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Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz got their first real head-to-head skirmishes in the final debate of 2015, and still nobody set a glove on Donald Trump who holds commanding leads in the national polls.

Tues­day night’s Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial de­bate in Las Ve­gas didn’t of­fer any ma­jor race-al­ter­ing mo­ments, but it did so­lid­i­fy the re­cent tra­ject­ory of the 2016 cam­paign. That’s wel­come news for Don­ald Trump and Ted Cruz, and a bad sign for Ben Car­son.

Winners and Losers from the 5th Republican presidential debate

Tuesday’s Las Vegas debate featured a series of high-profile skirmishes. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio battled over the National Security Agency and its metadata program as well as their stances on immigration. Jeb Bush went after Donald Trump hard, casting him as an unserious person; The Donald dismissed Bush as irrelevant because of his low poll numbers.

GOP debate winners and losers

The final Republican presidential debate of 2015 brought heated clashes between several major candidates in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, when national front-runner Donald Trump tangled with a newly assertive Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz repeatedly jabbed at each other.

National security dominated in a debate that featured limited sustained candidate clashes and not a lot of risk taking. No candidate truly excelled, and no one had a dreadful evening.

GOP Insiders: Rubio shined in Vegas

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally went toe-to-toe Tuesday night in Las Vegas – and Rubio came out on top.

That’s according to Republicans in the POLITICO Caucus, our panel of the top activists, strategists and operatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

5 takeaways from the GOP debate

The increasingly raw fight between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz provides the GOP race’s top subplot coming out of Tuesday night’s debate in Las Vegas – two skilled, 44-year-old senators scrapping to survive as the party’s not-Trump.