During Donald Trump‘s first 2024 presidential debate, Joe Biden hurt his own 51-year political career to the point that the president was ultimately cajoled by the Democratic Party into withdrawing from his own re-election bid. During the former president’s second presidential debate of the year, Trump took the bait laid out by the moderators, and the newly coronated Kamala Harris decisively did not implode; but in the long run, nothing will likely change much at all.

The stakes for the first debate should not have been high, if only because both Trump and Biden were such constants in American public life for the past half-century, and it was only because of the exposure of the senility the media so carefully concealed that the debate was of any real consequence. By contrast, the stakes for the second debate — between the Boomer celebrity and the young telegenic woman of color, the man everyone knew far too well and the enigma who has adapted to every political preference from celebrating Trump’s border wall to decriminalizing illegal immigration — seemed high.

And with serious moderators who challenged Harris on her 180 policy reversals, the stakes should have been high. But instead, Harris managed a minor victory with a major asterisk attached: mainly that voters largely have their minds made up about Trump, who didn’t actually self-destruct, and while she leveraged assists from the moderators, she didn’t define herself in any meaningful way.

Trump played into Harris’s petty goading about losing the 2020 election and his crowd sizes at certain points, and during others, he faced the uphill battle of trying to correctly challenge her extreme position that abortion should be nationally legalized through the point of birth and prior endorsements of mandatory gun confiscation and fracking bans while the moderators ran cover for her. But Trump didn’t give voters any new information about himself, much less any meltdown or ego-driven death spiral to convince them to rethink what they already believed. He missed opportunities and indulged liabilities, but not in any fatal way.

Considering he leads Harris on the economy by double digits and has closed the national gap after two nonstop months of the media trying to make Harris happen, Trump could afford a weak night. Harris, on the other hand, needed a strong one, and to her credit, she didn’t cackle. She didn’t complain. And as her advisers were clearly petrified of, she didn’t go off script in her carefully crafted and rehearsed attacks on Trump.

But she also didn’t reclaim any actual identity for herself beyond being a telegenic stand-in sufficient for voters who want to cast a ballot for anyone but Trump.

In 2020, such an empty suit sufficed to the point that he literally won the presidency without leaving his basement. However, that victory wrought the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, the worst influx of illegal immigrants into the country in its history, and countless conflagrations across the planet, and Biden’s second-in-command is as much a weathervane as he once was, a prosecutor who endorsed defunding the police when it was expedient and the most liberal member of the Senate who pretended she no longer wanted to nationalize 30% of the country’s economy with the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. And thus, just 3% of likely voters polled by the A+ pollsters at the New York Times/Siena said they want the next president to constitute a continuation of Biden’s governance, and even though many felt they needed new information to make up their minds about Harris, a majority say that Harris represents more of the same from Biden.

So yes, Harris indeed succeeded, however mildly, at entrapping Trump in brief asides about his tariff potentials and engaging the Taliban for a deal (something that seems less objectionable than handing the Taliban the entirety of Afghanistan for nothing in exchange). But as much as Trump tried and somewhat failed to posit Harris as the extreme candidate who would double down on the failures of the Biden administration, Harris didn’t even seem to try to define herself as a pragmatist with any real beliefs, and her attempts to extract herself from Biden’s legacy were relegated to the hackneyed repetitions that the country must find a “new way forward” from the last four years that she’s been a heartbeat away from the presidency and recitations of the joke that Trump isn’t actually debating against Biden, the candidate he wish he were fighting.

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The real reason Harris wants another debate is not because she won, which she did by a thin margin and thanks to skewed rules, but an objective measure nonetheless. Her team realizes she needs another debate because she missed the opportunity she needed more than Trump did. As far as external actions go, at worst, she didn’t define Trump, and at best, she slightly dented him.

But she didn’t define herself either, and in the eyes of voters, she remains an empty vessel, a mannequin made by other party operatives who hope the masses can bring themselves around to pretend to believe in.