Riding a wave of several hundred million dollars worth of advertising – and despite the onslaught of negative information about his opinions on race, stop-and-frisk, and his past support for Republicans – former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has climbed to second place in some recent national polling of Democratic presidential candidates.

As a result, Bloomberg won a place on stage at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas.

But though he was the last candidate invited, Bloomberg is certain to be the center of attention. Indeed, the only prediction I’m confident to make is that the TV ratings for the Las Vegas debate will be significantly higher than other recent Democratic debates.

Not just political reporters, but audiences anticipate some kind of cage match between successful entrepreneur Bloomberg, self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and analytic advocate for structural change Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The question of the night will be: Who gets the better of the battle between Bloomberg, Sanders and Warren? And after the debate, do any candidates cast themselves as providing the only chance for the party to unite?

We’ve seen the likely battle lines already. After a tape emerged showing Bloomberg saying that the elimination of redlining (which made it easier for minority borrowers to qualify for mortgages) was at the heart of the 2008 fiscal crisis, Warren surfaced a 2005 video of herself cautioning that growing income inequality (which was not as big an issue then) was likely going to result in an enormous growth of mortgage defaults (that is, the fiscal crisis).

That’s Warren. Sanders doesn’t need a briefing book to know how to fit an attack on Bloomberg into his well-articulated stump speech about millionaires and billionaires having too much control of the U.S. political system.