Here’s What to Expect from Thursday’s Democratic Presidential Debate

For a majority of the presidential season—at least, on the Democratic side—Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has obsessively promised not to run a negative campaign against the party’s presumptive frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. Like everything in politics, that hasn’t exactly held true: As it becomes increasingly clear that the race would be a Sanders-Clinton smackdown—and that Sanders might actually have a shot, however small, at winning said smackdown—the Vermont senator has started to hit the former First Lady with not-so-subtle attacks about her ties to Wall Street, and flip flops on liberal linchpins like trade and the War in Iraq. On Wednesday, Sanders broke his promise completely, remarking in a Democratic town hall that Clinton is a “progressive on some days.”

The jab—and the protracted debate over progressivism that followed—set the stage for Thursday night’s official Democratic presidential debate, hosted by MSNBC at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, just days before the state’s first-in-the-nation primary. After the virtual tie in Iowa earlier this week—and now that Martin O’Malley, the awkward third wheel of the race, has finally bowed out—the well-oiled Sanders and Clinton machines are now officially going in for the kill.

Despite Clinton’s win in New Hampshire during the 2008 Democratic primary, Sanders currently holds a commanding lead in the state’s primary polls. So for Clinton, this debate serves more as a national plea than a primary push: after her slim win in Iowa this week, she really has to convince voters in states that hold primaries after New Hampshire to stay in her tent if she loses to Sanders here. (It’s worth noting, though, that polls are, more often than not, bullshit.)

To do that, Clinton will have to bat down any skepticism that she is not liberal enough for the Democratic crown, while also sticking to the message that she is a more palatable moderate who can win a general election. It’s that same fine line that she was unable to sidestep eight years ago: appearing as a “the progressive who gets things done,” as she puts it, while also convincing voters that she actually does believe in progressivism, despite her previous stances on issues important to primary voters. That moonwalk has proved a lot more difficult for Clinton in 2016, when she’s been forced to go head-head with a self-declared Democratic socialist. Even Barack Obama didn’t want to break up banks.

One way Clinton will try to accomplish her task is by poking real visible holes in Sanders’ overall message. Rather than simply attack the Vermont Independent’s record on gun control, as she had done in the past, Clinton will likely have to go after the soul of his candidacy—the “political revolution” that he’s been calling for—by pointing out that it’s unlikely the country will suddenly get over its dislike of socialism, turn Congress blue, and pass Sanders’ trillion-dollar proposals with flying colors. Of course, because Clinton will still need Sanders’ supporters in November, she’ll also have to reassure voters that she believes in Bernie’s message—just a more pragmatic version of it.

On the surface, this task doesn’t seem particularly difficult: A former Secretary of State should presumably be able to convince the nation that she is better suited to become president than a Democratic socialist from Vermont. But Sanders’ meteoric rise has defied all political predictions to this point, and so far, Clinton’s attacks have only seemed to bolster his strength.

The stakes aren’t nearly as high for Sanders, whose very presence in the race has already thrown the Clinton campaign into a panic. On Thursday night, he’ll most likely double down on the strategy he’s been pursuing for the past several weeks, bringing up Clinton’s ties to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street figures, sifting through her equivocating stances on the Keystone XL pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and reviving the specter of her vote for the War in Iraq. His rise in the polls is evidence that this equation is working— at least, for now.

What Sanders absolutely can’t do, though, is fan any speculation that he would be demolished, George McGovern style, in a general election. Because when Trump says, seemingly with bloodthirst, that he would love to face Sanders in the general election, the prospect of a Trump-Sanders-and-maybe-even-Bloomberg election tends to scare the shit out of some voters.

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