Last night's Democrat debate

Joe Biden, who earlier in the day had told an audience that he was running for the US Senate, made another huge gaffe in last night's debate in South Carolina, but none of the other people on the debate stage called him on it. Speaking about the need for gun control, Biden made the ridiculous claim that "One hundred and fifty million people have been killed since 2007, when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability. More than all the wars, including Vietnam, from that point on."

Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner,

It was a crazy statement. One hundred and fifty million people would be nearly half the population of the U.S., all killed by guns. Someone would have noticed. The real number for the period from 2007-2020 was in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. Biden's gaffe drew ridicule on Twitter, but not a single one of his opponents corrected him onstage.

Biden's performance might have been seen as a loser were the others not so bad. Bernie Sanders, leading the Democratic race after winning the most votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, was everyone's target at the beginning of the night. The criticism began with a cheap shot from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who said to Sanders, "Russia is helping you get elected, so you will lose to [President Trump]." And then the other candidates launched a swarm-of-bees attack on Sanders that included so many allegations that he was not able to address them all.

Sanders seemed off balance for a good bit of the time but regained his bearing with a strong appeal at the end of the debate when he argued that his "radical" ideas are not actually radical in other parts of the world. That is undoubtedly true but might not be very persuasive to voters in South Carolina and some of the less deeply blue Super Tuesday states.

Finally, there was Bloomberg. The billionaire Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat sometimes brags about the massive donations he made to the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterm elections. There's no doubt he believes he deserves some credit for the Democrats' pickup of 40-plus House seats. But he would never go so far as to say he bought the election.

Or would he?

"They talk about 40 Democrats," Bloomberg said. "Twenty-one of those were people that I spent $100 million to elect. All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president — I bough ... I, I got them."

To many ears, it sounded as if Bloomberg began to say that he "bought" a Democratic House. But he didn't get it fully out and then said he, and his money, simply "got" the new Democratic representatives.

After the debate, the Bloomberg team chose to ignore the moment. "I didn't hear that," said adviser Howard Wolfson when asked if Bloomberg said he bought the Democratic House.

On the Sanders side, top aide Jeff Weaver did not point fingers, but he couldn't keep from smiling as he answered the question. "You know, I'm not really sure what he was trying to say," Weaver said. "I think to many people it sounded like that. But he corrected himself in the process. It's hard to know what someone intends to say. It's a very stressful environment."

As for the rest of the field, the other candidates onstage, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer, did not have much effect.

The polls still show Biden in the lead in South Carolina, although by a much smaller margin than just a few weeks ago. Apart from an apparent outlier poll from the Democratic firm PPP that showed Biden with a 15 percentage point lead, other surveys have shown him with a 4-5 percentage point advantage. It's not much, but there are still moderate Democrats, both black and white, in South Carolina who find Biden a more acceptable choice than Sanders, who they view as an extremist, and Bloomberg, who they view as an unappealing billionaire who spent most of his career not being a Democrat.

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