mark: i'm mark halperin. john: i'm john heilemann. this ain't no way to protect your neck. mark: is it wu tang clan? is that the name of the group? >> i respectfully decline to answer your question. mark: happy democratic debate day and hello from bloomberg politics. at the radisson hotel in

hampshire. tonight, hillary clinton and bernie sanders will face off in new hampshire. we will have operatives from both campaigns on the show later. john: but first, a recap of the republican action in new hampshire. despite marco rubio's momentum coming out of iowa, donald trump has continued to train his fire on ted cruz, claiming that cruz used dirty tricks to win the caucuses. cruz is quoting jimmy carter, saying that trump does not have any "fixed opinions." all of this is occurring against a backdrop of intimations among rival campaigns that trump's standing in the granite state may be slipping. as of now, that chatter is only chatter with no public polling to back it up. one online survey shows trump maintaining a double-digit lead. after a town hall at exeter, i gave trump a chance to address the whispers about his campaign's prospects.

one of the things we have observed in the last 20 hours is every basically -- every republican candidate is spring to reporters about a trump collapse. mr. trump: i think it does not happen. have a good time. john: whatever is going on with donald trump's numbers, the question remains, why is he after ted cruz instead of marco rubio? mark: he hits the people that have hit him. rubio goes out of his way to not hit anybody. long-term, after new hampshire, assuming trump hold on in new hampshire, he sees cruz as a threat that needs to be

addressed. john: it seems to me that this is mostly, he can't let go of what happened in iowa. the strong strategy move, the person who is taking votes away from donald trump in the state is not ted cruz. by all indications, cruz is not really moving up. no republican candidate claims -- that cruz is rocketing up in new hampshire. to be sent that trump is falling and rubio is rising, it seems that the strategic move is to go after rubio. this is trump being trump, to exact revenge for iowa. mark: the debate is saturday. we say the moderators of this debate have extraordinairy power. the abc moderators have extraordinary power because they will determine whether we see an attempt to make rubio and trump to at it. if they ask rubio a question about trump and rubio hits him,

then trump will start to hit rubio. john: we have not seen rubio go after trump. we saw a front runner who people did not want to take on for nine months. now we have a front runner, neither one of them want to hit each other. mark: cruz went from being disciplined like rubio to now gratuitously attacking trump. john: he's quoting jimmy carter. mark: he's hitting trump harder than he has to. eventually we have to see some rubio action to make sense. there are two camps -- chris christie's and jeb bush's who are teaming up to do with they think is a center which is to take marco rubio down. christie every day keeps up a version of his boy in a bubble line. the bush super pac is lining up new ads to attack them. john kasich put out a new ad assailing all the other establishment candidates for slinging some mud. the central question in the establishment lane is still, can anyone stop rubio's rise?

today at a press conference, a number of reporters asked rubio about the current attacks on him and how he is handling it. the other candidates think you have momentum. do you agree, and if so, do you need to do more to defend yourself or just keep talking about what you are talking about? senator rubio: i hope we have momentum. we are working hard at it, and we feel good. we are thrilled about the progress we made in iowa. when everyone is attacking, you must be doing something right. mark: do you need to do more to defend yourself? senator rubio: we need to stay on our message. i feel good about -- >> ted cruz and others are saying that you are the boy in the bubble. senator rubio: look, when people are having a tough time and a tough time in the campaign, especially near the end, you see

some -- they'll start saying things. i am proudly pro-life and i will not apologize for being pro-life. i understand it is a difficult issue. on a crisis pregnancy, that is a difficult situation but i have to choose between the right of a person to choose what to do with their bodies or the right for an unborn child to live. i choose to support the right of an unborn child to live. i understand it is a difficult issue. mark: responding to chris christie attacking him from the left on abortion. so, no one really has laid a solid glove on him. he is very calm. how is he handling it and what is it going to take for somebody to change the dynamic? john: you were there and you saw

him in the flesh. i will ask the same question to you in a second, from what i have seen on television. what i've seen on tv, he has been great. he has been cool and calm and collected. and floating above the fray with the other guys attacking each other. everything right now looks like it is falling into place for marco rubio. the guy who should be attacking him, trump, is not. the other guys are not attacking him in effective ways and attacking each other at the same time. he has a huge lane to run through and he has not made a mistake that i've seen.

