So how about the candidates who finished a strong second and third in New Hampshire, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar? Could either of them offer a “compromise” alternative to Sanders and Bloomberg?

That’s hard to imagine unless one or the other or both of them begins to broaden their support into minority communities, which they didn’t have to do in Iowa or New Hampshire and have shown no signs of doing in polling of later states. As Ron Brownstein has explained, Buttigieg and Klobuchar may soon hit a wall. After months of campaigning in South Carolina, Mayor Pete was still at one half of one percent among African-American voters there in a recent East Carolina University survey. And he’s toxic to a lot of Bernie Sanders’ millennial supporters. Amy Klobuchar is similarly stuck in a ghetto of “moderates, voters older than 45, and those with college degrees.” African-American activists, including those in her own Minnesota, have some unfinished business with her record as a prosecutor before she went to Washington. The Minnesotan also doesn’t have a lot of money, and has no campaign infrastructure in the states ahead.

It’s important to remember that in the past, Democratic “moderates” have only won nominations when they had strong minority support along the way. That was true from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton.