With Donald Trump on track to be the Republican presidential nominee, most Democrats are feeling very good about their chances in November. But yesterday’s results in Michigan ought to scare them. A lot.

No, Bernie Sanders isn’t going to stop the Clinton juggernaut. His startling upset of Clinton in Michigan doesn’t change the delegate math. With a huge edge in unelected superdelegates, the Democrats have effectively cooked the books in such a way that nothing short of a Sanders sweep of primaries around the nation will enable him to ever overcome her lead.

Moreover, the Clinton southern firewall is real. As last night’s results from Mississippi illustrate, in states where African-American voters dominate Democratic primaries, Sanders isn’t competitive.

Sanders’ victory in Michigan does put off the inevitable. Had Clinton won there, he might still have gone on with his efforts fueled by an impressive campaign war chest. Yet few would have taken the challenge seriously anymore and Clinton might have started to feel free to pivot to the general election. That might have enabled her to begin drifting back to the political center after engaging in a race to the left in a vain effort to demonstrate her anti-Wall Street bona fides. Now the battle goes on and Hillary must waste vital time and funds in beating back the Sanders insurgency.

But there is more here that should worry Democrats than just the unfortunate necessity of watching Clinton trying to swat away Sanders’ gibes about her friends on Wall Street. The Michigan results are a perfect illustration of just how flawed a candidate she has become.

It is true that Clinton won among registered Democrats in the open Michigan primary. But her inability to appeal to independents and young voters is a large problem. Exit polls and other surveys also continue to show that the voters do not trust her.

Sanders deserves great credit for running a near note-perfect campaign. He has stayed relentlessly on message in terms of his left-wing populist economic agenda. He also has tread carefully when it comes to attacking Hillary on her various scandals. Conservatives have groaned at his unwillingness to attack her head on when it comes to the federal investigation into her misuse of classified information or the conflicts of interest that arose from donors to the Clinton Family Foundation seeking help from the State Department. But Sanders seems to intuitively understand that Democrats are predisposed to view all of the Clinton machine’s misdeeds as somehow an invention of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that is out to get Bill and Hillary. By avoiding that trap while honing in on her connections to Wall Street, he has done just enough to tap into resentment of the Clintons without offending liberal sensibilities.

But let’s be honest about him. He’s a 74-year-old socialist with no foreign policy agenda and someone that few, even among his supporters, really envision as a commander-in-chief. The fact that such an intrinsically weak candidate has given her a run for her money speaks volumes about her weakness.

The Democrats’ problem heading into the general election is not just that they are stuck with Hillary Clinton. It’s that once they realized that they had no viable alternative to her as a candidate (Martin O’Malley?), they resolved to coddle her in such a way as to shield her from the consequences of that weakness.

The delegate selection process in which several hundred superdelegates provide the choice of the party establishment with about a third of the votes needed to get the nomination is just one example of how they’ve tilted the playing field in Hillary’s direction. But by having the party apparatus act as bodyguard against any tough scrutiny of her record and actions, Democrats have failed to adequately test Clinton in such a way as to enable her to be ready for a general election fight against opponents that won’t treat her liabilities with kid gloves.

A great example was provided last night when Democratic National Committee Chair Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz fenced with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly over the e-mail scandal. After Wasserman Schultz denounced the low level of discourse in the Republican race, Kelly pointed out that the GOP would reply that at least no one on their side is “facing the threat of indictment.” In response, the DNC chair replied that no Democrat was either.

Of course, that’s blatantly false. Clinton and her chief aides are under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice for possible violations of law relating to her use of a homebrew server to send classified information. Moreover, the grant of immunity to Hillary’s IT guy is an alarming development whose implications could be far reaching for the fate of Clinton and everyone else connected to this story. But when Kelly said that the investigation was a fact, the best Wasserman Schultz could offer was to chide her not to be “melodramatic.”

To be fair, DWS understands that politics may dictate that no indictments are issued. I’ve never believed that President Obama would permit his administration to indict the Democratic Party’s frontrunner no matter what the FBI recommends.

But what we have here is not just Democrats rallying around their party’s putative leader. By swallowing hard and letting a person under federal investigation for crimes that have landed lesser personages in jail, Democrats have decided that protecting Clinton is their first and only priority.

So they nod and wink about the Clinton Cash scandal and put their fingers in their ears when anyone says the word “email.” They scoff when Benghazi is raised even though the possibility that the families of the slain Americans will spend the fall talking about how the former secretary of state lied to them is something that a rational person would consider a serious problem.

It’s true that Clinton may be lucky in her opponent. Donald Trump may be unelectable and provide her with a massive turnout of minority and women voters that she couldn’t generate on her won.

But what we’ve learned about Clinton in the past few months is that even though her party’s establishment is guarding her like a newborn infant and conducting a race by rules that ensures her victory, she’s still barely winning. Assuming that such a person exists, Democrats would have done better had they not been so intimidated by the Clinton machine and found a more viable challenger to her than Sanders if for no other reason than it would have provided her with a better test of her electability. She might have failed such a test even more spectacularly than her wobbly performance against Sanders but at least they would have known where they stood.

As it is, Clinton is limping into the general election. She may be a strong favorite against Trump but Michigan gave Democrats a reminder of just how shaky their candidate may prove to be when stacked up against someone who won’t play by their rules the way Sanders has done.