In comments last year, Bill expressed real regret over the outcomes of the act. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Clinton said. “And I want to admit it.” His statements today were not necessarily a full repudiation of that contrition, but definitely a walk-back: He regrets some of the outcomes, but not his decision-making process. Clinton used much of the same language as he did in 1994 to defend the bill. He also gave somewhat baffling defenses of the efficacy of the bill, claiming massive decreases in crime that were directly attributable to its penchant for incarceration. This is probably not true.

When pressed on the harsh sentencing laws in the act, Bill gave the standard defense. “I talked to a lot of African American groups, he said. “They thought Black Lives Mattered. They said ‘take this bill’ because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs.”

Clinton is right in many senses. The act was pitched in exactly the same way to black groups in the 90’s and many of them accepted it as an ugly, scorched-earth tactic, that was necessary to bring down immense crime rates in black neighborhoods. The coalition was broad, and much of the current Democratic leadership class, including Sanders and Vice President Biden, was prominently involved. As Clinton noted in the speech today, that crime bill also contained several less-controversial provisions that are still widely embraced today by liberals, such as the assault-weapons ban, overtures toward community policing, and the Violence Against Women Act. Hillary was not directly connected to the crime bill’s passage, but her strong support of it on the trail, including ex post facto racial fear-mongering about “super-predators” has earned her the ire of many criminal-justice activists.

As she and Sanders both sprint away from the crime bill, pushing plans to end mass incarceration, it binds both of them, especially informing the age and racial differences between the two campaigns. Sanders has explained his support of the bill as a reluctant compromise that allowed him to press for reforms to the death penalty, assault weapons, and domestic violence, despite its other problematic provisions. He seems to have been forgiven by young voters, who are likely more apt to see the bill as an abject failure.

Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the crime bill is more complex. Her coalition might be the coalition of voters that wanted it: older white and black voters in rural areas and black urban centers. While she has fully wrapped herself in the mantle of reform, promising to roll back the bill’s terrible effects, I suspect some of the old ideas about its necessity still linger among her base, even among the black voters. The tie to Bill Clinton’s legacy is strong, and many older voters still remember him—rightly or wrongly—as a president who brought order out of a drug-fueled crime wave. In some places, there is a strong generational divide about the necessity of Black Lives Matter, which arose as a sort of generational blowback to the crime bill, even among black people. Reports of Sanders’s struggles to hold older black audiences captive with his criminal-justice message roughly outline this divide.