Presidential debates aren’t held in a vacuum. To appreciate the tactics and strategies, it’s important to understand the larger context.

With this in mind, let’s summarize the broader circumstances in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Donald Trump is on the comeback trail, and with less than five months remaining before the Iowa caucuses, the former president is ahead in the Hawkeye State by more than 20 points. Trump’s advantage in New Hampshire — the first primary state — is even larger.

In national polling, the GOP leader’s advantage is enormous: Trump leads his next closest rival by roughly 37 points. In a field of about a dozen candidates, all but two of the Republican contenders are in single digits.

When was the last time either party saw a front-runner fail to win the nomination with a lead this big at this point in the process? It’s literally never happened.

There simply won’t be many opportunities for the non-Trump candidates to alter the direction of the race, which makes the debates all the more important. If the party’s prohibitive favorite is going to be stopped, his intra-party rivals are going to have to get a straightforward message to the party’s voters: “Don’t vote for the twice-impeached suspected felon; vote for me instead.”

It’s a message the audience simply did not hear in the first GOP debate. As an NBC News report summarized overnight:

Eight underdog Republican presidential candidates debated Wednesday on a stage overshadowed by Donald Trump, who snubbed his rivals in an attempt to show his dominance — and consign them to irrelevancy. While some took aim at Trump, his nearest rivals either defended him or trod cautiously around the former president as he faces four criminal indictments involving his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election, misuse of classified documents and falsification of business records to make hush money payments to a porn star.

To be sure, the former president didn’t get a complete pass from his rivals. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, for example, referenced Trump’s record of adding nearly $8 trillion to the national debt in four years. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Trump’s conduct “is beneath the office of president of the United States.”

But over the course of two hours, those were the exceptions that proved the rule. Former Vice President Mike Pence boasted about his role in the Trump administration, and far-right entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was effectively a Trump cheerleader who was eager to celebrate the failed former president who’s currently beating him by more than 42 points.

At one point, nearly all of the debate participants agreed that they’d support Trump’s candidacy, if he wins the nomination, even if he’s convicted before Election Day.

Whether the non-Trump candidates appreciate this fact or not, simply treading water and waiting for the race to change on its own won’t do. Trump is winning — and it’s not especially close. These Republican candidates were handed a platform, but they largely failed to use it to go after the prohibitive front-runner.

How does a candidate who wasn’t there manage to win a debate? The GOP contenders helped answer the question last night in dramatic fashion.