The fifth 2016 Democratic presidential primary debate marked the first time Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton faced each other one on one. 
 
 The February 4 debate was also the first one after the Iowa caucuses, which saw Sanders and Clinton fight to a draw, and the last before the New Hampshire primary, where Sanders is expected to beat Clinton handily. It finds Clinton at perhaps her weakest moment in the campaign so far, with no clear victories to date, defeat imminent, and a growing and impassioned movement backing her opponent. 
 
 It'll take a few days for poll results to trickle in, which will provide the closest thing to an objective answer of who actually won the debate. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped. 
 
 Winner: Bernie Sanders 
 
 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images I gotta tell ya, the Koch brothers, they're bad eggs. 
 
 No one is more on message than Bernie Sanders. No matter the context, no matter the topic under discussion, Sanders is uncannily good at changing the conversation to his preferred topics: inequality, the political power of banks, and the corrosive effect of corporate money on politics. 
 
 At times that can make him sound like he's missing the point. But when those are the actual topics under discussion, it makes him an incredibly disciplined, well-prepared debaters. And for at least the first half of the debate, the topics were all ones he was designed to do well on. 
 
 A huge chunk of the debate was devoted to discussing Wall Street reform, which gave Sanders a great opportunity not just to showcase his support for very ostentatiously tough anti–Wall Street regulations — like separating commercial and investment banking — but to bring up Clinton's longstanding ties to the financial industry, and especially her acceptance of $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. 
 
 He was also given an extended platform to trumpet his single-payer health care plan, which, whatever problems it may have, is a more inspiring talking point than Clinton's "let's just not do health care again" position. The very nature of the discussion on domestic policy forced Clinton to acknowledge, without Sanders's help, that she's offering voters less. 
 
 "I also believe in affordable college," she said. "But I don't believe in free college because every expert that I have talked to says, look, how will you ever control the costs." That may be a sensible assessment of the policy problem, but it doesn't fare well next to Sanders's promises that we can too dramatically expand access to higher education. 
 
 Sanders also got multiple chances to disavow interest in non-substantive procedural controversies involving the Clinton campaign. He doesn't care about her emails, he reiterated, but he also pooh-poohed concerns about irregularities in the Iowa caucuses, which many online Sanders supporters have argued gave Clinton an unfair, narrow victory there. 
 
 Sanders sensibly pointed out that he only got a couple fewer delegates out of Iowa, and that who actually got first largely doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It bolstered his image as a different kind of politician, without patience for cable news mini controversies and an unerring focus on the actual big problems: inequality, stagnant wages, and the rich's domination of the political process. 
 
 Winner: Hillary Clinton 
 
 Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 
 
 Okay, I know this sounds dumb, but hear me out. On some level, the Democratic primary process is now zero-sum, with any gains to Sanders hurting Clinton and vice versa. And that's true in a narrow sense. But both candidates gave very strong performances that emphasized their respective strengths. Regardless of who won in relative terms, both clearly succeeded in making the most compelling case for their respective candidacies. 
 
 For Clinton, that meant giving her strongest performance to date on foreign policy. She's still well to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole on these questions. But she also is actually well-versed in them, whereas Sanders's comments on foreign policy appear limited to a) praising the foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, and b) hammering Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War. 
 
 The latter remains Clinton's biggest weakness. It's unclear why she can't simply say, "It was a huge mistake, I've rethought my views on the use of force and learned from my mistake," but in lieu of that kind of fully honest reckoning, her burn at Sanders — "A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS" — was rhetorically effective if not particularly reassuring to more dovish Democrats. It turned the conversation from being about her positions on the issue toward Sanders's near-total ignorance of it. 
 
 Reasonable people can differ on how important Sanders's disinterest in the issue is, but insofar as it matters, the fact that he appeared clearly out of his element wasn't particularly helpful. When Chuck Todd asked him why he hadn't laid out his foreign policy philosophy, Sanders didn't reply, "Because that's an empty campaign season ritual that doesn't actually matter." He claimed a mostly unrelated speech about socialism counted. 
 
 That's really weak sauce when trying to defend your credentials against a former secretary of state, who, for better or worse was pretty clear about what she'd do about ISIS: "I am against American combat troops being in Syria and Iraq. I support special forces and the air campaign." Sanders failed to lay out any way in which his ISIS policy would differ from hers, and his comments on Iran were mostly devoted to insisting they didn't disagree on how to deal with the country. 
 
