Harris’s media strategy, which is not to do much media, was backfiring. If she possessed such prosecutorial prowess, reporters legitimately asked, then why was she being shielded from the press? Ahead of the debate, as The New York Times/Siena College poll revealed, more than a quarter of likely voters felt they did not know enough about her.

Her encounter with Trump allayed many of those lingering concerns. Though she wasn’t entirely convincing in early exchanges on the economy, the paramount issue for voters, she was impassioned on abortion, her signature theme since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. It helped, too, that Trump spoke of “the genius of six Supreme Court justices” who handed down the Dobbs ruling, which turned back the clock on reproductive rights to the early 1970s. Like many of his utterances on debate night – his widely debunked riff about Haitian immigrants “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio, will enjoy a long afterlife on YouTube – it will surely haunt him.

Debates are not only won on the night, but in the days afterwards as soundbites and screenshots harden into memes. Harris, suffice to say, is crushing it on social media. The internet, where feline videos have always been king, is now raining cats and dogs.

Since 2015, I have watched every minute of every debate that Trump has participated in, from those early encounters with “Low Energy” Jeb Bush and “Little Marco” Rubio, to his showdowns with Hillary Clinton and Biden. Nobody has outwitted him quite so skilfully, or got under his skin quite so effortlessly, as Harris. Baiting him on how MAGA rally-goers often head for the exits before Trump has finished speaking was a masterstroke. Her “Hannibal Lecter” jibe – trading on Trump’s compulsion to mention the fictional, cannibalistic serial killer – was another winner. Indeed, as cable commentators on CNN and MSNBC lined up to say how she had served up Trump’s derrière on a platter, Team Harris could be forgiven for toasting her success with an iced chianti.

Certainly, her command performance arrested an emergent media narrative that she is a word-mangler, unable to convey a clear and cut-through message.

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Yet in a country as chronically divided as America, everything becomes a Rorschach test. Thus, its red and blue bastions will look at the same debate but see wholly different things. The former president’s wistfulness about the pre-COVID economy, with its cheap gas and low interest rates, will have resonated with voters struggling with the cost of living. The mockery of Trump always revs up his base. The condescension of America’s media elites, which fuels a sense of shared victimhood, has long served as a bonding mechanism with the MAGA brethren. Unsurprisingly, then, right-wing blowhards on Fox News immediately bemoaned media bias, and attacked the ABC News anchors, who moderated the debate, for fact-checking Trump in real time. It was three against one, they cried.

Debate winners, it is also worth noting, do not always end up as election winners. Just ask Mitt Romney, who dominated Barack Obama in their first encounter in 2012. Or Clinton, who in 2016 racked up a trifecta of victories against Trump.

Given how methodically Harris executed her game plan, it was noteworthy that she chose to spell out her opponent’s long history of racism, as if litigating a case in court. Trump is polling unexpectedly well with Black men, traditionally a loyal Democratic constituency, and Harris wants to win them back. Yet emphasising race – something she has so far downplayed, as Obama did in 2008 – runs the risk of playing into her opponent’s hands.

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Since the late 1960s, all the successful Republican presidential candidates have played the race card at some stage in their campaigns, often from the bottom of the pack. Over the decades, Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”, aimed at exploiting white racial anxiety, came to be nationalised, and then Trumpified. Whether it was Ronald Reagan championing “states rights”, a dog whistle to white southern voters, or George Herbert Walker Bush benefiting from the notorious Willie Horton ad which drew on Black criminal stereotypes, the fissile politics of race helped Republicans win all but one presidential election between 1968 and 1992.

Here there is a key difference between America’s first Black president and Harris. When Obama made history in 2008, and won again in 2012, he was up against two honourable Republicans, John McCain and Romney, respectively, who refused to resort to race-baiting. Harris is up against the most prominent figure in the birther movement, who rejected the very legitimacy of Obama’s presidency and who has already questioned Harris’ racial identity.

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Seldom, if ever, has a campaign had so many narrative switchbacks. It was only nine weeks ago, remember, that Trump survived an assassination attempt, which made him look invincible. In a race that seems headed for a photo-finish, anomalies also abound. Cheneys are voting Democrat. The most famous scion of the Kennedy dynasty is backing Trump.

It was John F. Kennedy, the first ever winner of a presidential debate, who spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation. This week, Kamala Harris, in her climactic showdown with Donald Trump, used it like a cudgel.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

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