January Democratic debate live updates: Six candidates face off in Des Moines

The tone from Team Sanders in the spin room tonight was that it is time to move on from the Warren controversy. 

"You have two candidates, they got different recollections of the event. Voters are gonna have to look at those and make their own decision," Senior Advisor Jeff Weaver told NBC News. 

Neither Weaver nor top surrogate Nina Turner spoke to Sanders after the debate about the awkward exchange between Sanders and Warren at the conclusion of the debate where it appears Warren denied Sanders a handshake. 

NBC News has reached out to the campaign for an understanding of what was said and what actually occurred. Turner said while she was not sure what was said, it was clear their conversation was not pleasant. 

The fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party was on display Tuesday night in Des Moines, with moderate and progressive candidates clashing on a range of issues — from trade to troops in the Middle East — during the final debate before the Iowa caucuses.

With just six candidates on stage Tuesday night at the CNN/Des Moines Register debate — down from the initial 20 contenders divided over two nights at the field's first faceoff last year — the contenders had more space to let their policy differences come into sharper focus. But despite rising tensions in recent days, they mostly avoided lobbing personal attacks at each other.

Less than a month before Iowa voters weigh in on a 2020 Democratic contest that’s become a virtual four-way dead heat, here's who held their ground — and who might have spent their last night on a primary season debate stage.

Sanders exaggerated data points about the current American health care system in his pitch for "Medicare for All" on Tuesday night.

"First of all, what Joe forgets to say is when you leave the current system as it is, what you are talking about are workers paying, on average, 20 percent of their incomes for health care," Sanders said, referring to former Vice President Biden. "That is insane. You've got 500,000 people going bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills. We're spending twice as much per capita on health care as do the people of any other country."

Let's dig in.

• Americans are not typically spending 20 percent of percent of incomes on health care, according to federal consumer expenditure data from 2018, as well as research on the issue. To be sure, there are some people for whom this is true — particularly in Medicare families — but it's not correct to describe the nation this way. 
• The U.S. spends twice as much as many — but not all — developed nations on health care, according to data from the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It’s not twice as much as "any other country," however.

As for the half a million medical bill bankruptcies per year, The Washington Post dug into the data point last year and rated it "Three Pinocchios" — though Sanders' campaign and researchers of the American Journal of Public Health editorial his campaign told The Post he relied on for the statistic disputed the rating. Read the paper's deep dive here. 

• With 19 attacks in 17 minutes of talking time Amy Klobuchar made the most attacks, averaging more than one attack every minute spoken.
• Elizabeth Warren had the most speaking time with more than 19 minutes.
• Tom Steyer spoke the least, he had 10 minutes of talking time.
• Six candidates was the fewest candidates on stage yet in these debates.
• Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg were attacked the most, with five attacks on each.
• Candidates attacked Donald Trump 45 times, Mitch McConnell zero times, Wall Street and corporations 13 times, and the “ultra-rich” three times.

DES MOINES, Iowa — The nonaggression pact between Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts faced its most difficult test and held — at least for now.

The two progressive senators de-escalated a tense round of tit-for-tat exchanges between their presidential campaigns on the debate stage here Tuesday night over the charged issues of gender and electability.

Aides and supporters of both senators, who have more or less remained allies even while running against each for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, had accused each other of dirty tricks and lying in recent days after a series of leaks to the media, culminating in Warren saying in a statement that Sanders once told her he didn't think a woman could win the presidency.

But when the topic came up during a debate hosted by CNN, both sought to set the issue aside and move on, even as Sanders once again denied telling Warren a woman couldn't win during a one-on-one meeting in 2018.

Read the full story.

Candidates attacked President Donald Trump 45 times in the two hours and ten minutes of tonight's debate. That's more attacks directed at Trump in any debate except Night 2 of the July 2019 Democratic debate.

See the full numbers at our seventh Democratic debate attack tracker here.

"Back in 1986, I introduced the first climate change bill — and check PolitiFacts, they said it was a game changer. I have been fighting this for a long time," Biden said during Tuesday's debate.

While Biden did introduce one of the first pieces of climate change legislation in the Senate in 1986 and again in 1987, as PolitiFact noted, it wasn't the first time Congress had considered the issue.

A Democratic senator named Al Gore introduced a non-binding resolution in 1985 asking the president to study greenhouse gas emissions, PolitiFact said. The New York Times covered his push with the headline, “Action Is Urged to Avert Global Climate Shift," and reported that Gore said his bill would call for ''an international year of scientific study of the greenhouse effect and would request that the President take steps to begin this worldwide cooperative investigation.''

Meanwhile: