Hillary Clinton pulled off a direct critique of Bernie Sanders that’s usually creeping around under the surface on Wednesday morning, during her interview with Politico.

Clinton said that Bernie is a relatively new Democrat; when Glenn Thrush asked her if Sanders is a Democrat, she further added “in fact, I’m not even sure he is one. He’s running as one. So I don’t know quite how to characterize him. “There’s a lot of this floating out there. During the interview many questions about Sanders not raising money for Democrats down-ticket. Questions about his voting history. His past assertions that the blue party wasn’t really that different from the red party. His more recent assertion that he only ran as a Democrat to get media coverage.

By about 13 points, Bernie Sanders won Wisconsin where he and Clinton tied among Democrats. Noting that Sanders ran up huge margins among independents, in the same way that Clinton has won states.

For instance, Clinton and Sanders would have split the delegates instead of Sanders netting a plus-11 margin, in Wisconsin. In other words, Clinton’s wide delegate lead wouldn’t have fallen at all, if only Democrats voted. Furthermore if changes are tallied up in each state, Clinton’s delegate margin from the states shown jumps from plus-337 to plus-604. In other words, if you take out independent votes, Clinton’s pledged-delegate total jumps from 1,279 to somewhere over 1,400.

Her overall lead (including states for which we don’t have exits) goes from 252 to more than 500. If the former was insurmountable, which it essentially is, the latter is Everest.

Nevertheless, that’s not how it works, to Hillary Clinton’s consternation. The strong support of independents coming out to vote for a long-time independent is forcing the Democratic front-runner to keep scrambling to win Democratic primaries. Clinton doesn’t even know if the guy is a Democrat! People coming to vote in the Democratic primaries don’t seem to care.