Massachusetts senator and 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren began the month of June polling around 7 percent, placing her in-a-respectable-but-certainly-second tier of candidates along with California senator Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg. But over the past several weeks, she earned a blizzard of media coverage and made inroads with primary voters thanks to her steady rollout of detailed policies, from wiping out student debt and taxing the uber-rich back to funding universal childcare and abolishing the Electoral College. Warren entered Wednesday's inaugural Democratic debate at 12.8 percent in RealClearPolitics's polling average, good for third overall; New Jersey senator Cory Booker and former Texas representative Beto O'Rourke, at 3.3 and 2.3 percent, respectively, were the only other participants on stage who managed to exceed one percent.

Of the candidates hoping to use the debate to boost their polling numbers, former Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro was probably the most successful. His invocation of the black and Hispanic victims of police violence—a talking point he uses to promote his police reform platform—drew enthusiastic applause from the crowd. The former San Antonio mayor also drew a sharp distinction between his desire to repeal Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which makes it a crime to illegally cross the border, and his fellow Texan O'Rourke's reluctance to vote to do so while in Congress. "I think that you should do your homework on this issue," Castro said, asserting that a separate federal law addresses O'Rourke's purported concerns about the implications of repeal for human trafficking. "If you did your homework on this issue, you would know that we should repeal this section."

For the most part, however, the stage belonged to Warren. She didn't monopolize the conversation in the traditional sense; according to FiveThirtyEight, the 1,637 words she spoke put her well behind the more loquacious Booker and O'Rourke, and on par with Castro (1,588 words), Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar (1,614 words), and NBC's Chuck Todd (1,633 words.) But her presence drove the debate at several critical junctures, as her policy positions forced competitors to measure their platforms directly against hers. In an early question to Booker, Savannah Guthrie asked why he criticized Warren's choice to call out by name companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook when she announced her plan to break up tech giants back in March. "I don't think I disagree," Booker replied, seemingly contradicting his earlier-expressed disagreement with Warren's approach. Eventually, he conceded: "I will single out companies like Halliburton or Amazon that pay nothing in taxes, and our need to change that."

On health care, only Warren and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio raised their hand when the moderators asked which candidates support would support abolishing private insurance. After offering a spirited defense of Medicare for All—which she acknowledged as an issue Sanders's 2016 candidacy brought to the Democratic mainstream—Warren added, "There are a lot of politicians who say, 'Oh, it's just not possible, we just can't do it, [and] have a lot of political reasons for this.' What they're really telling you is they just won't fight for it." When Lester Holt turned to O'Rourke, who supports a Medicare buy-in option but not Medicare for All, his appeals to the importance of preserving "choice" sounded a lot like the unwillingness to fight that Warren had just finished describing.

In another notable sequence, moderator José Díaz-Balart asked Ohio congressman Tim Ryan how he could, like Trump, promise to bring back manufacturing jobs to his home state. Ryan recalled how the auto industry's disappearance devastated his community, and concluded that the country "need[s] an industrial policy saying we're going to dominate building electric vehicles." It was a reasonable-enough sentiment, but again, Warren provided the sort of context to the problem that Ryan's aspirational statements omitted. "We’ve had an industrial policy in the United States for decades now, and it’s basically been let giant corporations do whatever they want to do," she said. "Giant corporations have exactly one loyalty, and that is to profits." It was as much an argument about job creation specifically as it was a reiteration of her campaign's overarching argument—that the booming economy benefits only "a thinner and thinner slice at the top."