Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders face off in New Hampshire town hall – campaign live

That’s it from us for tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow for the lead-up to the final Democratic presidential debate before the New Hampshire primaries!

Check out Adam Gabbatt’s dispatch from Derry, New Hampshire, to see where things stand at the end of the night:

View image in fullscreen

Answering questions from Anderson Cooper and the audience on topics ranging from Wall Street regulation and Supreme Court nominations to rural heroin epidemics and climate change, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders highlighted some key differences between their candidacies - and some surprising similarities.

• Sanders told Cooper that his faith is a matter of community and inclusion, saying that “he wouldn’t be here” running for president unless he had a strong religious backbone that “guides my life.” “Everyone practices religion in his own way,” Sanders said. “My spirituality is that we are all in this together.”
• Clinton said that Sanders’ bashing of her progressive credentials is unnecessarily exclusionary: “Under the definition that was flying around on Twitter and statements by the [Sanders] campaign, President Obama would not be a progressive, Joe Biden would not be a progressive, Jeanne Shaheen would not be a progressive, even the late, great Paul Wellstone would not be a progressive. I’m not gonna let that bother me – I know where I stand, I know who stands with me.”
  
• Sanders said of Clinton’s progressive bona fides that “I do not know any progressive who has a super PAC and takes $15m from Wall Street. That’s just not progressive.”
• Clinton declares that not only does she have a litmus test for judicial appointments, “I have a bunch of litmus tests,” Clinton said. “I’m looking for people who understand how the real world works, who don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to support business, to support the idea that money is speech.”
• Sanders slammed Donald Trump’s statements on immigrants and climate change in one fell swoop: “Trump is, as you know, a well-known scientist. Brilliant scientist. And he has concluded after years of studying the issue that climate change is a hoax brought to us by the Chinese. I would’ve thought that he’d say that it was a hoax brought to us by the Mexicans.”

View image in fullscreen

Hillary Clinton, pressed on why she accepted so much money from Goldman Sachs for three speeches given for the investment behemoth:

That’s what they offered.

Hillary Clinton responds to Bernie Sanders’ statement after the Iowa caucuses stating that his the only Democratic campaign that doesn’t have a super PAC:

View image in fullscreen

“That’s just not the case” that she’s in the pocket of Wall Street, Clinton said. During her time in the US senate, “There was no doubt that I took on a lot of what was going out on Wall Street including calling them out on the mortgage issues... and calling for changes in CEO pay.”

“But I honestly think that the best answer to this is the fact that everybody that I know who looks at what’s happening in this campaign sees the same thing: the Wall Street interests, the corporate interests are spending a lot of money trying to defeat me! I find it a strange argument.”

4 Feb 201622.42 EST

Jeb Lund

Hillary Clinton just deflected a tough question with an old cliché, says Jeb Lund, and the reasons for doing so are clear:

A man who has a form of colon cancer and is potentially terminal, asks Clinton about the options for people to die with dignity.

Clinton gives a long answer. She begins it with: “We need to have a conversation in this country”.

Can we put this to bed forever, please? It’s very easy to have an opinion on this, and Hillary Clinton surely has one. It’s just probably not an opinion that wins with enough demographics to make it worth expressing.

Clinton ends with: “I don’t have an easy or glib answer for you”. But this is an easy and glib answer. “Let’s have a conversation” is glib to the point of cliché.

She says that she would want to immerse herself in the scientific and medical and religious writing on the subject before answering, but nobody needs to. Either you believe that people with no hope or no remission from suffering have the right to die, or you don’t.

Hillary Clinton, for one of the first times during the 2016 presidential campaign, touches on the history of her marriage and its difficulties during the late nineties:

“I’ve had to be in public dealing with some very personal issues,” Clinton said, her voice growing slightly quieter. “I read a treatment of the ‘prodigal son’ parable by the Jesuit Henri Nouwen... and there was a line in there that became a lifeline for me: ‘Practice the discipline of gratitude.”

#RealTalk: Hillary Clinton got more animated talking about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” than she has on any other policy question during the first half-hour of the town hall forum.

Granted, the former first lady has a quarter-century-old axe to grind with the Republican establishment, but for voters - particularly the young voters whose votes she said she would “work hard for” earlier in the night - who aren’t as personally invested in Clinton’s battles with the right wing, the answer might have been off-putting.

Anderson Cooper: Do you still believe in the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’?

Hillary Clinton: Don’t you?

I view that as perversely flattering.”

Hillary Clinton on American Crossroads and Karl Rove’s attacks on her candidacy

Donald Trump’s jet makes emergency landing in Tennessee

Billionaire Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s private plane made an emergency landing in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday because of “engine trouble,” according to Reuters. Trump’s Boeing 757 - nicknamed “Trump Force One” - was flying to Little Rock, Arkansas, from New York when it landed at Nashville International Airport. Trump traveled the rest of the way in a small charter aircraft, a campaign spokeswoman said.

The Federal Aviation Administration will investigate the incident.

Anderson Cooper asks Hillary Clinton if she would support making women sign up for the Selective Service, as men over the age of eighteen are currently required to do.

View image in fullscreen

“From my perspective, the all-volunteer military has worked, and we should not do anything that undermines, it because it has provided a solid core of people who are willing to serve our country. The idea of having everybody register concerns me unless we have a better idea of where that’s going to come out.”

Clinton hit back hard on Sanders’ comments on her lack of of progressivism notes Jeb Lund:

Hillary Clinton said: “It’s interesting that Senator Sanders is setting himself up to be the gatekeeper on who is and isn’t progressive ... By those definitions, president Obama isn’t a progressive, vice-president Biden isn’t progressive”. She’s right, they weren’t!

Of course, that’s not the point that Clinton is making. If you like Bernie Sanders, this exchange probably made you see red, because it’s very cynical. If you support Hillary Clinton, this was just about the best answer she could give.

It plays to the identity-politics pitch she’s making to women voters, while signaling to African-American voters in South Carolina that she understands their desire to be heard and validated.

It suggests that Bernie Sanders is another man telling Hillary Clinton what she can’t do, while he’s telling African-American voters that America’s one black president is bad.

Well done.