Democrats vying for the 2020 presidential nomination tore across cable news and social media into Thursday afternoon, jockeying for political oxygen following the party’s first primary debate the previous evening.
“I think we hit a solid double, a solid double last night,” assessed Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, employing some baseball nomenclature to describe his Wednesday-night showing alongside nine other White House contenders.
“People are still discovering me. We saw some really good surge in online donations. I hope that continues,” Booker said in his interview with SiriusXM’s “The Joe Madison Show,” adding that “a lot of the analytics coming out of the night showed that we gained ground.”
Julián Castro, widely hailed as one of the debate’s stronger contestants for getting the better of fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke in an immigration-related policy clash, ventured that “a lot of people were surprised” by his execution Wednesday.
“I haven't gotten as much coverage so far in the campaign,” the former Housing and Urban Development secretary conceded on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I showed that I can more than handle myself,” Castro said. “So I think that people are looking at me in a new way today.”
O’Rourke, for his part, insisted he was “really happy” with how he fared at the debate, awarding himself an “A” grade.
“I described why I’m doing this, who I’m doing it for, the people who inspire me and how we’re going to meet these challenges. I felt like I was able to get that across,” the former El Paso congressman told CNN’s “New Day.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, whose campaign had been written off by many political commentators as dead on arrival, also shined in a handful of feisty exchanges, interrupting fellow candidates and moderators to interject his progressive bona fides.
De Blasio, who was the only candidate during the debate besides Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to declare a willingness to abolish private health insurance, took a victory lap Thursday.
“I felt like I was able to just get out there and say, ‘Let’s talk about this plainly,’” de Blasio told MSNBC.
“People want honesty. They want candidates who are willing to actually take a position,” he said. “They don’t even have to always agree with you, but they want to know you stand for something. I hope I was able to show my heart last night.”
John Delaney, who challenged de Blasio’s support for getting rid of private health coverage but failed to elicit much buzz in the hours after the debate, complained Thursday that he was not given enough opportunity to speak.
“I would have loved more time, right? I don’t think the way the time was allocated was at all fair,” the former Maryland congressman told MSNBC.
“They said I tried to interrupt eight times, which was the most of the evening. So, you know, I’m from Jersey, so I fought my way in as much as I could,” he said, adding: “The person who interrupted the most was me.”
Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, another of the more moderate Democratic voices on the debate stage who notably collided with Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in a foreign policy skirmish over the war in Afghanistan, expressed a more positive recollection of the evening.
“I thought it was great,” Ryan told CNN. “We got a good amount of time, and I got the message across … about really trying to reconnect with the working class and really focusing on those economic issues that so many people are feeling.”
Sarah Cammarata contributed to this report.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine