Super Tuesday is fast approaching, the 2020 election is—deep breath—roughly eight months away, and yet the crowded Democratic presidential primary field is still chock-full of seven major (and some major-ish) candidates: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg, Tulsi Gabbard, and Tom Steyer. Watching them all battle it out, not to mention vetting this many contenders, can feel rather overwhelming.

But while it may not be clear from the controlled chaos of the debate stage, the eight remaining candidates (and their supporters) are, in fact, making a distinct case for why they should win the nomination and take on President Trump. Here are their sales pitches, as we understand them.

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Bernie Sanders: The Changemaker

Bernie, as he’s lovingly known, is calling for a progressive movement (powered by young and typically underrepresented voters of color) for working people, including “Medicare for all” and a $15 minimum wage. He’s hailed as authentic, independent, and politically bold, and after Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, the Vermont senator has emerged the front-runner: If he performs well on Super Tuesday, he could tally up a delegate lead that will be mathematically impossible for the others to beat.

There’s momentum, and a certain air of inevitability, behind Bernie, despite qualms from the Establishment about his Democratic socialist affiliation. “If you want to get rid of President Trump,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote this week, “prepare to get behind Sanders and do everything you can to make him president.”

Joe Biden: You Know Me!

Polls show the former vice president is getting a boost in South Carolina with the opposite argument as Sanders: “Americans aren’t looking for revolution,” Biden told NBC this week. Rather, he’s selling himself as a safe bet, an experienced elder statesman (nickname: “Uncle Joe”) who has Been There Before. “We know Joe,” Representative Jim Clyburn (D–S.C.), the House majority whip, said of Biden in a key endorsement this week. “But more importantly, he knows us.” While Biden has underperformed at the polls so far, he makes a (sadly) rare argument in politics: He’s a good, moral man of faith who can repair the “soul of the nation” after four toxic years under Trump.

Elizabeth Warren: The Woman With the Plans

Warren and Sanders share a passion for sweeping “structural change,” as she calls it—but the senator from Massachusetts is attempting to distinguish herself as the woman who can actually get it done. (“After the 2008 financial crash, Bernie and I both wanted to rein in Wall Street,” Warren said at a CNN town hall this week, then noted that she was the one who “dug in” and created the Consumer Protection Agency.) Her debate performances are consistently impressive—she raised more than $2.8 million after last week’s showdown in Nevada, lifesaving support for her campaign even as she lags in the polls and the likes of Joe Scarborough (sigh) suggests she and Klobuchar drop out.

Where Hillary Clinton was hesitant to talk about the historic nature of her candidacy, Warren leans all the way in (excuse the phrase) to her gender, touting her plans for paid family leave and affordable childcare, and sharing her own story of pregnancy discrimination (Chris Matthews be damned).

Pete Buttigieg: The New Guy

The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and national newcomer entered the race on the promise of “generational change”: rethinking the status quo, such as increasing the number of Supreme Court justices and making Election Day a national holiday. “My face is my message,” the 38-year-old elder millennial has said. His oft-repeated stump speech line is about looking ahead to 2054, the year when he’ll be the same age Trump is now. Buttigieg seems hatched from a perfect presidential test tube: He’s both a veteran and a Rhodes scholar. But, unlike presidents past, he is an out, gay, married man—one who won Iowa (by one metric, at least) and has the second-highest number of delegates toward the nomination, after Sanders.

As the race heats up, Buttigieg is attacking Sanders’s “inflexible ideological revolution” and billing himself as a soothing alternative—someone who can win, but in a more old-school, bipartisan way. “There’s a majority of Americans who want to be able to turn on the TV, see the president, and actually feel their blood pressure go down a little,” he recently said.

Amy Klobuchar: I Can Win Back Trump Voters

The hot dish–serving Midwestern moderate makes a case that’s likely compelling for any Democrat with electoral college anxiety: She, and only she, can actually win over Trump voters in purple states likes hers. Look no further than the green T-shirts her supporters wear, reading (in all caps): “Amy Klobuchar Will Beat Donald Trump.”

“While everyone talks about winning rural areas, suburban areas, I’m the only one up here with the receipts,” Klobuchar said in a powerful moment at this week’s debate in South Carolina. In 2018, “she won 42 counties that Trump carried in 2016, including 39 in rural areas,” Vox noted. While Klobuchar’s delegate count (seven, compared with Sanders’s 45) is currently weak, she’s casting herself above the basic primary squabbling. “It’s not just who talks the best,” she said at the last debate, but “who actually gets things done.”

Mike Bloomberg: Moderates Love Me

The billionaire businessman and philanthropist is casting himself as a more moderate pick who is laser-focused on unseating Trump, and he certainly has the bona fides, after initially running for mayor of New York as a Republican before switching to Independent. “One of the reasons I’m reasonably confident I could beat Trump is I would be acceptable to the moderate Republicans you have to have,” Bloomberg recently told Reuters. “Whether you like it or not, you can’t win the election unless you get moderate Republicans to cross the line.”

Bloomberg brings an outsider vibe to the race. He entered late, bypassing the Iowa caucus entirely, and poured nearly $200 million in ad buys (not to mention meme and influencer marketing.) But his supporters say that to beat the New York magnate in the White House, it takes one to know one.

Tulsi Gabbard: The Peacemaker

Yes, the four-term congresswoman from Hawaii is still technically in the race, despite a diminishing presence on the national stage (and the debate stage), and having won no delegates thus far. After serving in Iraq as an Army medical specialist, her lesser-known campaign is foreign policy–forward, urging America to pull out of foreign wars and calling for peace, while slamming former secretary of state Clinton as a “rot” on the Democratic party and scorning the U.S. “military-industrial complex.” By contrast, Gabbard sides closer to Trump on diplomacy with North Korea: “We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather than with, you know, a police baton,” she told The New York Times.

Along with Buttigieg, Gabbard is the only veteran running for president, and she vows to fight for fellow military members.

Tom Steyer: The Outsider

You can’t deny he’s passionate: The billionaire climate activist in the plaid tie started out by spending millions of his own money to campaign for Trump’s impeachment. By the time Steyer became a candidate himself, Congress came to agree with him. A fringe candidate with no delegates yet, Steyer has been a wild card but has remained in the race, thanks to his own fortune. “What exactly is Tom Steyer planning to do?” a recent NBC headline asked.

Some speculate he’s “siphoning votes from Biden,” according to the same NBC report, and hope he’ll pull out—but Steyer has funneled $20 million into television and radio ads in South Carolina, and has appealed to African American voters as the only candidate who backs reparations. It’s clear that neither he nor any of his opponents are going down without a fight.