Chris Hayes Calls Out Democratic Candidates’ Refusal to Attack Each Other in Debates: ‘Like Watching a Tennis Match’ to Choose a Football Player

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes offered up a long soliloquy about the subdued, and noticeably friendly tone throughout the 2020 Democratic debates and suggested it might not be the best preparation to run in a cutthroat election against President Donald Trump.

In his live, post-debate reaction show from New Hampshire, Hayes contrasted the 2020 Democratic primary debates with the scathing, personal attacks and downright crude insults offered up in past primary debate seasons.

“Everyone keeps waiting for the knives to come out,” Hayes noted. “These folks have not really been going after each other. There are jabs here and there. There was lots of debate that Biden would have to go after various candidates and he did. There were a few moments when he went after them, but this is nothing like the bloody brawl that I have seen in other primaries. Obviously, nothing will ever compare to the 2016 Republican primary. No one is talking about the size of their genitalia, for instance. Thank God. Thank God.”

Hayes suggested that the 2020 candidates were pulling their punches and seemingly going out of their way to compliment each other was the result of several factors.

“One reason is that there is a huge multi-candidate field and everyone rightly thinks they will hurt their own chances if their seen as going negative,” he said, before identifying the other main reason: the person occupying the Oval Office. “They also sense there is an intense anxiety about unity. This worry that the party will fracture. This fear that people won’t unify behind the nominee to defeat Trump.”

“The problem so far, and I’m not saying people get nastier with each other, but it ends up being like a tennis match and then selecting that person to go play football,” Hayes said to dead silence. “It is very, very hard to conceive of the universe that the person who wins this nomination is going to walk into, because the universe that we’ve seen in these debates, which is a normal, sensible, substantive universe in which people have exchanges based on facts and differences about policy outcomes is not the universe of the maelstrom of insanity and deceit they’re about to walk into.”

The result, Hayes said, is a kind of paradox for Democratic candiadates, who are simultaneously trying to appeal to primary voters and also demonstrate they can stand toe-to-toe with and ultimately beat Trump. “You come out saying ‘That person seems smart, that person made a good point there, that person sort of landed a blow there.’ Then looming in the background is this enormous, once-in-a-generation, hopefully, once-in-an-ever monster, cartoon monster that is going to have to be fought by the nominee.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

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