Winner: Bernie Sanders | Loser: Hillary Clinton | Loser: Univision

Winner: Bernie Sanders

In part, Sanders simply benefitted from good fortune. All three of the moderators were more focused on Clinton's weaknesses than Sanders, and set the tone for a debate that overwhelmingly put her on the defensive. The only really tough question Sanders got came very late in the debate and on an issue — his past praise of Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega — that Democratic primary voters probably don't care about.

Still, despite a favorable landscape, Sanders executed cleanly, crisply, and clearly. He delivered multiple red meat lines that attracted thunderous applause from the audience.

Perhaps most of all, Sanders effectively pulled off the central rhetorical trick of his campaign: Repeatedly making policy commitments that are well to the left of where the Obama administration is while downplaying the idea of a sharp break between himself and the popular incumbent president.

In Clinton's best debates, she wields Obama as an effective human shield, forcing Sanders to tone down his fiery condemnations of Washington corruption and throwing him off his message. Wednesday night, he didn't have that problem. He slammed Clinton on her speaking fees, where she can't use Obama as a shield, and deftly made a calculated break with Obama on deportations.

Loser: Hillary Clinton

From the first day of the 2016 campaign right through to today, Clinton has been the favorite to win the nomination. She has had her stumbles and Sanders has had his victories but she remains the front-runner and that hasn't changed. But one of her core objectives throughout this primary has been not just to win, but to win without letting herself get dragged into left-wing positions that will complicate her task in the general election.

Until tonight, she'd done a pretty good job of it.

But hit by waves of questions that were less about comprehensive immigration reform than about enforcement of existing immigration law, she made a series of commitments that go well beyond the existing Democratic Party consensus. Clinton indicated that she wouldn't deport children, and maybe wouldn't deport anyone at all as long as they haven't violated non-immigration laws. She even went so far as to suggest she will try to help people who've already been deported come back to the United States.

The narrow political calculation here is clear enough — Clinton needs non-white voters to win the primary, and most general election voters probably don't care too much about this. But the net effect is to dull the sense that Donald Trump has an extreme position on immigration by countering "deport everyone" with "deport almost nobody."

Loser: Univision

This debate was a mess, starting with the fact that Sanders' microphone didn't work at the beginning through to disastrous audio mixing on the simultaneous translation that often left neither the Spanish nor English audible.

But the problems went well beyond technical issues. The moderators opened the debate with two process questions in a row, and repeatedly went back to the well of faux hardball questions rather than illuminating ones.

Not all the questions were bad, though, and the debate featured many intriguing exchanges. Yet each time an argument was getting good, the moderators would butt in to declare that time was up and we needed to move on to a different subject.

Given the one-on-one nature of the debate, there was simply no need for this. Disagreements between Clinton and Sanders over the wisdom of single-payer health care, over the merits of the 2007 immigration reform bill, over the Export-Import Bank, and a half-dozen other issues ended up being cut short in favor of pivots to often-useless questions about email servers or Benghazi. The result was, on most issues, something more like a side-by-side display of talking points than a real debate.