mark: he gets what's going on. one thing about these candidates, they are politically sophisticated. not candidates who do not get what is going on. and he knows how to push back when necessary but try to float above the fray. that has been effective for him. i was very impressed with the way he handled the questions today and the way he handled his presentation. john: i will say the most damaging thing i've seen about rubio so far was rick santorum on morning joe unable to name a real accomplishment of marco rubio's. it opens the door. the list is pretty thin. i imagine we will see in the next 96 hours, some republicans, maybe chris christie, really hammering on the inexperience or "you are barack obama." mark: christie has already gotten an ad. showing the morning joe thing. it is true. his accompaniments are not that impressive. he said, here is what i have done in the senate, but here is what i will do in the future. people are not voting for him because they think he has accomplished a lot. they like him for his message, he can unite the party and be a we will preview what sanders and clinton need to do on that big stage after these words from our sponsors. ♪

mark: with us to talk about hillary clinton is joel benenson. thank you for joining us. you have been involved in debate preparations with secretary clinton, how is that going? joel: going really well. she is hitting her mark. she knows the case she wants to make and she feels pretty confident. she always feels she does well in debates. we are ready for tonight. she had a good night last night at the forum. mark: she comes into the contest one on one as the more experienced debater than bernie sanders or do you think he has improved over the course of these debates?

joel: he has been pretty good all the way through. mark: he was horrible in the first debate. joel: i don't think he was horrible. john: he really was. [all talking at once] he's nodding his head. joel: i thought he was fine. mark: is he as good a debater as hillary clinton? joel: i don't think so. he is making a strong argument, he is consistent. mark: but he is not caught up with her in terms of the skills required to debate at this level? joel: i don't think so when you are on the states you will have time to cover all the parts of the job of being president of the united states and going to more depth on specific issues and how your plans stack up. there is going to be a full or discussion of those things. that is the kind of scrutiny that one-on-one debate, it's going to be more focused on that. john: you have done a lot of debate prep over your career not just here but for barack obama. you saw in 2008 the way the debates changed from being multi-candidate to down to three and then down to two. so, a lot of people watching this would say, why does martin o'malley's absence matter that much? he was nowhere near their stature. but he does matter. explain why martin o'malley being gone, the way that changed this debate from her perspective.

joel: it probably changes it from both candidates. the key element -- how much time each person gets to talk. when there are three people and there is some competition, that will take away from the two primary candidates. even martin o'malley was trailing by a lot. it was time they could've used to make their arguments to press their case more. tonight they will end up being more evenhanded because with two people it is easier to manage. it is going to be more set. i think both of them have an opportunity to either defend or make their case more consistently with more time. john: it seems to me when you get down to two things get more personal because there is no buffer. there have been slights. do you expect this to be a more emotional debate than any debate we have seen so far? joel: i don't think more emotional. i think it will be more direct between the two of them. we have got two people standing close, next to each other. and there are things they agree with, things they disagree with. and i am sure as they have been doing, they will point those disagreements out.

i expect it to be a lively debate. mark: the polling in this race shows senator sanders with a huge lead. where do you have him right now? joel: we have got ground to make up. you know i do not talk about polls. you know what i think about public polls. mark: can she still win the primary? joel: if you look at the exit

polls from 2008, 48% made up their mind in the last -- mark: can she still win numerically? joel: in 2008, there was a big spike in iowa. she was down by 13 points. i can talk about that -- we had her down 13 points late in the week and by tuesday, she had won in new hampshire. that is how fluid it is. in part, i think that is because the rules here allowing independents to go to either primary they want to go to, it gets hard to predict. even at the end, some of the independent voters can choose to go, even though they may prefer one of the democrats, i'm going to vote in the republican primary. john: given that you are behind and there is a chance you might finish well behind, is there a margin by which you all concede this is not a moral victory? is there some margin where you say, we just got beat? joel: a win is a win. when we come out of new hampshire, what we look at is the landscape in nevada, south carolina and march starting with super tuesday. we have about 1200 delegates. i do not think there are moral victories in any of these racist. you have got to people who are going to keep competing. the question is -- does the landscape change more for us? when you look at the states where we go from here, i think we are in a good position as we had out of new hampshire. john: to be clear, to be consistent, you won by a narrow margin in iowa. if bernie wins by one vote here, you will say he is the home state senator. you will say he won fair and square, he is the winner? joel: if he wins by a point, he is the winner.

