On Monday’s episode of “The Daily,” I was asked what we should look for during Tuesday’s debate. Here’s what I said:

One easy way to look at the debate is just whether it’s fundamentally about Harris or whether it’s fundamentally about Trump.

If after the debate, we’re talking about Harris’s flip-flops on the issues, or whether she’s too far to the left, or her handling of immigration, she’s in trouble. She’s not going to win the election on any of those issues. The most she can do is be able to move past them: to be able to sort of satisfy those concerns enough to focus on Trump.

If we’re talking instead about Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, his views on abortion, Project 2025, if we’re talking about his behavior, like was the case after the first presidential debate in 2020, that’s a sign that not only did Harris sort of satisfy these concerns that we’ve been talking about, but she allowed the election to pivot toward Trump.

In the end, Harris needs this election to be about Donald Trump for her to win. She has to be able to satisfy those concerns about her, and turn the election back to him.

By this measure, the outcome of Tuesday’s debate is clear enough.

You probably knew the debate was about Donald J. Trump if you simply watched it. The numbers show it as well: Mr. Trump spoke for longer than Vice President Kamala Harris, and she nonetheless spent more time attacking him than the other way around. Or put differently: Mr. Trump spent most of the debate on defense.

It’s worth reflecting on the significance of this dynamic. All year, Democrats assumed they would win the election by making the contest a simple up-or-down referendum on Mr. Trump, just as they did in 2020 and 2022. It’s difficult to overstate just how much the Biden campaign and Democrats took this assumption for granted, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. It was practically the only theory for how President Biden would win. And it all fell apart when the first debate proved, once and for all, that a Biden-Trump rematch would be as much a referendum on Mr. Biden’s fitness for office as Mr. Trump’s conduct.

For 90 minutes, Ms. Harris finally managed to do the one thing Democrats assumed they would do all along. The early indications are that it helped as they hoped, as the first CNN/SSRS poll taken after the debate showed that viewers thought Ms. Harris won by a comfortable margin.

Republicans Keep Talking About Abortion: In a campaign they would like to center on the economy and the border, Republican candidates keep drifting back to abortion rights, an issue that favors Democrats.

Harris’s Economic Plan: A central question in the final stretch of the election is if Kamala Harris’s proposals will cohere into an economic argument that can top Donald Trump’s.

Vance’s Relationship With his Mother: In his 2016 memoir, JD Vance described a rough childhood due to his mother’s devastating drug addiction. Today, the two are a remarkable team.

Whatever you think personally, the result will shape the media conversation in the coming days. Not only will people hear that Ms. Harris won, but much more time will also be spent explaining her victory — whether it was about her own preparation or Mr. Trump’s difficulties on abortion or how immigrants were “eating the cats.”

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