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.

Despite inflation finally slowing toward the Federal Reserve’s maximum 2% target, the economy remains the No. 1 issue in this election, with 81% of voters polled by Pew deeming it a vital issue, more than any other topic in the race. And, unfortunately for Harris, Trump’s renewed focus on the 20% increase in prices since she and Biden took office seemed to staunch the media’s attempt to manifest “Brat Summer” into existence. In a recent slate of national polling conducted before the Sept. 10 debate, ABC News-Ipsos, New York Times-Siena College, and Pew found that voters trust Trump on the economy by a lead of 12 points, 7 points, and 10 points, respectively.

And while Harris overperformed, relative to Biden’s career-ending debate implosion this past June, and Trump somewhat underperformed, the vice president did nothing to reverse the reality that voters overwhelmingly favor Trump on the matter they consider the most crucial.

In all fairness to Trump and Harris, the moderators wanted to wrap up the debate’s economic discussion as cursorily as possible. But with what little time she had, Harris did not elucidate what her “Opportunity Economy” actually means.

“I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time,” Harris said, poaching the Trump campaign’s proposal to expand the child tax credit by $5,000. “My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to startup small businesses, knowing that they are part of the backbone of America’s economy.”

While Harris expended ample energy attacking Trump’s tariffs proposals and outright lying about his record on unemployment and nonexistent relationship with Project 2025 and the deceitful grifters at the Heritage Foundation promulgating this Democratic propaganda, Harris didn’t flesh out any other single deliverable in her economic agenda.

Trump sorely missed an opportunity to skewer Harris on her past support for nationalizing 30% of the American economy with her co-sponsorships of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All while serving as the most left-wing member of the Senate. Nor did he challenge Harris over her proposals to ban private health insurance and fracking during her 2020 Democratic presidential primary run against Biden. But Trump’s most withering critique of the debate may have been his correct assessment that Harris brings nothing new to the table in 2024.

“She doesn’t have a plan,” Trump said in response to her month-late and a thousand dollars-short economic platform. “She copied Biden’s plan, and it’s like four sentences, like, ‘Run, Spot, Run.’ Four sentences that are just, ‘Oh, we’ll try to lower taxes!’”

What little economic policy Harris hasn’t stolen from Trump, including the aforementioned child tax credit and corporate tax cuts dressed up as hipster rent-seeking, has proven economically illiterate. She endorsed the sort of Soviet-style price controls that stoked the stagflationary crisis of the ’70s to crack down on the already razor-thin profit margins of grocery stores. Her primary solution to a housing crisis fueled by the dearth of supply since the industry bubble burst in 2007 is to fuel consumer demand further with $25,000 housing bribes for first-time homebuyers.

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Just as the disgraceful hackery of moderator Candy Crowley, a CNN correspondent in 2012, helped rig that year’s debate for President Barack Obama against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the ABC moderators refused to force Harris to defend a fiscal record that is as disastrous as her future proposals are nonsensical. The political malpractice is that Trump himself didn’t put her feet to the fire and lay it out for voters that a ballot for Harris is a ballot to double down on the Bidenomics that has eroded 4% of the average real weekly wage over the past four years.

The good news for Trump is that she missed an even greater opportunity than he did. Based on the bent of the Electoral College and his resilient swing-state polling, Trump is the marginal favorite in this election — almost entirely because voters still don’t know who Harris is. During her single-best opportunity to introduce her policy proposals to them, Harris balked, blowing the chance to be seen as more than a mere agitator to Trump but an actual leader.