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Democratic candidates reflect on debate performance in their battle for South Carolina

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The spin room after Charleston turns into its own kind of debate stage.

Minutes after the tenth Democratic presidential debate wrapped at the Gaillard Center, six candidates walked straight into the CBS News spin room to explain what just happened on stage — and to make their final pitch before South Carolina votes on February 29. The February 25 debate, co-hosted by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, had been two hours of near-constant cross-talk, with rivals lining up to hit frontrunner Bernie Sanders on electability, healthcare costs, and gun votes.

In the spin room, the candidates dropped the debate-stage combat for something closer to direct pitch-making. Sanders defended his record against the “too radical” label, Joe Biden leaned on his South Carolina numbers, and Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg used their time to needle the tone of the night while courting undecided voters ahead of Super Tuesday.

• Seven candidates shared the debate stage in Charleston — Biden, Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer — with much of the fire aimed at Sanders over electability, healthcare funding, and gun legislation.
• Sanders told CBS News in the spin room, “The truth is, nothing I am saying is radical,” pushing back on rivals’ claims that his agenda couldn’t beat Donald Trump.
• Biden, banking on his support among African American voters in South Carolina after weak finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, said winning the state by even “one point is enough.”

Sanders Defends the Agenda Under Fire

Sanders spent much of the debate fielding attacks from nearly every direction — on Medicare for All’s price tag, on his past votes on gun liability protections, and on whether a democratic socialist could actually carry swing states against Trump. He didn’t back off any of it in the spin room afterward, framing his platform as mainstream rather than fringe.

“The truth is, nothing I am saying is radical.”

That line was Sanders’ answer to a night in which rivals repeatedly cast him as unelectable. He’s entering the February 29 primary as one of the frontrunners, and his spin room comments were less about relitigating the debate’s cross-talk and more about steadying his message before votes are counted.

Biden’s One-Point Math

For Biden, South Carolina isn’t just another primary — it’s the state his campaign has pointed to for months as the firewall, built on decades of relationships with Black voters and church communities across the state. After finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire that raised real questions about his campaign’s viability, Biden used his spin room stop to lower the bar for himself in one sense while raising the stakes in another, saying a win by even “one point is enough” to reset the race heading into Super Tuesday.

That framing matters. Biden’s team has staked its entire strategy on South Carolina serving as the launchpad it was always designed to be, and the debate performance — heavy on cross-talk and short on knockout moments for any one candidate — did little to change that calculus. Barack Obama’s own recent warnings to Democrats about the state of the race only added to the pressure on Biden to deliver.

Klobuchar and Buttigieg Look Past the Noise

Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg both used their spin room time to comment on how chaotic the debate had gotten, with candidates frequently talking over each other and moderators struggling to keep the format moving. Rather than dwelling on any single exchange, both pivoted to closing arguments aimed at undecided South Carolina voters and framed their sights on Super Tuesday, when a much larger swath of delegates will be up for grabs.

Neither campaign has South Carolina’s demographics working in its favor the way Biden’s does, which is part of why both candidates spent more time in the spin room talking about momentum and delegate math than replaying specific debate moments. The campaign’s policy rollout from Biden’s camp has become a reference point other campaigns are increasingly forced to respond to as the race narrows.

Six Days to South Carolina

With the primary set for February 29 and Super Tuesday just three days after that, every minute of spin room time carried weight. The debate’s combative tone toward Sanders signaled that rivals see South Carolina and the March 3 contests as the last real window to slow his momentum before delegate math starts working against them.

Biden’s camp is still counting on South Carolina to do what it was always supposed to do for his campaign — turn a rough February into a springboard. Whether “one point” turns out to be enough gets answered in less than a week, right before more than a dozen states vote on Super Tuesday.