As flashy as production has become for political debates—with swooping shots and bright colors and podiums that look like game show consoles—it couldn’t animate the Democratic field last night. Not even the addition of Tom Steyer, who tried but failed to explain why he was there, could shake things up. If yesterday’s debate left any overall impression, it was this: Democrats are in worse shape than they ought to be. They have a giant field yet no obvious choice for 2020. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden are the current front-runners, but either looks all too beatable. Bernie Sanders has been having trouble recapturing the energy of 2016, and his health has become a reasonable concern. To an unusual extent, there’s an opening for one of the also-rans, like Pete Buttigieg, a small-town mayor, or Amy Klobuchar, a non-famous senator, or even Andrew Yang, a futurist wonk, to surprise everyone and vault to the top. Or Al Gore could return. (Hey, he’s only 71.)

Elizabeth Warren

Warren has a lot of strengths that were on display yesterday: intelligence, expertise, vision, and a sense of narrative. But her weaknesses also came out: evasiveness, insecurity, and awkwardness. When Beto O’Rourke accused her of being “punitive” instead of “lifting people up,” or whatever it was that he pulled out of his bottomless bag of gas, Warren seemed nonplussed. Where a candidate like Donald Trump might have employed his common tactic of embracing the insult, Warren ran from it. “So I’m really shocked at the notion that anyone thinks I’m punitive,” Warren said, adding, “Look, I don’t have a beef with billionaires” and clarifying that she just wanted to tax them. But this was the same candidate who minutes earlier had accused “everyone else on this stage” of believing it is “more important to protect billionaires than it is to invest in an entire generation of Americans.” There’s a brittleness to Warren that makes her overcorrect in response to attacks, as we also saw with her DNA test for American Indian heritage.

Many of Warren’s fans on Twitter were irritated with the hosts of the debate, CNN and the New York Times, for pressing Warren on the question of whether her medical plan would require higher taxes on the middle class. Since educated viewers all understand her implication, which is that any hike in taxes would be dwarfed by all the savings in medical premiums, why make her spell it out? But if journalists or Democratic opponents don’t press her to spell it out, then others will. How she deals with it says a lot about her credibility and salesmanship. Warren’s tactic was to keep avoiding a straight answer, no matter what, and it was so obvious that even a smart nonhuman animal, like a German shepherd or a dolphin, would have noticed it. So either Warren will have to make her pitch more candid, like that of Sanders, or she will have to learn to dodge awkward questions more smoothly, like Cory Booker. For now, though, she often comes across as a star student who read a book about how to run for the presidency without gaining any intuition about when to break the rules. Looking like a politician makes you a clumsy politician.

Joe Biden

Biden had no disastrous moments yesterday. But that’s in part because expectations are set low. He remains unable to formulate a sentence without stumbling over his own tongue, with lines “I’m the only one that got, got, moved the—to make sure that we could not have a magazine that had more than 10 rounds in it.” When he said, “because of [sic] I know what has to be done,” he sounded like a second grader. He also coined a word, “expedentially,” although the Washington Post graciously rendered it as “exponentially” in its transcript. A bigger problem for Biden is that he seems unwilling to put in the basic preparation work of an effective candidate. He knew he’d be asked about a $50,000-a-month consulting gig that his son, Hunter, had for a Ukrainian oil company while Joe was vice president and tasked with pursuing corruption in Ukraine. “My son did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine,” Biden offered. When CNN’s Anderson Cooper pointed out that Hunter had made a statement suggesting the opposite of “nothing wrong,” since it acknowledged a mistake and poor judgment, Biden asserted that he had never discussed Ukraine with his son (which, if Hunter’s memory is correct, would be untrue) and added, “My son made a judgment. I’m proud of the judgment he made.” Wait—proud of Hunter’s judgment in taking the sleazy gig? Any competent campaigner would have rehearsed a hundred smoother answers.

I’ve skipped over policy substance with Biden, not because this is a horse race article (although it is) but also because Biden has a hard time wrapping it up into a clear package. He has a lengthy record that he embraces selectively, but he has no clear summation of what he represents. On that front, Sanders and Warren blow him away, and it’s not because they’re to his left. Buttigieg and Klobuchar also have a clean pitch, one of sensible Midwestern progress, and they’re in the center. Biden has stances on issues, but he has no deeper theory of governance, or none that he could articulate to himself or anyone else. This has the effect of heightening all his other problems of gaffes and inconvenient past votes and actions. It all becomes noise and confusion without a distinctive and clear top line. Democrats often have this problem. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton both did. But at least they were articulate.

Bernie Sanders

Sanders, recuperating from a heart attack, had the best night of the top three candidates. He was charming and seemingly at ease, cracking jokes and thanking people for their good wishes. His fellow candidates applauded him, and they seem to like him. Sanders sounded like himself, and you would never guess he had been hospitalized in recent weeks. But primary voters will be even more hesitant to take the Sanders plunge than they already were. It looks more and more like the year in which Bernie could have beaten Trump was 2016, when populism was experiencing an unexpected surge.