Uphill battle for Sanders

In the 36 hours before the latest Democratic debate, the forces of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton fired angry verbal broadsides at one another, essentially accusing one another of dirty tricks after an inadvertent breach in their party’s computer data base.

But when Clinton, Sanders and Martin O’Malley met for this month’s St. Anselm’s College debate, the mood was far less combative. Sanders apologized for his campaign’s mistakes, Clinton accepted his apology and said it was time to move on, and O’Malley said their “bickering” exemplified Washington politics.

Even when they criticized one another later on the issues, from regime change abroad to paying for college aid and health care at home, the three stuck primarily to substance, avoiding the highly personal, sometimes nasty tone of the most recent Republican debate four days earlier.

Donald Trump

There are two main reasons. None of the three uses the kind of incendiary language, proposes off-the-wall ideas and stirs angry emotions as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump does. And the Democratic race still seems more likely to end predictably than the multicandidate GOP contest.

With several possible Republican standard-bearers, their heated rhetoric represents both fierce and potentially achievable ambitions as well as underlying concerns within the GOP that the emotions Trump unleashed could destroy an excellent chance to regain the White House.

By contrast, it almost seems at times as if Sanders, Clinton’s principal challenger, believes she is probably going to win the Democratic nomination and, while eager to delineate their differences and pull her closer to his leftist views, does not want to undercut her chances of keeping Republicans out of the White House next November.

To be sure, the Vermont senator continues to run well in the first two states being contested next year, trailing Clinton by about 10 points in recent polling for the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and leading by roughly the same margin in polls for the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary. Elsewhere and nationally, however, he trails her by substantial margins.

Democratic electorate

His numbers resemble Barack Obama’s when he contested Clinton eight years ago, and Sanders has created some of the same excitement among younger voters as the then-Illinois senator did. But the 73-year-old self-styled Democratic socialist seems unlikely to match the success the first significant African- American candidate enjoyed subsequently in an increasingly diverse Democratic electorate.

Sanders’ decision against escalating the verbal warfare against Clinton as his strategists did before the debate paralleled his refusal in their first debate to make an issue of the controversy over her use of a private email server while secretary of state and the resulting Justice Department investigation.

Sanders’ victories in both Iowa and New Hampshire could unsettle the predictable course of the Democratic race, but even then he would face an uphill battle. One can only imagine how loud and long the email and computer breach matters would resonate if they surfaced in the more competitive Republican race.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.