If you were a Democrat, and you believed, as many Democrats do, that the nation faces an existential crisis in the form of President Trump, would you want to watch a Democratic debate which opened with ten of your party’s presidential candidates stuck in an endless discussion of healthcare arcana?

Yes, healthcare helped Democrats win the House in 2018 and remains important today. But Trump was not on the ballot in 2018. He will be in 2020. To defeat him, Democrats need a nominee who is as big as he is. There might not be any such candidate in the Democratic field today, but if there is, he or she will not be identified by an exploration of how many years it will take to transition to “Medicare for all.”

Going into the debate, night two for the Democrats, the major question was whether front-runner Joe Biden would be sharper than he was in the first debate in late June. As it turned out, Biden was definitely improved, but not enough to dispel the concerns of Democrats who worry that he has lost a step. Biden was halting at times, occasionally stopped abruptly, and ended his debate with a bit of confusion when he asked viewers to “go to Joe 3-0-3-3-0 and help me in this fight.” (He was supposed to ask people to text “Joe” to 3-0-3-3-0 but got things a bit mixed up.)

Nevertheless, Biden stood up for a centrism that is in scant supply in the Democratic field but obviously still appeals to the Democratic voters who are keeping him at the front of the pack. Biden did it by saying things like this, on immigration: “The fact of the matter is … if you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back. It’s a crime.”

It’s hard to imagine any other candidate in the 20-candidate Democratic race, even those who are trying to distance themselves from the party’s open borders wing, saying that quite so bluntly.

Biden also spent a lot of time defending Barack Obama, the only Democrat elected president in the last 20 years, whose record on healthcare, immigration, and other issues, liberal as it was, would not pass muster with the party’s liberal wing today.

The debate was really all about Biden, about whether he would do better and whether any other candidate would attack him as effectively as Kamala Harris did in the first debate. So yes, he did better, and no, no candidate attacked him effectively as Harris. There were attacks — from Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others — but nobody left Biden dazed, like he was in the first debate.

In fact, the best attack was not on Biden at all. The most effective blow of the night came when Tulsi Gabbard took a sledgehammer to Harris’s record in law enforcement in California.

“Sen. Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said. “But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.”

Harris responded by saying she was proud of her record, but she did not rebut any of Gabbard’s particulars.

The story of night two was a mix of who-attacked-whom, along with a bit of policy tedium. It was a marked contrast with night one, featuring another ten candidates, which was more an examination of the Democratic Party’s liberal identity.

Night 1 saw Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren attempt to define the party as a strictly liberal party. The strategy was to discredit and delegitimize the moderate wing by giving it the worst conceivable name: “Republican.”

“We should stop using Republican talking points in order to talk with each other about how to best provide … healthcare,” said Warren, who formed a temporary united front with Sanders to oppose relatively centrist proposals to expand health coverage.

“We are not trying to take away healthcare from anyone,” Warren said. “That’s what the Republicans are trying to do.”

“Your question is a Republican talking point,” Sanders said to CNN moderator Jake Tapper.

“Look, I put a real policy on the table to create 1.2 million new jobs in green manufacturing,” Warren said to another CNN questioner, Dana Bash. “What you want to do instead is find the Republican talking point…”

The idea, apparently, was to suggest that anything short of a Warren-Sanders policy prescription — universal healthcare, unlimited border crossings, free college, and more — was simply not a Democratic value.

With Biden not a part of night one, the centrist pushback came from the most minor figures in the field. For example, former Rep. John Delaney, who had a good night and emerged as a leading centrist voice, argued against eliminating the private healthcare of more than 100 million Americans who the liberals wanted to move into a government-run system. “We should deal with the tragedy of the uninsured and give everyone healthcare as a right,” Delaney said. “But why do we have to be the party of taking something away from people?”

Warren quickly scolded Delaney for “using Republican talking points.”

Later, Delaney, speaking not only of healthcare but of economic policy as well, said, “I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises, when we run on things that are workable, not fairy tale economics.”

That prompted another reproach from Warren. “You know, I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” she said. “I don’t get it.”

Warren was proud of that point; her team sent out a tweet with her quote before the debate was over.

On immigration, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock emerged as a voice of rationality. “We’ve got 100,000 people showing up at the border right now,” Bullock said. “If we decriminalize entry, if we give healthcare to everyone, we’ll have multiples of that.” Bullock tried to insulate himself from criticism by noting that the position he outlined was also that of Jeh Johnson, who was President Obama’s last Secretary of Homeland Security.

That earned another slap from Warren. “What you’re saying is ignore the law,” she said. “Laws matter. And it matters if we say our law is that we will lock people up who come here, seeking refuge, who come here, seeking asylum, that is not a crime.”

By the end of the night, it was Delaney who tried to make the big-picture case against the liberal heavyweights on stage with him. “We can go down the road that Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren want to take us,” he said, “which is with bad policies like ‘Medicare for all,’ free everything, and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected. That’s what happened with McGovern. That’s what happened with Mondale. That’s what happened with Dukakis.”

Delaney’s argument no doubt scored points with Republican viewers, but his was a relatively lonely voice on night one.

The next debate is scheduled for September in Houston. Party rules will raise the bar for inclusion, which means the field will likely be dramatically smaller. There will be no more 20-candidate debates. But the liberal-centrist split, deepened after this week, will not go away.