I watched as much of the South Carolina debate as I could take, which was a little more than half. The "talking over" one another was not conducive to understanding anyone's positions and they often seemed to be forgetting that they have a common enemy and it isn't each other.
I'm sure that four years ago or eight or twelve, I must have written how I think the wrong way to approach these debates is to try and determine who "won." It ain't like a baseball game where you can look at a scoreboard and see how many runs one side scored. The goal is to improve one's standing with the voters and that's not something that's easily measurable, nor is it something that only one person can do. The main poll I saw after the Las Vegas debate indicated that both Sanders and Warren were up two points, Biden stayed the same, Buttigieg and Klobuchar each lost one and Bloomberg lost three.
You could say, I suppose, that Sanders and Warren tied in that meet-up. You could also say that Warren "won" in that she needed the boost more and may have saved her entire candidacy by reminding the voters who liked her why they liked her. But then you look and see that that poll had a two-point margin of error so maybe in reality, it was closer to a five-way tie with Bloomberg only slightly behind the pack. Hell, you could even argue that considering how many shots to the head Bloomberg received in that wrestling match, he "won" by not being knocked out.
I didn't think anyone last night markedly improved their position or harmed it. I would have loved it if someone had because I'm still wrestling with my decision on who to vote for. My reservations about Sanders flow from reading too many articles about why he can't win in November and might even hurt Democratic chances in the House and Senate — even with the all-important Dick Van Dyke endorsement. Some of those articles are hard to dismiss and nothing I heard in last night's debate changed that. I may have to write-in Fred.