Hillary Clinton has a populist problem. She’s the consummate Washington insider in an election where voters demand an outsider, and a business-friendly pragmatist where the people want revolution over realism. Faced with Bernie Sanders’s rousing rhetoric on economic inequality and corporate influence in politics, she’s struggled mightily to defend a sometimes cozy relationship with Wall Street—in particular, a series of highly paid speeches she gave for Goldman Sachs. But in a televised town hall in Nevada on Thursday night, Clinton finally seemed to figure out her answer to the biggest question hanging over her head, delivering a powerful, if poll-tested, response to the charge that she’s beholden to Wall Street.

Responding to a realtor who pressed her on why she would not release the transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches—for which she received well over $600,000—Clinton, who had previously waffled on the question, found her footing after an initial promise that she would release her transcripts “when everybody else does the same, because every other candidate in this race has given speeches to private groups.

“But let me get to the heart of your question,” she continued, building steam. “I was the candidate who went to Wall Street before the crash. I was the candidate who went to them and said, ‘You are wrecking our economy. What you are doing with mortgages is going to bring us down.’ I called to end the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers. I called to rein in C.E.O. pay. I now have the most effective and comprehensive plan to deal with the threats that Wall Street poses and I go further than Senator Sanders does because I want to go after all the other bad actors like hedge funds, and bad actors like the A.I.G. insurance company, like Countrywide Mortgage.

“I take a backseat to nobody in being very clear about what I will do to make sure Wall Street never crashes Main Street again, and that you can count on,” she concluded.

While she ended up dodging the realtor’s follow-up question asking if she was only making a political promise, Clinton’s decision to go granular in her response—that is, more granular than she did in some formerly unconvincing answers—represented, if not a ground-shifting moment, a significant advance in her ability to counter Sanders’s claims that her candidacy is compromised by special interests.

Clinton deployed that same confidence and specificity throughout the Nevada town hall, drawing a rousing response from the heavily Hispanic crowd with a series of well-considered answers on immigration and deportation policy. Sanders, who is running neck-and-neck with Clinton in the latest polling ahead of the state’s Democratic caucus on Saturday, was passionate but comparatively shaky, appearing uncomfortable where he couldn’t fall back on his usual economic talking points, telling one voter he couldn’t promise to solve their problems and another to look up his positions on “Bernie Sanders dot com.” For once, the candidate whose polemical style has been his calling card seemed to be at a loss for words.