A bitter debate among the last-chance candidates augurs ill for the Democrats

With Sanders storming ahead as the likely nominee, debate descends into a fight for the moral high ground, writes Andrew Naughtie

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Pete Buttigieg, formerly the candidate of youthful optimism, had turned pessimistic by the start of last night’s debate.

“I am not looking forward,” he declared, “to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump, with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, and Bernie Sanders, with a nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s.”

He may not have to wait much longer.

Coming as the candidates look down the twin barrels of South Carolina and Super Tuesday, this debate was a chance for the non-Sanders contingent to take down their frontrunner and elevate themselves.

They failed. The redundant, acrimonious shouting match they put on has made no difference.

All the candidates fought hard to take Sanders down, accusing him of not understanding maths, giving succour to the gun lobby and nurturing a soft spot for Fidel Castro.

Yet Sanders looked perfectly confident fending them off, and has managed to endure the debate without becoming the story.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren once again tore into Michael Bloomberg, but after the mauling she gave him last time, the novelty was long gone.

Her billionaire target had raised his debating game from appalling to safely mediocre, hardly blinking when Warren accused him of telling an employee to “kill” her baby, safe in the knowledge that his campaign ads were running in the commercial breaks.

Joe Biden didn’t exactly look like the zombie candidate he’d been written off as after New Hampshire, but that’s not a high bar for a former vice president to clear.

And as for Buttigieg, Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar, not one of them managed to land the kind of blows on Sanders that would have brought them up to his level – or at least, dragged him down to theirs.

And so the frontrunner steams ahead. It now looks likely that Sanders will perform well enough in South Carolina that the result won’t much matter.

The same goes for the unholy chimera of political narrative and hard delegate math that is Super Tuesday, which Bloomberg has designated his national electoral debut but where he is far from guaranteed to dominate.

So how long will this go on?

If Sanders manages to trivialise his rivals by denying them the cachet of actually winning anything, they might finally start peeling away. Then again, they’ve come this far. Bloomberg, indeed, is only just getting started.

Why not stay in and hope that by plugging away long enough, they can keep Sanders from winning the outright delegate majority he needs to sew this thing up?

But the fact remains that unless someone manages to trip him up, and soon, his march to a messy and unhappy convention may be unstoppable.

That raises the spectre of what comes next. And again, it was the doomy Buttigieg who put it best as he forecast dark times to come.

“I mean, look, if you think the last four years has been chaotic, divisive, toxic, exhausting, imagine spending the better part of 2020 with Bernie Sanders vs Donald Trump,” he implored the audience.

“Think about what that will be like for this country.”