One of the most compelling things about Tuesday’s Democratic debate – which featured Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, and a host of lesser known candidates – was to see just how much of Sanders’ 2016 progressive agenda is dominating the party in 2019 and just how uncompelling the centrist replies to it still are.

John Delaney, an unknown former congressman who has spent millions running a campaign no one’s heard of, was the unlikely gladiator willing to take it on. Despite statistically insignificant support, he got plenty of airtime, saying his progressive opponents (both Sanders and Warren) were committing political suicide and that they didn’t stand a chance in a general election.

But while Delaney and others, like the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, spoke about what they wouldn’t do, what they wouldn’t support, Sanders talked about getting “rid of the profiteering of the health insurance and drug companies”, about jobs, and free education, about basic rights that belonged to everyone. And Elizabeth Warren asked: “Why go through the trouble of running for president and then talk about what we can’t do and won’t fight for?”

The key moments from the latest Democratic debate Read more

Delaney complained that the two progressive candidates were going to take away people’s health insurance and that ordinary people wouldn’t like that. Warren dismissed those concerns by pointing to how broken the current system is. She shared the story of a friend who, in the middle of battling a disease, was burdened by exorbitant medical bills and insurance-related paperwork – an experience that millions of Americans can relate to. And when an exasperated Delaney complained that his colleagues didn’t understand healthcare from a business perspective, Sanders told him that was the point: it shouldn’t be a business. That might have been difficult to hear for a congressman who has made money off the industry for years.

It was perfect for CNN producers to have Delaney aggressively take on the popular Sanders and Warren, but he ended up playing into their hands, forcing the conversation to topics which are their core strengths. With the hapless Delaney knocked out early, other candidates tried to play the foil. The former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper zeroed in on Senator Sanders: “Socialism is not the answer. Don’t let extremism give Trump four more years.”

Sanders replied by reminding him that every credible poll has him beating Trump. He runs especially strongly in battleground states, where he can expose Trump as a “fraud” and a “phony”. What’s extremist about giving people a living wage, or having them pay less for prescription drugs?

With Hickenlooper dispatched, it was another bland centrist’s turn. The Ohio representative Tim Ryan tried to play up his working-class credentials by complaining that Sanders was “taking private health insurance away from union members”, a trope that’s already been aggressively deployed by Joe Biden. (Sanders pointed out to CNN’s Anderson Cooper after the debate that, without having to bargain for private insurance, union workers would be able to demand higher wages and better conditions from their bosses.) Klobuchar just as crassly dismissed the idea of tuition-free higher education by saying it amounted to giving “free college to the wealthiest people”.

Despite polling showing how popular the core progressive agenda of universal healthcare, jobs, and free education is, centrists are desperate to portray themselves as the only sane, electable option out there. This isn’t just the strategy of some long-shots in a crowded field – it’s the argument keeping Joe Biden at the top of Democratic polls.

But the electability bubble is in danger of bursting. Centrists used to run on lofty rhetoric: the “Yes, we can”, “hope and change” stuff. Now they’ve ceded that ground completely to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.