 Sanders clearly won on domestic policy. Clinton clearly won on foreign policy. And both gave excellent performances that offered compelling substantive grounds for supporting them. It feels perverse to label either a loser. 
 
 Loser: Debbie Wasserman Schultz 
 
 Andrew Burton/Getty Images DWS. 
 
 Tonight's debate wasn't even supposed to happen. It was not on the original list of six approved by the Democratic National Committee and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But then NBC and the Union Leader — New Hampshire's biggest newspaper — agreed to hold one even without the DNC's go-ahead, Clinton signed on, and Sanders signed on and got Clinton to commit to three additional debates. And so it was that a Democratic debate was scheduled for 9 o'clock on a Thursday night ahead of the earliest primary, perhaps the best possible time for maximum viewership. 
 
 That was definitely not the strategy behind the DNC's pre-approved debate schedule. Recall that the last debate was held on the Sunday night before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While Wasserman Schultz insisted that it was timed to "maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates," basically no one believed her. Networks generally don't save their most promising shows for the night before a federal holiday. The intention was clearly to decrease viewership and — to be a bit cynical about it — limit Sanders's opportunities to damage Clinton. 
 
 Tonight's debate was evidence that failed. The demand for more debates was too high, and eventually both candidates gave in to it, making the DNC appear utterly feckless, with not even Clinton there to back it up. The party leadership has lost control of the debate process entirely, which is a loss both for the organization and for Wasserman Schultz's odds of continuing to lead it in the medium run. 
 
 Loser: Wall Street 
 
 Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images Wall Street finally lost something for once. 
 
 There was a time, not so long ago, in which left parties — not just the Democrats but the British Labour Party as well — made conscious alliances with the financial sector. Banks were singled out from the rest of "big business" and provided a durable base of party funds, while Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in turn adopted remarkably finance-friendly deregulatory agendas. 
 
 It wasn't a straightforward quid pro quo (many Democrats thought banks were just less insidious than other companies on the merits), but it definitely resulted in a broad, bipartisan pro-bank consensus on both sides of the pond. 
 
 Those alliances were threatened by the 2008 financial crisis, and especially following the passage of Dodd-Frank in 2010, the financial sector has become more consciously right-wing, and the tilt of its donations has turned toward the Republicans. Partially because of a Democratic reorientation toward donations from the tech sector and Hollywood, and partially because of enduring outrage from the crisis, the Democratic Party has in turn become more stridently anti–Wall Street. 
 
 The financial sector's best hope of stopping this process was nominating Hillary Clinton. She literally represented Wall Street during her time as the senator from New York, and her core of economic advisers is centered on Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs/Citigroup chairman. As recently as November, she was defending her pro–Wall Street votes by invoking 9/11. 
 
 But tonight, her defense was different. It wasn't, "Actually banks are good." It was, "Sure, I take their money, but I will still gut them like fish": 
 
 I called to end the loopholes that hedge fund managers enjoy. I called for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before it was created. I think the best evidence that the Wall Street people, at least know, where I stand and where I have always stood is because they are trying to beat me in this primary. … We have a law. It was passed. It was signed by President Obama. It lays out a process that you go through to determine whether a systemic risk is posed. By the way, President Obama signed that, pushed it through, even though he took donations from Wall Street, because he's a responsible president. 
 
 Whether or not you buy her explanation for Republicans attempting to help Sanders — I think it's less that they're scared of her views and more that they think Sanders is hopeless in the general election — the message here is clear. To paraphrase Jesse Unruh, she can take Wall Street's money and still tell them to fuck themselves. And her comprehensive Wall Street reform plan suggests she has some credibility here. 
 
 If you were a financial executive watching tonight, you'd still leave less scared of Clinton than of Sanders. But you'd leave convinced that another Democratic administration will entail a world of hurt for Wall Street. 
 
 Loser: Doves 
 
 Shutterstock Doves, in happier times. 
 
 It's curious that Bernie Sanders is so completely apathetic about foreign policy, since it's arguably the issue where Clinton is most vulnerable. Sure, she's more experienced, and sure, she will all come across as more knowledgable, but she's also genuinely to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole when it comes to matters of war and peace. 
 
