David Muir, ABC News Correspondent Linsey Davis and Univision Anchor Jorge Ramos.

Audience:  3,500 people, most invited by the Democratic National Committee.

Broadcast:  Live nationally on the ABC Television Network and Univision (with a Spanish translation) and locally on KTRK-TV. ABC News will livestream the debate on ABC News Live – the network’s 24/7 breaking news and live events streaming channel – on Roku, Hulu, AppleTV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube, Apple News, Facebook, Twitter, and the ABC News, Good Morning America and FiveThirtyEight websites and mobile phone apps. Univision News will also livestream the debate on all of its digital platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Periscope.

Format:  One minute and 15 seconds for direct responses to questions and 45 seconds for responses and rebuttals.  One minute opening statements.

Overview:  Much changed since the second debate on July 30-31.  The stricter DNC criteria narrowed the field participating in this debate to just ten candidates.  Hickenlooper (Aug. 15), Inslee (Aug. 21), Moulton (Aug. 23) and Gillibrand (Aug. 28) ended their campaigns in the lead up to this debate.  Excluded candidates were: Bennet, Bullock, de Blasio, Delaney, Gabbard, Ryan, Sestak, Steyer and Williamson, along with pseudo-candidate Messam.  Gabbard and Steyer came close to qualifying, as they met the contribution criteria but fell one poll short of the four qualifying polls.  This was the first head to head matchup between the major candidates. 

There were no closing statements, but an interesting last question for all candidates: "The question is on the quality of resilience.  No president can succeed without resilience; every president confronts crises, defeats and mistakes.  So I want to ask each of you, what's the most significant professional setback you've had to face, how did you recover from it, and what did you learn from it?"  Biden was first to answer, and had just started his response when several protesters in the audience started shouting about immigration policy and deportations and were escorted out.

Biden had the most speaking time, more than 17 minutes, and Yang the least, a bit less than 8 minutes.  The debate drew an average total audience of about 14 million viewers, 12.93 million who watched on ABC and 1.11 million on Univision.

		Biden	Warren	Booker	Sanders	Harris	Buttigieg	Castro	Klobuchar	O'Rourke	Yang
	ABC News	17.22	16:15	13:48	13:42	13:42	11:52	11:09	10:08	9:25	7:55
	CNN	17.24	16:27	14:44	13:55	13:26	11:31	11:11	10:13	9:19	7:54

Post-Debate  |  Video  |  Transcript