he does have home field advantage. mark: he's from vermont. joel: no. except for the fact the only point you guys are ignoring and the question is the fact historically new englanders have done very well. they've done very well. but actually, bill clinton lost to paul tsongas, a new new englander by almost two to one. mark: you would have opposed. don't say that because you lost. joel: given how that turned out for president clinton. mark: i think she will declare herself the comeback kid as long as it is less than 30. the clintons have done it again. joel: we have been behind here for awhile.

mark: i'm not looking forward to how this gets done. john: you feel like, does it concern you at all, you feel confident or insecure about nevada? it will be a long number of days after this new hampshire primary. joel: you don't feel secure about anything because you know these elections are going to be fluid. what i feel confident about is how our message works there. the strength we have. we beat him significantly with african-americans and latinos, the small group in iowa. going into nevada and south carolina, that will favor us. mark: we will see you in vegas. coming up, a divine intervention. we will preview bernie sanders and hillary clinton and what they need to do in a debate. the debate stage and talk to tad devine after this. ♪

mark: new poll numbers on the republican race in new hampshire. from cnn and university of new hampshire. donald trump 29%. marco rubio 18%. ted cruz 13. jeb bush 10. that is in line with the polling that we saw pre-iowa. an 11 point lead for trouble for marco rubio. now to the democrats. the debate on msnbc is at 9:00. it is the main course of our political feast this week which makes last night's town hall something of an appetizer. both sanders and clinton performed quite well overall. here's a quick look at some of the best moments from each of them.

senator sanders: i think it was in november in ohio. you may recall this. i don't know the context of it, secretary clinton said, some people call me a moderate and i probably say that i am a moderate. that's what she said. all i said, you cannot say you are a moderate one day and be a progressive on the other day. my spirituality is that we are all in this together. and that when children go hundred, when veterans sleep on the street, it impacts me. we have got to make police departments look like the communities that they serve. so, if there's a diverse community, the police department should reflect that diversity. trump is a well known scientist. brilliant scientist. [laughter] he has concluded after years of studying the issue, that climate change is a hoax. brought to us by the chinese.

mrs. clinton: i was somewhat amused that senator sanders set himself up to be the gatekeeper on who is a progressive, because under the definition that was flying around on twitter and statements by the campaign, barack obama would not be a progressive, joe biden would not be progressive. jeanne shaheen would not be progressive. even the late great senator paul wellstone would not be a progressive here. here is what i want young people to know. they do not have to be for me. i'm going to be for them. >> how are you going to defend yourself against right-wing attacks? mrs. clinton: i have had a lot of practice. whatever your age, you really think about what someone is proposing and what their record is about getting it done. mark: joe benenson said that bernie sanders is not as good a debater as hillary clinton. and he is not. but i thought last night he showed the maturity he has gone to as a performer in situations like the town hall. i thought she was quite good.

much more her natural self than her tv self. john: i 100% agree. i thought they were both impressive last night. she found her way back to effectively how good she was at her best in 2008. we all wondered how long that would take and whether she would get there. she is there in this setting. bernie sanders who started this campaign as a shouty order, but had not that much experience doing this kind of stuff in front of millions of people. he is not quite as good as her but he is in the ballpark. on his those best moments, he looked at them and said those guys are pretty good at this. mark: she is going to have to do something more dramatic tonight that she did last night if she is going to close the gap. they have got a big party dinner to run i in manchester across the street. a lot of activists. on a friday night with speeches. john: the rubber chicken dinner. mark: we'll see what kind of

tricks she has upper sleeve, but it will be a lot harder for her to assume she can run over him as she did in the early debates. john: this of a conflict tonight. last night you had an ability to show humanity, which is a soft thing. this is going to be hard knocks. one thing that was notable we noticed on the show was the disparity between how much tougher clintons questions were, the ones that she got compared to the ones that sanders had to handle. take a look at that. >> senator sanders, the first thing i hear about you is that you are going to raise taxes on the middle class. i'm wondering if you raise my taxes, how does that help me? >> as senator and secretary of state you have a history of interventionist foreign policy that is troubling to many voters. can you assure me you would not expand our military involvement abroad? >> democrats in iowa who said that terrorism was a most important issue for them, they backed separate clinton over you by 37 points. why do you think that is? >> you voted for the iraq war. what have you learned since that vote that could give me confidence that you would not make a mistake of that magnitude again? >> there were 18 inspectors general supports talking about problems of begging -- plaguing