 There's space for a challenger to make the argument that Barack Obama made in 2008: She's too quick to go to war. The Libya intervention in 2011 was a mistake. So were her calls to intervene early against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So was her hawkish rhetoric toward Iran, which arguably made life worse for Americans held there. She has clearly not learned the right lesson from Iraq, and she'd repeat her 2002 mistake by launching yet more ill-advised wars as commander in chief. 
 
 Sanders is not making this case. He's invoking the war vote, sure, but more as a thumb in Clinton's eye than as a pivot to explaining why a Sanders presidency would be different and less bellicose. That's largely because it probably wouldn't be that much less bellicose. Sanders's plans for ISIS and Afghanistan are basically identical to Clinton's. He supports the drone war. 
 
 If Wall Street was left without allies in the Democratic field tonight, then so were genuine doves. Lincoln Chafee, the only Democratic candidate to make a straightforwardly antiwar case, was treated as a punchline and dropped out early. And with two candidates left, doves are completely without a champion. ||||| Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images 
 
 Hillary Clinton’s superb debate performance on Sunday raised an unsettling question: If she can be this consistently good on a debate stage, why can’t she replicate that impressiveness on the campaign trail or in interviews? Clinton was once again in superior form Sunday night in South Carolina, besting Sen. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley in the last Democratic debate before the Iowa caucus. 
 
 Isaac Chotiner Isaac Chotiner is a Slate contributor. 
 
 Clinton’s debating performance is formidable because it combines her intelligence with a sincerity and level of conviction that often seem absent in other forums. When she opened the debate speaking of Martin Luther King Jr.’s role fighting for increased wages, she used his career as a subtle metaphor for what she is pitching: principled leadership with a strong practical bent. That mixture, along with her strength in close-quarter combat and an ability to wrap herself in President Obama’s record—something that played well to the Charleston crowd in the auditorium—was what won her this debate. 
 
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 Clinton had several strong moments Sunday night. “Ninety people a day die from gun violence in this country,” she noted, before going on to attack Sanders’ record on the Second Amendment, methodically reciting a series of his congressional votes. For some reason Sanders still struggles when pressed on his gun rights votes; he called Clinton “disingenuous” and said that guns “should not be a political issue.” Sanders has run an impressive race and is challenging Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but Clinton’s ability to bring him to earth and seem like just another politician—his weird, Trump-like quoting of polls tonight didn’t help—is remarkable. (The moderators helped her tonight by making it appear as if Sanders had changed or updated a number of his positions.) 
 
 Clinton combines her intelligence with a sincerity that often seems absent in other forums. 
 
 The same dynamic occurred when the subject turned to health care. Clinton’s attack on Sanders’ support for a single-payer system is, er, “disingenuous” (as Jim Newell pointed out in Slate last week). But the way she attacked Sanders on the issue tonight was effective: She essentially claimed that Sanders’ plan would cause a huge amount of disruption in Obamacare, and thus reopen the battle that has barely ended over the president’s signature program. Sanders needs to figure out a way to answer this criticism, but he certainly didn’t do so tonight. 
 
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 Clinton’s answers on race and the heroin epidemic—about the former she used the phrase “systemic racism,” and also spoke passionately about the latter—were equally impressive. Even on the issue of banking and regulatory reform, Clinton got the best of the exchange by turning it into a debate on President Obama. Her attack on Sanders for voting for Bill Clinton’s bill on derivatives, meanwhile, was pretty shameless; Sanders, predictably, didn’t mention it was a Clinton bill and didn’t really respond to her attack. This should be an issue where Sanders dominates the debate, and his trouble doing so was indicative of his larger struggles this evening. (As for Martin O’Malley, he probably had his best debate—such as it was—although he also had the most absurd moment of the night when he claimed he was running because “black lives matter.”) 
 
 Even so, there was no knockout moment for Clinton: Most of Sanders’ supporters, like Trump’s, are probably not too caught up in his debate performances, and are instead rightly focused—here they differ from Trump’s fans—on his policy platform. But despite all the headlines about Clinton’s recent struggles, she is still overwhelmingly likely to be the Democratic nominee. She doesn’t need to knock Sanders out. 
 
