Before the debate, there were basically three tiers of candidates in the polls. You had the top three in double digits (Biden, trailed by Biden and Warren), two runners-up around 6 percent (Harris and Buttigieg), and then a whole mess of candidates near the bottom. By the end of both nights, there were only two candidates who seemed like they may have performed well enough to move up a tier: former HUD Secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Kamala Harris. [...]
From that standpoint, he couldn’t have hoped for a better night than the one he had on Wednesday. Castro’s bold idea on immigration — to decriminalize illegal entry — was taken up by other candidates on stage, and then was endorsed by the vast majority of candidates on Thursday. He used his mastery of the issue to pounce on fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke, making O’Rourke look like an empty suit while elevating his own profile (O’Rourke had a really, really bad night in general, but Castro was the single biggest reason). [...]
Sanders’s 2016 presidential run appears to have played a major galvanizing role here, opening up space for a genuinely left-wing shift among Democratic leaders that produced a crop of progressive 2018 stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In July 2018, YouGov asked self-identified Democrats whether they wanted candidates for the midterm elections to be “more or less like Bernie Sanders.” Fifty-seven percent said they wanted more Sanders-esque candidates; a scant 16 percent said less. [...]
Social justice, identity politics, wokeness — whatever terminology you want to call the modern left-wing approach to issues relating to historically disadvantaged social groups, it dominated the stage on both nights.
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