the v.a. why did it take so long and it took you so long to act. you made three speeches for goldman sachs. was that a mistake, an error in judgment? did you have to be paid $675,000. mrs. clinton: that is what they offered. >> there is a new book called by his more spirited has president obama let progressives down? mark: i do not want to say they were all softballs to bernie sanders because they were not. the ones to bernie sanders seemed to be a lot more in his wheelhouse than some of the questions hillary clinton, which went straight to her political vulnerabilities. mark: cnn did not take those questions at random. boy, was that unfair. the senators questions were not totally easy but they had the hardest questions on her biggest vulnerable to achieve handled all of them fine. i will say when hillary clinton is treated unfairly, it is not right to sit back and not say anything. that was really unfair.

john: i totally agree. she did not handle that wall street question, speaking fee question well. but the rest of them, thinking back to the previous, she got a lot of tough questions that she handle them very well. mark: her iraq war question was not great care should did not directly address the question. i just do not understand -- in situations where she is treated unfairly, when the debate is in a state where she is behind. john: we have less than a minute. i want to look for to tonight. having watched the totality of what we saw last night, what you expecting in terms of the dynamic between the two of them tonight? mark: she is unfurled a lot more opposition research than he has. it would be interesting to see if she brings up anything new. you know that her very good research operation -- i'll be interested if they unfurled at our savior for south carolina. where he to be rougher and tougher than he can here. john: we are going to talk about her breakfast later in the show. it started to go into a place they have wanted to go for a while about the sexism as a sub rosa thing in the sanders campaign could she did an interview with people today that brought up that topic. i think we will see some interesting gender dynamics.

i would not be surprised if things get maybe a little ugly on that front. mark: if his people had not prepared bernie sanders to do with that charge, then there is malpractice. with the brain behind bernie sanders, one of the brains, bernie sanders has his own brain, tad devine joins us here after this word from our sponsors. ♪

john: could bernie sanders use some advice at the debate tonight?

maybe a tad. we just asked joel benenson what he thought the debate would look like with martin o'malley off the stage. what changes, what is different? tad: it is very different when you have two candidates. you think the presidential debates. two candidates, and it raises the stakes around the debate. there is a lot more opportunity to speak, to engage. so i think -- and there is also a good opportunity to deliver a message. you're going to be able to speak longer. i think we will try to take advantage of that opportunity. we believe, bernie has a stronger message. if we can deliver that message we can win the election. mark: normally someone who does well in iowa has momentum. effectively a tie. she won numerically. you have momentum by tying her. as the week has played out, who do you think has shown bigger momentum? tad: i feel good about what we have done. i think we did what we needed to do in iowa to sustain the vote.

mark: day-to-day, who is winning the new cycle? tad: i think everything we have done every day here has been good. obviously, there has been a lot of down time for debate prep today. we're having a little of that before the debate. yesterday, we were down a little bit. he was -- he went to vermont, slept overnight. we had an event at 5:00 in the morning. john: i cited the fact that you would knowledge the fact that bernie was not a debater in the first debate. i think he has gotten better. do you think he is now at. with her are still a little bit? tad: i think she is on debate 30 and we are on debate 4 or 50. i give her the advantage. i think she is really accomplished when it comes to debating. but i think bernie has learned a lot from the first debate to the second. gotten better and better. i think last night, even though that was a town hall forum, think he was sensational. the right tone. he dealt with people in the right way.

