During the second presidential debate, but the first between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Harris was widely regarded as the winner by the chattering class. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, succeeded in assuaging members of her party that she’ll fare better than President Joe Biden would have come Election Day. She goaded Trump, again the GOP nominee, into fruitless asides about crowd sizes and his grievances over losing in 2020 to the president.

But even with the assistance of the moderators — ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis indeed excelled as de facto Harris hagiographers and Trump haters — Harris’s victory comes with a major caveat. For all that she succeeded in reminding voters of what they already knew, that Trump has the insatiable ego required to thrive in Hollywood and Washington, Harris failed to make the case for herself. She neither distanced herself from the disastrous legacy of “Bidenomics” nor presented a tangible and affirmative economic agenda for the future.