 On Sunday morning, the New York Times ran a story about Clinton’s campaign, and it was a familiar one: The campaign wasn’t going as she had hoped; she had underestimated her opponent (no, not Martin O’Malley); and she has now found herself in a race that is closer than she ever expected. But the biggest mistake her campaign made, arguably, was going along with the Democratic National Committee’s debate schedule. That schedule included debates that often take place on weekends (three-day weekends, even!). Not surprisingly, they have been getting much lower viewership numbers than the Republican debates. (Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the hapless DNC chair, laughably claimed that the DNC’s goal was to make sure lots of people see them.) ||||| The seventh Democratic debate of the 2016 season took place against the backdrop of a landslide Bernie Sanders victory in the New Hampshire primary and an electrifying sixth debate that took place just before voters went to the polls. Compared with the previous showdown, it was a much lower-key affair, with more moderator involvement and less boring down on particular points of disagreement. 
 
 Both candidates, ultimately, delivered on their key themes, played up their key strengths, and likely pleased their key supporters. 
 
 And they fought not just over who would win the nomination but also to a considerable degree over how we should understand both the future and the past of the Democratic Party. So here are three players who ended up in a stronger position than they were in before the debate, as well as three who wound up weaker. 
 
 Winner: Hillary Clinton 
 
 She didn't score any knockout blows or hit any home runs Thursday night, but the reality is that she didn't need to. 
 
 Playing small ball and successfully turning the debate into a series of tedious, hard-to-follow exchanges is good enough for the candidate who currently enjoys a large lead in national polls. Recall that outside of the hothouse of internet commentary, most Democrats currently have a favorable view of both candidates, and a large swath of Democrats still don't know who Sanders is. 
 
 Nothing happened Thursday night that would make a person who previously liked Clinton stop liking her, and if this was your first exposure to That Guy Who Is Running Against Hillary Clinton you wouldn't have been blown away. 
 
 Sanders is coming off a very good 10-day run that must be leaving the candidate and his senior staff feeling both exhilarated and exhausted. The result was a dangerously complacent debate performance. 
 
 Despite his stellar fundraising and New Hampshire performance, Sanders is still a major underdog who has a limited amount of time to change the dynamic before delegates start getting assigned very quickly. Sanders did nothing to assuage related doubts about his electability and his grasp of foreign policy matters, and didn't add anything new to his well-known critique of Clinton. 
 
 Winner: Black Lives Matter 
 
 Twenty, 10, or even two years ago it would be almost impossible to imagine national politicians dedicating as much time and attention to the problem of police violence as we heard onstage Thursday night. 
 
 The politics of looking anti-police or soft on crime were just too perilous. Things are different now. 
 
 Sanders promised to "end overpolicing in African-American neighborhoods" and proclaimed himself "sick and tired of seeing videos on television of unarmed people — often African Americans — shot by police officers." 
 
 Meanwhile, Clinton spoke of the "dark side" of law enforcement and repeatedly referred to "systemic racism." 
 
 The context is that stumping for black votes is a necessity for any Democrat trying to win primaries in South Carolina and other Southern states. And the Black Lives Matter activist community has successfully pushed the issue to the absolute top of the agenda in terms of black politics. 
 
 That's a remarkable achievement. The underlying issue in which the consequences of heavy-handed policing fall disproportionately on black communities is decades (if not centuries) old, but the entire issue was completely invisible in the 2004 and 2008 primary cycles. It was very much not invisible last night. 
 
 Winner: Barack Obama 
 
 Clinton ran against Obama in a bitter campaign in 2008, and many of Sanders's most fervent supporters think he's a weak-kneed neoliberal sellout tool of Wall Street. But no hostile sentiments were evident from either candidate on Thursday night. 
 
 On the contrary, Clinton made a vigorous defense of the Obama legacy — and suggestions that Sanders is less than fully committed to it — the centerpiece of her argument. Early on she defined herself as an advocate of "President Obama's principal accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act," and slammed Sanders for jeopardizing it. 
 
 The essential strategy, seen several times during the debate — but most crucially during an exchange over Wall Street — was to use Obama as a human shield. 
 
 Did Sanders want to say that Obama was corrupt because he received campaign contributions from the financial sector? When Sanders says we need a political revolution, does that mean he thinks Obama was a failure? 
 