i hope he does that tonight. john: there is a history in the debates and his party in this primary, this week of things getting hot. not as hot as in south carolina but there is emotional content. people on both sides of your campaigns, people are a little bit annoyed with each other. making accusations of negative campaigning. do think we are going to see that on stage tonight? tad: i don't know. it is not going to come from us. it is up to hillary. if she wants that kind of debate, with a lot of engagement, bernie will engage. if she was a talk about her issues and message, we will do the same. mark: talk about what your campaign is doing in the states after the hamster. where you spending money? tad: we are doing a lot. we have been on television in nevada since the 23 of december. we have moved to a third set of ads in nevada. i feel really good. she joined us on the six of january. i feel confident we are building a winning the campaign in

nevada. mark: does that race look like you could win it? tad: i believe we have a chance to win in nevada, yes. we are still behind that we are making great progress. in south carolina, we are on television as well. we have been on television for 2.5 weeks. we have gone through an introductory, almost finished the biographical advertising. we will move to another track soon. we have a great campaign on the ground. a lot of voter contact, direct voter contact going on there. we've advertised on the radio since november, targeting african-american radio. i think we're making progress there. i can't say it with as much confidence -- we do not have recent numbers. we have staff in every march 1 state and him beyond. some cases three or four people, in other cases smaller numbers of people. we have research we have been accumulating from a number of states on march 1. i think we will be able to make informed decisions about resource allocation. john: on nevada, do you feel you have more people on the ground that she does?

tad: yes. john: if you had to judge which of the two major minority populations that bernie can make progress with first, would that be african-americans or hispanics? tad: it will be latinos. i think they will like his story as the son of an immigrant. that is how our biographical advertising begins. i think his agenda is also very strong. and i also think that hillary clinton and bill clinton, their ties with the african-american community which go back a long way are strong. and significant. i do think we could make great progress with the african-american community and we certainly are going to try beginning in south carolina. mark: you have a lot of friends in the clinton campaign to do think they are currently discombobulated, afraid, concerned? how would you characterize what you see in them? tad: no. i think, you know, i think they're up against a tough fight in new hampshire. i think they recognize that had we gave them everything we had in iowa. i am proud of the efforts and our people on the ground.

i do not think they are discombobulated. joel, here. mark: he looked combulated? tad: jim argolas i have known since the mondale campaign. they have highly skilled people. they have been through this with president obama couple of winning campaigns. they are running a good campaign. and we are, too. john: at the breakfast -- brian fallon started to talk about a phenomena referred to as bernie burroughs. there is a support base that engage with the of secretary clinton that are laden with sexim. tad: listen, what i think is, we do not encourage anyone to attack hillary clinton from the candidate on down. we have it differences on issues. those differences will be on display tonight. the one thing we do not want him to do is go after her personally. whoever wins this nomination, whether it is bernie or hillary, i hope what i believe will all come together. so we do not condone any kind of

nasty stuff anywhere. mark: we get a chance to ask you about those ads. we'll do it during the break. john: nice to have you always. up next, we are going to make america kid again with nbc's kate snow. if you're watching us and washington, d.c., you can listen to us on the radio at bloomberg 99.1 fm. we will be right back. ♪

john: there was a lot of snow in iowa after the caucuses. today in new hampshire, we are getting kate snow who joins us now. kate: very smooth. i like that. john: we love the pun with with all due respect. kate: great to see you. john: we are going to ask a bunch of questions, but the first thing i want to ask you is a quick question -- you covered hillary clinton in 2008. now covering her in a different way in 2016. what is different, what is the same? kate: that is a good question to a lot of strikes me as the same. to be fair, i have not been out in the field with her this time. i'm anchoring behind glass. but a lot of it is the same. i think the message, the fundamental message she has, and maybe this is part of a problem in new hampshire, is the message is the same. it is experience, i know what i'm doing. i heard bill clinton the other day said, this is the most important election of our lifetime. and she's the only one right now fit for this job. he said the exact same -- the line was the exact same quote from 8 years ago.

so i am getting a little sense of groundhog day watching it from the outside. mark: you were struck by the same answers of hers, including when she was confronted with a very hard mathematical reality, the bernie sanders is doing better significantly better with young people. kate: her reaction was sort of, wow. it was an authentic reaction. she -- no. she congratulated -- she said, what was her word? that is amazing, fantastic? what struck me last night was she is maybe a little less guarded right now. and this a parallel to eight years ago, too. 8 years ago, if you remember, she lost iowa. everybody got on that plane. she was in a down mood, we landed in new hampshire at o-dark hundred. she got right to do in started slogging away. remember that moment in the diner where she cried, she teared up and she talked about how hard it is to run.

