By contrast with Tuesday night’s rancorous Republican primary debate, the three remaining Democratic candidates were able to argue with one another for two hours on Sunday without questioning anyone’s citizenship, threatening to bomb countries, or letting Donald Trump almost entirely off the hook.

But one of the most fundamental political differences between the parties at the moment is that Republican officials don’t want their frontrunner to win their presidential nomination, and Democrats do. And in that sense, Sunday’s Democratic debate was almost as dire for professional Democrats as Tuesday’s was for Republicans.

The Democratic Party establishment’s pro-Hillary Clinton bias is partially rooted in a desire to wrap up the primary quickly, before it turns into a bruising, months-long slugfest like it did in 2008. To that end, it’s crucial that she win one, if not both, of the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The problem for party elites is that Bernie Sanders is closing in on Clinton in Iowa polls, and leads her in New Hampshire. For them, it wasn’t just imperative for Clinton to perform well on stage Sunday, but also for Sanders to falter—or at least fall back from attacking Clinton the way Republican candidates retreated on Thursday from the challenge of taking on Trump.

They had no such luck. For the first time this debate season, Sanders attacked Clinton without fear or favor. Of her attacks on his gun-regulation record, he said (in a very contestable statement), “I think Secretary Clinton knows that what she says is very disingenuous.” He boasted unapologetically about his climbing poll numbers, and he called her attacks on his health-care plan “nonsense,” and “Republican attacks.”