LAS VEGAS -- It’s an odd debate when the top two candidates fighting for their party’s nomination claim the same moment as a victory.

But that’s what happened in Las Vegas, after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders interrupted a back-and-forth about Hillary Clinton's email controversy to pronounce, “Americans are sick of hearing about your damn emails!”


For Clinton, the unexpected show of support from Sanders validated a sense that the overwhelming focus on her email is part of a right-wing conspiracy to tank her poll numbers. It was a welcome boost as she heads to testify in front of the Benghazi Committee next week, and a comment that effectively took the email issue off the table, if only temporarily. But Sanders’ team embraced the exchange as well: it put him at the center of one of the night’s stand-out moments as 15.3 million viewers watched.

Now, Sanders’ team is touting the debate as a victory expected to expand his audience, boost fundraising, and, most important, peel off Clinton supporters to his cause. Indeed, at a fundraiser in Hollywood on Wednesday, Sanders said he had raised $2.5 million since the debate.

“He had the biggest soundbite of the night,” Sanders’ senior adviser Tad Devine said in an interview. “It’s being played on TV every ten seconds.”

While pundits generally agreed Clinton won the debate with a relaxed, commanding performance, focus groups across the country pronounced Sanders the victor. And the "damn emails" moment was critical to the Sanders campaign’s goal of expanding his appeal among Democratic primary voters who are open to a Clinton alternative. “Our target voters are not voting for us right now -- they’re voting for Hillary Clinton, or are favorable to her,” Devine explained. “It was precisely what we want to do, we want to talk to her voters.”

And Sanders’ response on Clinton’s emails was the “intercepted pass" he needed to lure Clinton voters to his side, Devine argued.

Sanders’ campaign also said his talk about reforming the criminal justice system helped appeal to crucial voting blocs outside his base of white, young college-educated voters. “We made inroads with African Americans last night,” Devine said. “This is the first time Bernie Sanders showed up last night in front of important constituents. Some of the first words he said were Black Lives Matter.”

"The reason those words matter," Sanders said during the debate, "is the African American community knows that on any given day some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car and three days later she can up dead in jail...we need to combat institutional racism from top to bottom, and we need major, major reforms in a broken criminal justice system."

Post-debate outreach is already happening on the ground in Iowa, where Rev. Frantz Whitfield -- an African American minister who supported Clinton in 2007 and hosted her at the Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Waterloo -- has switched allegiances and is now trying to bring black voters to Sanders.

“Hearing him say Black Lives Matter in the debate got a lot of people’s attention,” Whitfield said. “We’re talking about getting Bernie to the church -- one of my main focuses is to get his name out in the African American community, and now it’s going to take us knocking on doors.”

Sanders making the comment of the night is also getting him more exposure than he has enjoyed thus far in his insurgent, grassroots campaign, which has largely kept him in Iowa and New Hampshire and rendered him relatively unknown in states he will have to win in later primaries to remain competitive into March.

Indeed, the Sanders campaign blasted out a fundraising email with the subject line, “Your damn emails,” noting that Sanders’s comment “got the biggest applause of the night.” The fundraising plea included a video clip of the exchange, which supporters were encouraged to “watch right now, and if you’re as fired up as we are about how things are going, make a contribution of $23.81 — the average donation made to our campaign during the debate — before Bernie steps off the stage.” (Clinton's campaign said it was not releasing any fundraising figures.)

While political insiders called Clinton the runaway winner, a CNN post-debate focus group showed voters choosing Sanders as the night’s victor. On Fusion’s panel of about a dozen 18- to 34-year-old registered Democrats, the majority considered Sanders the winner; and a Fox News poll of 28 Democrats showed that while half came in supporting Clinton, that dropped to just about 14% after the debate. A Time magazine online poll showed 68% of recipients said Sanders won, while 84% of respondents in a U.S. News & World Report poll had him as the night’s winner.

Clinton’s team, however, was not ready to cede any points over what has been hailed as the best night to date of her rocky campaign. “There is no substitute for the eyeball test,” said spokesman Brian Fallon, “and she was the only candidate who looked and sounded like our next President. There is going to be a lot of next-day spin from other campaigns, but the unanimous verdict last night was Hillary Clinton owned the stage.”

Her campaign noted that while Sanders’ “damn emails” comment was helpful to Clinton, she enjoyed other stand-out moments of her own -- the most tweeted topic online was an exchange where Clinton criticized Sanders’ record on guns, and a second big exchange with Sanders was when Clinton engaged him on her vision of how the country’s economy works (“we are not Denmark,” she said).

Clinton campaign officials also said they were skeptical of online metrics that can be manipulated through paid marketing that campaigns launch on social media, and that are in general unscientific.

But former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer noted on Twitter Wednesday that the dynamic of Sanders walking away with the focus group and online poll wins as the pundits lauded Clinton’s performance was “reminiscent of Obama in 07-08.”

Even inside the Wynn Hotel, in a room down the hall from where the debate was unfolding, Clinton supporters who came to watch on site were enjoying Sanders’ performance. A large segment of the Clinton watch party cheered when Sanders called for a “political revolution.”

Sanders’ “damn emails” line -- so popular it has already spawned its own Twitter feed, @damnemails -- was not rehearsed or planned, campaign aides said, but the plan was always to shy away from attacking Clinton on the issue. “We discussed whether the emails were going to be something he spoke about more aggressively or pushed back on,” Devine said. “All of us decided there was no reason for him to attack her on the issue. But the line was not planned -- the line was Bernie. All we said was, you gotta be yourself in this thing, call it like you see it.”

For Sanders’ campaign, the hope is that his message to Clinton supporters on the emails and his message to African American voters that Black Lives Matter will drown out any damage caused by the slams he took for his record on guns, where he has voted against legislation to institute background checks for gun purchases.

But his team was hopeful. “We had 90 debate watch parties in Iowa,” Devine said. “We have an organization that can pull off something like that.” And he pointed to Whitfield’s conversion from Clinton’s camp to working on behalf of Sanders as a sign of more to come.

“I have a lot of pull in my city, trying to persuade people to vote,” Whitfield noted. “One of the reasons I left the Clinton campaign was I felt out of the loop. I feel like I’m part of the Sanders campaign. My whole goal was to feel like I’m part of something.”