Life must be gay if you’re Kamala Harris. Here are just some of the things Mike Pence mentioned at last night’s debate that left her smirking or smugly guffawing: people dying of COVID, a possible COVID vaccine, frackers out of work, jobs killed, China lying to the WTO, the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court being packed, blacks incarcerated in California, the CIA spying on Trump’s campaign. It got so bad that I thought Pence might start testing her, bring up pancreatic cancer or Stalin’s purges and see if she didn’t slap her knee and double over.

Yes, it was the much-anticipated clash between the veeps, and I say that mostly without irony. After Donald Trump’s human blowtorch performance in Cleveland, the morbid curiosity factor was very high. And while I do think Harris lost, I didn’t think Pence was all that impressive either. The vice president used to be a radio talk show host in Indiana, where he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf” (Harris prefers laughing gas). Yet last night, he seemed more than ever in need of a switch to regular. He defended Trump’s record, but not with particular zeal or efficacy. Maybe the man is just tired of politics; God knows the rest of us are.

Pence’s weakest moment came (inevitably) when he tried to defend the administration’s response to the coronavirus. Harris blazed her guns here, and the vice president responded, “When you say what the American people have done over these last eight months hasn’t worked, that’s a great disservice to the sacrifices the American people have made.” That’s…a generous use of the royal we. Trump loves to conflate himself with the nation as a whole, and Pence probably figured that was his best shot here. Cue Harris: “The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country.” She was aiming for the highlight reel and she made it.

Next up was the economy and here Pence absolutely ate Harris’ lunch. He kept coming back to the same three points: a Biden administration would raise taxes, ban fracking, and implement the Green New Deal. Harris protested that none of this was true, though it’s been hard to tell amid all the political maneuvering. Biden has pledged he won’t hike taxes on those making under $400,000, yet he’s also said he’ll repeal the Trump tax cuts, which did have benefits for the middle class. Harris herself enthusiastically supported a fracking ban during the primary and was a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal in the Senate. At any rate, Pence did exactly what the incumbent is supposed to do: exploit the gap between what the opposition says in the primary and their more mainstream lines in the general. It’s what Trump tried to do last week, only to get bogged down burping the ABCs.

On whether Democrats would pack the court, Harris was worse than useless. Rather than answer, she first told a cute (and totally dishonest) story about Abraham Lincoln in 1864, then brought up race. That latter diversion was laughably predictable, and Pence, to his credit, made her pay for it, stayed focused. Next came a question on foreign policy, a subject wholly neglected during the last debate. Harris began with an answer so patronizing you could hear aneurysms going off in every eighth-grade civics class: you’ve “got to be loyal to your friends,” she explained, and you’ve “got to know who your adversaries are.” It was like Henry Kissinger was hosting Sesame Street.

And then Pence started bragging about Trump’s assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, and Harris had an opportunity. The foreign policy nerd in me wanted her to bring up the Shiite militias in Iraq, which have only accelerated their attacks on our troops since Soleimani’s death, despite the administration’s claim that the killing would provide deterrence. Instead she pivoted to reports that Trump had badmouthed the troops. It was probably the more effective way to go, though realist dorks nationwide were crestfallen. Harris did manage not to smirk when Pence adamantly denied those claims, a personal victory in itself, I suppose.

There’s a certain type of shallow person who thinks clapbacks are the same as arguments, sass is the same as stateliness, and they will have been jubilant over Kamala last night. (“There was a time when our country believed in science,” she said at one point, glaring at Pence like he’d just incarcerated Galileo.) The Huffington Post is already lauding her as a “human GIF machine,” the ultimate qualification for the situation room, naturally. But for the rest of the world, it will have been a modest victory for either Pence or Harris. Both were civil and insightful, at least compared to the last go-around. Both were evasive and sometimes nonresponsive. And most important of all, both were not Donald Trump. This election is a referendum on a single man, and nothing last night changed that.