I noticed that my evil bindings and general bindings for clojure mode are overriding the dubugger. So I can't press c or n for continue or next. I have to type the emacs escape '\` to get them working. how do I make the debugger mode bindings have higher priority if that is the case.

try this out:

(evil-make-overriding-map cider--debug-mode-map 'normal)
    (evil-normalize-keymaps)