Sanders and Warren, Leading Liberals, Fight Off Accusations They Are Impractical

Further, Mr. Sanders and his aides are more eager to confront Joseph R. Biden Jr., who they view as the most formidable moderate in the race and who also is currently winning support from many of the working-class voters they covet.

For her part, Ms. Warren has sought to both flatter Mr. Sanders and protect her left flank by offering a full-throated embrace of Mr. Sanders’s “Medicare for All” legislation. “I’m with Bernie,” she has repeatedly said. Of the leading candidates, Ms. Warren is the only one besides Mr. Sanders to lend her full support to the plan.

Still, there are differences between the two in substance, attitude and political strategy. Ms. Warren has risen rapidly in the polls by both pulling away support from Mr. Sanders among younger and more liberal voters, and winning over many women — especially educated white women — who tended to support Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries. She has generated a wider array of policy proposals than Mr. Sanders, usually taking greater pains to explain how they would be paid for and at times limiting the generosity of the public benefits she has proposed, as in the case of student loan forgiveness.

Mr. Sanders has seen his support erode since the 2016 election, but remains highly popular among very liberal Democrats and maintains a following among working-class whites that Ms. Warren has not yet matched. He has staked his campaign, above all, on his support for single-payer health care, and he has taken a more combative approach than Ms. Warren to candidates whom he sees as overly accommodating of the wealthy’s interests — Mr. Biden chief among them.

[We tracked down the 2020 Democrats and asked them the same set of questions. Watch them answer.]

Signaling that Ms. Warren was not his focus, Mr. Sanders spent the weekend before the debate targeting Mr. Biden and Senator Kamala Harris of California for health care policies he denounced as inadequate and deferential to corporate power. But Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris will not appear on the debate stage until Wednesday, when the seething rivalry between them that began in the first round of debates may again be on vivid display.

Mr. Buttigieg, a distant third in prominence among the debaters, has needed a jolt of energy for his campaign: While he has raised an enormous sum of money, more than any other candidate in the last fund-raising quarter, his polling numbers have steadily slipped into the mid-single digits over the last month. A liberal reformer rather than an economic populist, Mr. Buttigieg has ample areas of disagreement with Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, on issues such as health care and higher education.

Similarly situated in the debate, if not in the polls, was Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, an avowed moderate who has been touting her appeal across the Upper Midwest states that are likely to decide the general election. Ms. Klobuchar has profound disagreements on policy with the leading candidates in the Tuesday debate, calling for measured improvements to the health care and education systems rather than sweeping legislation, and rebuffing a number of liberal litmus tests on subjects like immigration.

In theory, a debate stage in swing-state Michigan would be an ideal setting for laying out those differences. Up to this point, however, Ms. Klobuchar has stopped well short of calling out Mr. Sanders or Ms. Warren by name about their differences. In their first debate encounter last month, Ms. Klobuchar passed up several opportunities to draw clear distinctions and she has similarly declined to do so in appearances since the Miami forum.

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