she did that again last night and she was asked by that rabbi that question about balancing -- the one if your ego, the other is your humility is the question. how do you balance? she gave this interesting answer but it -- what was interesting to me was that it was a humble answer, it was a real personable answer, tapping into that vulnerability again. john: as practice as she is, and who has done this for so long, we thought she did great last night. she got really tough questions. she did really well but the answer she gave on the wall street speaking fees struck me as so totally off -- tonally off. kate: it was sort of honest, though. john: all of this time she still does not have a better answer to that question. it strikes me as amazing. has been asked 100 times. kate: i bet tonight she will have a really good answer to that question -- they have to be expecting that she will be asked again. bernie sanders, when his key arguments over the past weeks and months has been she is in

the pocket of wall street. mark: we play the other night andrea mitchell's ropeline discussion where he said, bernie sanders is not barack obama. bernie sanders has been an impressive candidate. barack obama has been touted as -- how impressed are you by bernie sanders? kate: i am surprised. here is why. i covered capitol hill 8 million years ago. and bernie sanders was coming to be honest, kind of old nutty professor type guy. i do not mean that disparagingly, but people saw him as this outcast from the party. he was an independent. he was from vermont. mark: the gadfly. kate: he said interesting things. but it was on the periphery. and now he's completely caught fire. i was talking to tad before he came on. i think part of it is millennials do not want to be told who to like.

they do not want to be told what to do. and he rose grassroots, social media drove this phenomenon. people are passing around his videos. john: where i thought mark was going to go somewhere else with bill clinton and the ropeline. i remember vividly you in the summer of 2008 -- you may have asked them whether barack obama is qualified to be president a started citing, he's constitutionally -- and it was kind of my god. that was the moment. the question i have coming out of that, bill clinton is a huge asset, sometimes a liability. where do you see him now as he is the coming more the center of his campaign? kate: that was in liberia. i remember it vividly because we had a lot of conversations and great interviews but this one, he was this close to me and red and not happy with my questions because i was asking him about his campaign in south carolina. in 2008, there were members of congress who said that he was invoking race, bringing race into the discussion. he does not like that question. he answered i'm not a racist. that is not what i meant to do.

but that was because they let him go. at a certain point in the campaign it years ago, i think that the clinton campaign made the decision to let him be the attack dog. this time around, my sense is that he has not yet been given that order. yeah. so, the closest thing we have seen is andrea mitchell's interview where he started to get a little bit edgy in his voice. mark: he saw the ted cruz event. what are your overall impressions of his performance? kate: really interesting to be there in the room. it is different than it is on tv. he went a really long time answering voter questions. it was a big town hall, packed, nashua. a lot of radio listeners. conservative talk radio had promoted it in boston. i talked to people in the crowd who were undecided, i talked to people who were totally ted cruz. it was his crowd. and he talked about everything under the sun. he was forcibly speaking against donald trump. he made shots at marco rubio. but i think what came across to me, having not seen him before in person, he is a scholarly

student of debate. he was measured in everything he said. he had details and was sort of, i think he struck the audience and the voters as being very well equipped, if you agree with his politics, to be the president. john: kate snow, please come back to this set. up next, we take a look at robbie mook, his boss and the s word after this. ♪

mark: they say that the most important meal of the day is breakfast. the most important on your team is a campaign manager. we put them together this morning. breakfast in the campaign manager, the clinton campaign manager. robbie mook. he ate half a piece of bacon. posted by al hunt. talked about his expectations for this primary. and how the clinton campaign plans to close the generation gap in this race. robbie: i was also disturbed yesterday that he was running an ad on tv here in new hampshire that says he got the endorsement of the valley news, my hometown newspaper. the daily news has not endorsed anyone in this race.

he implies in the same ad the national telegraph is supporting him. they have not endorse. the editor tweeted out last night he thought it was deceptive. this comes after in iowa, he sent out mail pieces with the logos of the aarp, implying a support which he does not have. they had to speak out against that as well. and he also ran ads in iowa implying he received the support of the des moines register. what we are getting at is an overall pattern of breaking that pledge and doing some what voters regard is pretty typical political behavior. i think the debate that should be had in the general election should be about the future of the middle class and how the middle class can start to get ahead again. how we can get wages rising. i think it is a fair question to ask whether a debate over socialism versus capitalism is helpful in that. and we'll just have to see.

