It seems sil­ly to feel com­pelled to note such a thing, but thus is the state of elec­toral pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States: Last night’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pres­i­den­tial Debate was, if noth­ing else, extreme­ly sub­stan­tive. The can­di­dates gave rea­soned respons­es to ques­tions about seri­ous issues that the Amer­i­can peo­ple care about. Notably absent was the sen­sa­tion­al­ized name-call­ing and per­son­al attacks char­ac­ter­is­tic of the two pre­vi­ous Repub­li­can debates . At one point, Sanders even denounced a vapid line of ques­tion­ing from CNN anchor Ander­son Coop­er which con­cerned itself with Hillary Clinton’s email ​“scan­dal,” say­ing that ​“the Amer­i­can peo­ple are sick and tired of hear­ing about your damn emails!” draw­ing per­haps the great­est applause of the entire debate.

The Democratic candidates' emphasis on the lack of paid maternity leave in the United States will force Republican presidential candidates to confront the issue.

But the great­est sur­prise of the night was the cen­tral role that paid fam­i­ly leave took in the debate. In her open­ing remarks, Clin­ton declared, ​“I believe in equal pay for equal work for women, but I also believe it’s about time we had paid fam­i­ly leave for Amer­i­can fam­i­lies and join the rest of the world,” to great applause from the audience.

Min­utes lat­er, in a spir­it­ed defense of his demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist views, Sanders con­trast­ed the Amer­i­can health­care sys­tem with that of oth­er coun­tries. ​“When you look around the world, you see every oth­er major coun­try pro­vid­ing health care to all peo­ple as a right, except the Unit­ed States,” he argued. ​“You see every oth­er major coun­try say­ing to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not going to sep­a­rate you from your new­born baby, because we are going to have … med­ical and fam­i­ly paid leave, like every oth­er [major devel­oped] coun­try on earth.”

In the days lead­ing up to the debate, numer­ous news out­lets pre­dict­ed the issues that would be dis­cussed. None of the Wash­ing­ton Post​’s 12 issues were paid leave, nor were any of The Wall Street Jour­nal​’s five. While TIME list­ed health­care as one of its sev­en like­ly issues, paid leave was nei­ther explic­it­ly men­tioned nor even hint­ed at.

That fam­i­ly leave still took such a cen­tral role — in Hillary’s open­ing speech, in Bernie’s first ques­tions and in more ref­er­ences through­out the debate, includ­ing a ques­tion that the three front-run­ning Democ­rats each answered elo­quent­ly — was a wel­come sur­prise. Bernie Sanders was right when he said that the Unit­ed States is the only major coun­try that doesn’t pro­vide paid leave to moth­ers. And as a recent In These Times inves­ti­ga­tion revealed, near­ly a quar­ter of work­ing Amer­i­can moth­ers spend two weeks or less with their new­born before return­ing to work.

Paid mater­nal leave is des­per­ate­ly need­ed in Amer­i­ca, and the fact that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Debate framed it as such por­tends well for the pas­sage of such pol­i­cy in the near future. And last night’s high­light­ing of the issue on nation­al tele­vi­sion will also force Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates to con­front it.

Some of the GOP can­di­dates, like Car­ly Fio­r­i­na and Ted Cruz, have already out­right reject­ed the idea. Both Fio­r­i­na and Cruz have stat­ed they don’t believe paid leave should be enforced by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Cruz says he per­son­al­ly believes in mater­ni­ty and pater­ni­ty leave, ​“but I don’t think the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment should be in the busi­ness of man­dat­ing them.”

Like­wise, Fio­r­i­na has insist­ed that she doesn’t oppose paid mater­ni­ty leave, she just ​“oppose[s] the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment man­dat­ing paid mater­ni­ty leave to every com­pa­ny out there.” Fio­r­i­na has also argued that fed­er­al­ly-man­dat­ed paid fam­i­ly leave will force small busi­ness­es to ​“hire few­er peo­ple and cre­ate few­er jobs.”

When ques­tioned about these views dur­ing the debate, Hillary Clin­ton ref­er­enced California’s paid fam­i­ly leave law. While this isn’t a nation­al pro­gram, Cal­i­for­nia is ​“a state as big as many coun­tries in the world. And [the law] has not had the ill effects that the Repub­li­cans are always say­ing it will have.”

The wide appeal of this argu­ment should force con­ser­v­a­tives to sup­port a gen­er­ous paid leave pol­i­cy. Repub­li­can can­di­date Mar­co Rubio recent­ly announced his own paid fam­i­ly leave plan, which would be imple­ment­ed at a nation­al lev­el by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and would enable even part-time work­ers to enjoy paid leave. The plan would give tax incen­tives for employ­ers that grant their employ­ees between four and 12 weeks of paid leave.

While Rubio’s plan would still fall short in many ways (it would like­ly ben­e­fit high­ly-paid white col­lar employ­ees far more than those that need the leave most), this is still a step in the right direc­tion and an astound­ing turn­around from past years. When the Fam­i­ly and Med­ical Leave Act (FMLA) — which only guar­an­tees 12 weeks of unpaid leave — was up for debate in the 1990s, now-out­go­ing House Speak­er John Boehn­er (R‑OH) called it ​“anoth­er exam­ple of yup­pie empowerment.”

By plac­ing paid leave front and cen­ter in the debate, the Democ­rats hope to reject that stig­ma and con­vince the GOP to sup­port a sim­ple fed­er­al leave law. Such a law is long over­due. When almost every oth­er nation in the world — Papua New Guinea and Suri­name might be the only excep­tions — requires paid mater­ni­ty leave, Bernie Sanders is right to call our sys­tem an ​“inter­na­tion­al embar­rass­ment.” Hope­ful­ly, the entire Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial field’s focus on paid mater­nal leave last night will be enough to force the Repub­li­can Par­ty to end its defense of that embarrassment.