As the dust settles in Milwaukee, it’s hard to say that the fundamental dynamic of the GOP race changed much Wednesday night.

Chris Christie’s strategy was clearly to have a moment by bludgeoning Vivek Ramaswamy into oblivion. He got off a good shot early, taking Vivek to task for his “ChatGPT” delivery and his inexperience, but he allowed Vivek back into the debate in later exchanges. Indeed, Nikki Haley probably landed a bigger blow on Vivek than Christie did when she called Vivek naïve and under-informed — knifing him as only a southern lady can — in an exchange on foreign policy. Christie will have to do better in future opportunities to effectively synthesize the message that he deployed in his closing comments. Christie can’t win by being merely a human torpedo (though of course he’ll need a bit of that torpedo quality if he wants to stick around).

Ron DeSantis played the night safe — with everyone else gunning for Vivek, he seemed content to play the wallflower except for uncorking bits of his stump speech a few times. His team will want to believe that this performance will stabilize his campaign, which over the summer had seemed at times, ahem, listless. DeSantis hopes that his well-funded ground game and data operation in Iowa will drive him to victory. His strategy at the debate was to, well, survive the debate; winning will come later because he plans to outwork everyone else in Iowa’s retail-politics game. Well, he’d better hope he’s right because the clock is ticking, and DeSantis won’t get an infinite number of opportunities to make his case to the wider public. When you combine his botched Twitter Spaces campaign launch with Elon Musk and this B- debate performance, he hasn’t knocked any opportunity out of the park to date.

Vivek is going to have a boomlet almost entirely on the logic of “no publicity is bad publicity.” But Ramaswamy is an unserious, novelty candidate for a country facing serious problems. He looked painfully young. His over-the-top energy and glib-answer-for-everything vibe might play okay on a warm night in August. I’m skeptical that it will age very well as the nights grow cold and the Iowa caucus starts feeling real. But don’t be surprised if a few national polls over the next week or so pick him up in the mid teens and edging past Ron DeSantis.

Tim Scott brought his stump speech to a WWE match. He’s winsome; he always is. He did nothing, however, to distinguish himself from the other candidates, and it was clear that he’s better giving a speech to a friendly audience than in the political combat of the debate stage.

Mike Pence had serious, substantive exchanges on foreign policy, his role as vice president after the 2020 elections, abortion policy, and immigration and border security. Pence had a strong debate — arguably the strongest of any of the candidates. He presented himself with dignity. And he landed big punches on Vivek — though of course it speaks to Pence’s standing relative to Vivek that the biotech entrepreneur attracted so much attention from the former vice president.

Regardless, the problem for all of these candidates remains the fundamental one: How do you convince the average center-right primary voter that you’re a better choice to lead the Republican party into the future? How do you distinguish yourself from the also-rans? How do you displace Trump without taking him on directly?

Only 45 men have ever been president of the United States. It’s an office that doesn’t fall into your lap. If you want to be president, you can’t be a wallflower. You’ve got to go take it.