The great cliche of the election of 2016 is comparing Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump as disruptive figures changing the fundamental orientation of their parties. There’s some truth to this parallel, but the more fundamental difference between the two candidates may matter more. Trump’s great leverage in the GOP race is that he’s willing to blow up the party if they don’t give them what he wants. He’s repeatedly talked about running a third-party campaign if he’s not given the proper respect, which has allowed him to bully his rivals with impunity. Sanders, by contrast, is not willing to hold the Democratic Party hostage—even though, as a longtime independent, he’s only joined it recently. He has a distinct vision of politics, but he’s not willing tear the party in half to get a chance to enact it.

Sanders has had remarkable staying power—did Hillary Clinton ever imagine she’d still be debating him, much less losing a major primary to him, in March?—and as he showed again at Wednesday night’s Univision/Washington Post debate in Miami, he can stand his ground in a debate. But, so far, his staying power means he’s going to make Clinton fight for every delegate without really endangering her front-runner status, buttressed as it is by the support of superdelegates, those “uncommitted” party officials whose overwhelming pledged support means Sanders needs to outperform Clinton even to get to a tie.

Time and again, he’s framed his criticism of Clinton in general terms, casting her as part of a system rather than an individual miscreant. On Wednesday, again, Sanders refrained from alleging any personal malfeasance. His critique of Clinton is a systemic one. By contrast, when Clinton goes after Sanders, it is on very particular points: votes against gun control and for the Minutemen, failing to vote for for the auto bailout, receiving praise from the Koch brothers.

Clinton’s attacks on Sanders have the hallmark of diligent opposition research, of hard-working staffers poring over the record to find discreditable (or seeming discreditable) facts about an opponent.

Sanders’s critique of Clinton tends to be more generalized—and make you wonder what’s wrong with his own “oppo” team. During Wednesday night’s discussion of Benghazi, for instance, he shrewdly sidestepped the scandal to make a larger point about Clinton’s support for regime change in Libya. So far, so good—and it allowed him to again link Clinton with Henry Kissinger. But Sanders’s response was also a missed opportunity: He failed to bring up Clinton’s support for regime change in Honduras, an issue that’s timely because of recent killings of political dissidents in the country, and one that gave him a chance to plant doubts about his opponent in front of an Hispanic audience.