 Sanders largely refused to take the bait, declining to criticize Obama even when that forced him to blunt his criticisms of Clinton. That even the left opposition within the Democratic Party doesn't want to voice clear criticisms of the president makes Obama a clear winner. 
 
 Loser: Republicans 
 
 His fans don't like to admit it, but every single Republican in Washington is dying to run against Bernie Sanders. 
 
 The problem isn't really the specifics of socialism or this or that. It's the basic reality that Sanders has clearly positioned himself to the left of Obama and voters want a candidate who is to the right of Obama. 
 
 That doesn't mean Sanders is hopeless. Voters still think Republicans are too conservative, and any Democrat has a chance of winning by arguing that the country needs a check on congressional Republicans, but it gives Sanders a baseline weakness as a candidate relatively to Clinton. Clinton's strong performance is bad news for those hoping to face off against him in November. 
 
 Loser: Wall Street 
 
 A handful of Democrat-friendly Wall Street types and Wall Street–friendly Democratic operatives types have recently expressed to me a fuzzy yearning for Clinton to push back against Sanders's line that "the business model of Wall Street is fraud." Selfishly, they would like pushback because they find this argument offensive, and while they are confident Sanders's bank-busting legislation won't be enacted, they don't like to see their personal reputations dragged through the mud. 
 
 More high-mindedly, they make the case that Clinton can't defend her Wall Street fundraising unless she can establish the argument that investment banks and hedge funds are legitimate players in the American economy, just like farms, ice cream companies, quaint B&Bs, and whatever else it is they do in Vermont. 
 
 It didn't happen. On finance, Clinton defended herself from Sanders's attacks by just further punching the banking industry. She argued that Sanders's proposals don't target a wide enough range of institutions and that Sanders himself has voted at least once for financial deregulation. Hundreds of D-leaning donors, bundlers, and lobbyists are left feeling lonely tonight. 
 
 Loser: Henry Kissinger 
 
 For the first time in the Democratic campaign, Bernie Sanders had a foreign policy exchange where he looked loose, comfortable, and confident. The issue, somewhat surprisingly, was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom Clinton had name-dropped and cited as a friend and a source of advice on several occasions. 
 
 "I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country," Sanders said. "I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend." 
 
 Clinton seemed a little surprised to be facing this line of argument, and rather than defend Kissinger on the merits of the various charges leveled against him, simply deflected with the notion that he is knowledgeable about China. A whole new generation of young Sanders-loving liberals are likely to find themselves checking out books like Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram to find out about Kissinger's involvement in Pakistan's brutal military campaign against Bangladesh.
– After Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders faced off in the first Democratic debate since Sanders' big win in New Hampshire, critics agreed there was one big loser: Henry Kissinger, who came under merciless attack from Bernie Sanders. "I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend," Sanders told Clinton. Here's what people had to say about the candidates' performances: "This was Clinton's best debate of the election," decides Chris Cilliza at the Washington Post. She was "in total control all night" and scored plenty of points against Sanders, he writes, while Sanders stumbled despite an improved command of foreign policy—and will probably regret claiming that he will be better on race relations than President Obama. Clinton didn't score any home runs but she still won, according to Matthew Yglesias at Vox. Nothing happened that would cause Clinton supporters to think twice, he writes, while voters getting a first look at Sanders would not have been impressed: The candidate turned in a "dangerously complacent debate performance" and failed to assuage "doubts about his electability" or add anything new to his critique of Clinton. Scot Lehigh at the Boston Globe also calls the debate for Clinton. She came out on top by "presenting herself as a deeply knowledgeable candidate whose progressive stands are tempered by real-world practicality," he writes. This was the case in her attacks on Sanders' plan for a single-payer health care system, where Clinton stressed that the "focus should be on expanding coverage and care to those who still lack it, rather than starting from scratch and overhauling the entirety of the system." Both candidates "performed well initially in talking about systemic racism and reforming the criminal justice system," but the "calm, cool, and collected" Clinton prevailed, writes Lucia Graves at the Guardian. Sanders, she writes, "was oddly on the defensive despite what has been momentum in his favor, starting out the night more combative than Clinton and wasting his time on petty one-liners." Click for some of the debate's best lines.