The first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may well end up being the last debate between the two presidential hopefuls. In the aftermath of Tuesday’s 90-minute showdown, Trump himself suggested he was less than inclined to set up a rematch, which gives a pretty strong sense of how poorly he thinks it went for him.

For Harris, one thing was resoundingly clear: She is nothing like Joe Biden on the debate stage. She said as much herself, in a phrase that was clearly practiced, and carefully deployed, down the debate’s homestretch. In an exchange that was emblematic of the evening, Trump, attempting to bring the conversation back around to inflation, said, “She is Biden.” Harris sharply responded: “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump.”

For Democrats, this simple fact was a giant relief. Harris proved herself to be a more than capable messenger for the Democratic Party and an unflappable sparring partner in the face-off with the contentious former president.

Compared to Biden, the difference in style couldn’t have been more obvious. Harris was able to go on the offensive, attacking Trump on his record and his character. She was able to engage with and rebut his obvious falsehoods. She was—let’s just say it like it is—able to avoid looping, elliptical digressions, speak in short and complete sentences, and avoid major gaffes like misnaming and mistitling her running mate. She seemed young, and she did not say anything about “finally beat[ing] Medicare.”

This was especially clear on the issue of abortion, arguably the chief political priority for Democrats in this election cycle and one that Joe Biden always approached from a very uneasy angle. Harris instead was passionate and firm in her defense of a woman’s right to choose, her ambition to codify Roe v. Wade into law, and clear in connecting the smattering of statewide abortion bans to Donald Trump’s packed Supreme Court.

Abortion has had massive electoral salience since the Dobbs decision in 2022, and it played a major role in Democrats’ overperformance in the 2022 midterm elections. It has buoyed Democrats in special elections since. For good reason, the party has made it front and center in its 2024 pitch to voters as well.

But Biden was always an uncomfortable messenger on the topic of abortion; arguably, there are few senior Democrats worse suited to deliver a forceful message on the issue. His considerable policy record exhibited little long-standing commitment to pro-choice legislation, and even as his position adapted over time, his rhetoric remained slow to catch up. Long after it became glaringly obvious that abortion was a huge political winner for Democrats, the president was still disinclined to utter the word on the debate stage or in public forums.

When Trump ambushed Biden in June with the flagrantly false claim that Democratic abortion policy allows for a child to be killed after birth, Biden mounted little pushback. He was unable to clearly verbalize the connection between abortion bans and maternal mortality and the plight of rape victims. It never seemed like something he really felt solid talking about.

On Tuesday night, Harris was the opposite, as she has been on the stump since July. She wanted to talk about abortion and made clear that she was more confident as the party’s standard-bearer on that particular issue. In fact, her debate performance swung on that issue. After a somewhat faltering start on the economy, Harris found her footing talking about abortion and never looked back.

In leaving Biden behind stylistically, Harris also left Joe Biden much of the substance of the Biden stump speech. Biden’s greatest strength has been the breadth of his legislative record as president, which is inarguably the triumph of the Biden–Harris administration. In just one term, with tiny congressional majorities, that team managed to pass the American Rescue Plan Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and more.

That record is a triumph, but Biden, as his June debate performance made painfully obvious, was not a capable messenger or advocate for all that legislation. One of the biggest problems for Biden was that the American public knows or remembers little about those bills, and his aversion to speaking with the press and his inability to articulate those victories on the debate stage meant that he was getting no credit for a genuinely impactful presidency.

But Harris, clearly a more capable messenger generally, also chose not to champion those policy wins. She made no mention of the American Rescue Plan Act or the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the CHIPS Act by name. The single time she invoked the Inflation Reduction Act—which is the most significant climate legislation in American history and a boon to manufacturing and the union workforce as well as a bill that cracks down on rich tax cheats and lowers the price of prescription drugs—she did so only to say that the bill expanded fracking and fossil fuel production. Gone also were the attendant populist flourishes that were foundational to the Biden–Harris message, promising to raise taxes on the billionaire class and corporations who are not paying their fair share.

How exactly Harris would distinguish herself from the unpopular sitting president was always going to be an interesting and delicate exercise. For the most part, Democrats are overjoyed to have Harris as their voice of the present and future.

Her reinvention of the Democratic presidential ticket has left behind most of the Biden baggage that once had Trump on a glide path to reelection. But in her eagerness to, in her own words, “turn the page,” she has also left behind some of the greatest triumphs of the administration in which she has served. Unlike Biden, Harris is a more than capable messenger for the future of the Democratic agenda. What they share, though, is the lack of a persuasive message about the party’s very successful, very recent past.