john: do you think it is legitimate to question his capacity to be a party builder for a party he has never been a member of? robbie: i think that is a legitimate question. if people are choosing the party's leader and nominee, it is legitimate to say not only is this person going to be the best candidate to take on the republicans, the best candidate to deliver results, but also is this candidate going to be a steward of this party which is really the organization that represents our values? is that person going to stand up for the senate candidate in oklahoma, for the gubernatorial candidate in nevada, for the congressional candidate in montana?

absolutely. bernie sanders, he is getting contributions from bank employees as well. every candidate is. the mistake would be to not be tough enough on wall street. and as i said earlier, she went there before the crash. she called them out. she has introduced a plan that is tougher than anyone else and more comprehensive than anyone else. john: distinct from the candidate and the campaign proper, there is a support base for senator sanders' candidacy that has been shorthanded as the so-called bernie bros. anyone who engages in social media in support of hillary clinton has encountered this element. it can be nasty. it can be vitriolic. and i think the sanders campaign needs to be aware the extent to which, in an effort to galvanize their supporters, they start to let the mentality or the crudeness seep into their own words and criticisms that they hurl at secretary clinton. mark: joining us now is our hillary clinton reporter, jennifer epstein. welcome. this campaign, a normal campaign

would be under a fair amount of pressure. in your dealings with the campaign, do they seem under pressure? jennifer: do they seem -- i understand this is a state that it is difficult for them to -- senator sanders has such a big lead. a poll has him with a 20 point lead. what they are trying to do is beat expectations. there is the claims of maybe we can pull it off somehow. she pulled it off last time. but it really is much more about making up that gap, testing out some messages. mark: i'm going to target my inner chris matthews and refocus you on the question. they seem a little on edge. some of them seem on edge. do they seem that way to you? jennifer: if that's what you're trying to get me to say. no. mark: this is a battle tested group. jennifer: you saw at the breakfast that there were

certain questions that robbie would not answer. that is robbie's m.o. in general. i think there are certainly issues like on wall street where they are just trying to stick to being on message. when their message is she is not going to be influenced by wall street but that is not really answering the question of is she answering these questions well? because i do not think she answered it well last night. who knows how she is going to answer what i assume is going to be some more on that from sanders tonight? john: tell me about what you think about this bernie bros thing? brian fallon, they raised this. it seems like maybe they're trying to go there a little bit? jennifer: yeah. he sort of maybe fell into it a bit in the conversation over the course of the breakfast. but he got into it. he brought up -- the bernie bros. he said bernie bros. secretary clinton in this interview with "people" magazine says i think we are making progress on some of these sexism issues.

she is pointing out that people are, she was asked in this interview about like marco rubio's boots and various candidates' hair. maybe we are making one step forward but definitely not two. mark: who would you say right now is the most important, besides the candidate, the most important person on the clinton campaign? jennifer: do you want the answer to be bill clinton? he is somebody that definitely seems to be pushing for a lot of attention to be, and energy to be spent here in the next couple of days. there are hundreds of staff coming up from headquarters that are already here. that are just really trying to fight this in a way that they are trying to at the same time downplay it. mark: thank you very much.

right back with who won the day after this. ♪

mark: who won the day so far? john: robbie mook. mark: marco rubio. no one touched him so far today and he is ahead. we're always live on bloomberg politics.com. john: time to say good night. before that we say sayonara. ♪

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>> had been friday. it is the fifth of february. i am yvonne man and this is "trending business." we will be live in tokyo, sydney, and new delhi this hour. first, there is what we are watching this morning. it is the foxconn effect. #is in tokyo. three years of negotiations come to an end. .he tale of woe at toshiba shares fall to a 35-year low after its annual loss forecast

widens. 3% worse than what analysts were expecting. another dramatic day as the year of the goat draws to a close. oil and the dollar of both weaker. the yen is the strongest in two weeks. let us know what you think of today's top stories by following me on twitter. now, where david trading in london asia -- in indonesia is just getting underway. >> we are waiting for the forecast for that 1, 4 .74%. that is for the full year. it does come in along those lines, that would be the slowest pace of growth going back to asia looking like this. the two stories. everything else but japan.