BERNIE SANDERS came to the seventh Democratic debate, held in Flint, Michigan, on March 6th needing a game-changing success. Despite winning the Maine caucuses the same day and in Kansas and Nebraska the day before, the senator is badly lagging Hillary Clinton in the delegate count and, moreover, looks ill-equipped to close the gap. He has a strong following with youngsters and white liberals—who dominated the Democratic electorate in those three states; but little support from the non-whites who matter much more in most others—including Michigan, which will hold its primary on March 8th. The result was an aggressive performance by Mr Sanders and some of the sharpest exchanges yet between the two surviving Democratic contenders. It could not have been confused with the theatrics on show in the Republican primary contest. Mr Sanders did not claim to be well-hung, as Donald Trump recently did. Mrs Clinton did not respond to his opening statement by calling the senator from Vermont a liar; she said, “Let me start by saying Amen to that”. She also swore that, even against a Republican nominee, she would maintain the decorous tone that has characterised most of her arguments with Mr Sanders: “I don’t intend to get into the gutter with whomever they nominate.” Yet Mr Sanders berated her for interrupting him a couple of times, and that was pretty spiky by his standards.

He also went after Mrs Clinton harder than he had before on several issues, many of which seemed to have been picked to appeal to black voters. He criticised the legacy of her husband, Bill Clinton, especially the negative effect his criminal-justice and welfare reforms have had on blacks. He attacked Mrs Clinton for her history of supporting the free-trade deals he blames for causing the decline suffered by rust-bucket cities like Flint, whose mostly-black inhabitants lost, in the 1980s and ’90s, around 90% of the factory jobs on which they once relied. “Secretary Clinton has discovered religion on this issue, but it’s a little too late,” he said. Yet she, without losing her cool, gave him plenty back.

She attacked Mr Sanders, yet again, on his mixed record on supporting gun controls. She defended her husband’s legacy—noting that the median African-American wage rose by 33% in the 1990s. Most acutely, she noted that Mr Sanders’s had voted against the $700-billion bailout bill that extended support to Michigan’s shattered carmaking industry after the financial crisis. He countered that the bill also offered support to Wall Street banks. “I will be damned if it was the working people of this country who had to bail out the crooks on Wall Street,” he said. The exchange illustrated the Democrats’ annoying tendency to draw moral distinctions between firms deserving and ill-deserving of state largesse. More important, it chimed with Mrs Clinton’s increasingly frequent attack on the senator as a political one-trick pony, obsessed with abuses on Wall Street to the detriment of other policy areas.

It was Mrs Clinton’s best punch in an unexciting, but accomplished performance by the former secretary of state, which did nothing to upset a suspicion that her passage to the Democratic nomination is now inevitable. Her answer to Mr Sanders’s demands to see her speech transcripts—when everyone publishes such things, so will I—was painfully weak. Yet the fact that this is such a prominent weak point for such a high-profile candidate perhaps also suggests that Mrs Clinton is not quite as scandal-riddled as her opponents often claim. This may not impress many Republicans, among whom there is a deep conviction that the former secretary of state should be behind bars. But Democrats, many of whom have been unnerved by a slow-burning controversy over Mrs Clinton’s handling of classified information while secretary of state, will be cautiously reassured by that.

Mr Sanders also did his appeal for black votes no good with a silly summary of race relations in America. “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in the ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” Too many black Americans are poor; but the large majority (73%) are not. And indeed, the biggest group of poor Americans, by race, are some 19m poor whites.

As a rank outsider, Mr Sanders has been in many ways an awkward opponent for Mrs Clinton. He comes across as refreshingly sincere, at a time of anti-politics sentiment. He is a skilful debater. And his biggest bugbears, including cosy relations between politicians and Wall Street, have exacerbated some of her biggest vulnerabilities. But Mr Sanders is still a rank outsider, and the odds on him winning the Democratic nomination are getting longer by the day.