During the first night of the second round of Democratic debates, the presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren mused “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” A new version of the million dollar question we've all been askingfor months—who is better positioned to beat Trump, someone from the progressive left of the party or a moderate?—emerged from these debates. It morphed into an argument over whether big, bold ideas and whether they run the risk of scaring away the general electorate needed to win a presidential election.

Sure, many pundits continued to see this as a left-right fight, especially after Tuesday night's match up where progressive Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders more than held their own against moderate critics such as Representative John Delany and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. The newer, fresher faces like South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Texas Representative Beto O'Rourke, mostly stayed out of the fight, but the too favored the bold and the big. Going into night two, many wondered if former Vice President Joe Biden was the type of moderate candidate that could to hold up his end of the argument. In the end, the second night was a nine on one fight, with all the candidates, especially California Senator Kamala Harris, going after Biden, who enjoys the benefits of being tied to the Obama administration but also the liability of being tied to the kind of pragmatic incrementalism it represented.

The argument for big, bold ideas works because this debate audience is made up of the most faithful of Democratic voters. Who else would sit through two nights of 2.5 hour debates? The people of Spain know all too well the kind of commitment to politics and democracy this requires, but in the case of the Democratic Party, this just happened a month ago and will be repeated in another month. I work in politics out of love and particularly love debates, but even I have found these first two sets to be a bit too much.

So, because only the party faithful are tuning in and will also be the ones voting, big bold ideas are what will gain traction because these voters are deeply frustrated by Trump and his ability to go big and bold without consequences. Democrats are always afraid of scaring off the center, yet this man seems to have been freed from those chains. There is so much that Democrats want to change and fix, that restraint just feels wrong, even immoral.

No issue illustrates this divide between bold ideas and pragmatism than healthcare and both nights were kicked off by a lengthy debate over healthcare policy. From the outside, the almost entirely private healthcare system that often bankrupts U.S. citizens on an all-too-regular basis is insane. Democratic leaders and the party base desperately want to fix this and Obamacare was a step in the right direction but it was also a deeply unsatisfying one. Obama was not able to get any public healthcare option into the bill. Why? Not just because Congressional Republicans wouldn't vote for it, but because many Democrats from conservative districts weren't able to either.

Now, the Democrats with big and bold ideas want to revisit this with some form of a public option, often referring to what's called “Medicare for all.” Medicare is the program that covers Americans over the age of 65, it is not a public system like Spain's but it does offer much more reasonable rates and many politicians have suggested lowering the age or simply offering it to everyone. It's really not a new idea, but for Democrats who are outraged over this dysfunctional system that only serves the rich, the rhetoric rings true. For less enthusiastic Democrats or independents, this sounds awfully close to some version of socialism. Of course, the biggest challenge is that most people just don't understand what these candidates are really arguing over.

It's up to the candidates behind the big and the bold to articulate their plans in terms people can grasp without having to sit through two and a half hours of debate or reading the fine print of their website. All that said, actual voting in these primaries, doesn't begin until the Iowa caucuses on February 3, 2020. Until then, there's plenty of time for everyone to have a good or bad night, become a media darling for 15 minutes, rise and fall in the polls and extol big, bold ideas.

This op-ed was published in Spanish in El Español on August 2, 2019.