It’s official: Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the Democratic front runner. How can we tell? Because she’s the one everyone is attacking. Well, almost everyone. U.S. Rep. Julian Castro didn’t jump in, perhaps because he is regularly mentioned as a possible vice-presidential candidate if Warren does win the Democratic nomination. (A Warren-Castro ticket makes demographic and geographic sense, but it wouldn’t offer ideological diversity.)
1. Warren fared well under pressure.
Once again, she steadfastly refused to acknowledge that middle-class taxes will likely go up if her healthcare plan becomes a reality, hewing instead to her now-familiar assertion that costs will go down. It fell to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to gently rebuke Warren for refusing to acknowledge what he has repeatedly. To paraphrase: Taxes might go up, but you’ll save by ditching a whole bunch of expenses you have today. Still, despite that evasiveness — and a couple of glimmers of peevishness as her fellow Dems piled on — Warren seemed to escape largely unscathed.
2. Klobuchar rocks, but will she roll?
Going into the Ohio debate — the fourth in the series — there were three leading candidates: Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sanders. That, too, was the way the debate ended. But Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota came to life and demonstrated that a moderate can be fiery. She drew sharp distinctions between herself and Warren on paying for healthcare and tax policy. Will it matter? Hard to say. But Klobuchar proved that there is a sane, sensible and tough center within the Democratic party.
3. Uncle Joe was largely able to sidestep questions about his son and Ukraine.
And then there is Biden, who sails on. He’s ahead in the polls nationally, but trails Warren in Iowa and New Hampshire, which will be casting real live ballots in about 100 days. President Trump’s scheme to slime Biden via his son Hunter didn’t seem to have much of an impact; while the moderators were eager to broach the subject, the other Dems weren’t inclined to follow their lead.
4. The Dems may not be in disarray, but they’re definitely divided.
It’s been a recurring theme throughout this campaign: While some of the Democrats seeking the White House advocate huge, ambitious structural changes (Medicare for All, breaking up Big Tech, banning and confiscating assault weapons), others insist that smaller, more attainable policies are the right way to go — and that thinking too big could end up preserving the status quo or even provoking a reaction. The same dynamic was on display in Ohio. See, for example, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar warning that Beto O’Rourke’s gun-confiscation proposal could doom the gun-control push currently underway in Washington, with O’Rourke defending it as a suitably drastic response to an untenable situation.
It’s tempting to think that the party’s eventual choice of nominee will resolve this tension, with, say, a Warren nomination showing the idealists have won or a Biden nomination suggesting the realists have carried the day. But Tuesday’s proceedings showed that the divide goes far beyond the frontrunners and will likely extend past this election cycle.
5. Twelve’s a crowd.
To be fair, the Democratic National Committee and media sponsors (CNN and the New York Times) probably didn’t expect twelve candidates to meet the requirements for the debate stage. But they did — and as a result, we got a production that was both too long (three hours, on seemingly every subject imaginable) and too short (face-to-face exchanges that could help, say, a voter decide between Warren and Biden were in dismayingly short supply). Make it tougher to qualify? Go back to two nights? Both possibilities are worth pondering, because — the moderators’ best efforts notwithstanding — the framework Wednesday didn’t quite work.
