If you’re reading this, you probably knew who you were voting for long before Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

The reason for this is simple: the minority of American voters who are not particularly loyal to any party tend to pay less attention to politics than partisans. Any political actor trying to reach undecided voters must therefore be mindful of the knowledge gap that exists between them and their audience.

And that is exactly what Donald Trump completely failed to do at the debate in Philadelphia. For this reason, among others, Vice President Kamala Harris was probably the main beneficiary of her first oratorical debate with the Republican candidate.

The first indication that Trump was “too online” for the average debate viewer came before the event had even begun. When the former president’s plane landed in Philadelphia, far-right internet personality Laura Loomer was among the VIPs who emerged from its fuselage (if that name sounds familiar, no presidential candidate should waste time appealing to you). Loomer has expressed the opinion that “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy. Right? And a lot of liberals and left-leaning globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that.” It’s theoretically possible that a person with that perspective could be a good sounding board for a politician hoping to reach moderate moms in the Milwaukee suburbs, but that seems unlikely.

In any case, whenever Trump took the stage, he regularly made it clear that he is the type of man who knows who Loomer and Nick Fuentes are and who can probably recite Fox News’ primetime program.

At the start of the debate, Trump sought to illustrate the horrors that the Biden-era surge in asylum seekers had brought to America’s shores. Polls suggest that swing voters share Trump’s general concerns about immigration numbers, and there were surely countless ways he could have articulated the restrictionist argument that they would have found coherent and reasonable. Here’s what he said instead:

What they’ve done to our country by allowing millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to cities all over the United States. And a lot of cities don’t want to talk about it — not Aurora or Springfield, anyway. A lot of cities don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

For any American not on right-wing social media, these remarks were surely confusing. Trump mentioned “Aurora” or “Springfield” without any explanation, as if those places were synonymous with known disasters (and not obscure right-wing conspiracy theories). And his response only got more puzzling from there, as he explained that “the people who came here” eat “the dogs” and “the cats.”

Here, Trump was referring to a baseless, racist accusation—most notably spread by his running mate—that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets. His reference was clear to all of us fallen souls whose social media addictions forced us to scroll through the most hateful, AI-generated cat images ever conceived earlier this week. But to everyone else, he sounded like a Fox News superfan who’d accidentally taken some of his grandson’s LSD.

At other times, Trump’s attacks were less out of touch with reality, but still didn’t provide enough explanation for those hearing them for the first time.

In an attempt to highlight the left-wing positions Harris espoused during her 2020 primary campaign, Trump declared, “She wants to perform transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants in prison.”

Trump was referring to the fact that Harris answered “yes” in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire when asked if she would “use her executive power to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the federal government’s health care – including those in prisons and immigration detention – have access to comprehensive gender transition-related care, including any necessary surgical procedures.”

Trump likely sees potential advantage in attacking Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded medical treatments for illegal immigrants. But he did not explain to viewers exactly what Harris had advocated and what the implications were. Instead, he summed up her position in shorthand and unnecessarily distorted it by suggesting that she wanted to “perform transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants” (rather than offer so much care for them), as if the Vice President intended to force gender reassignment surgery on detained immigrants against their will. This made Trump’s attack sound more baseless than it actually was.

Elsewhere, Trump’s references were apparently too high-brow, repeatedly referring to Harris as a “Marxist,” a term that is unlikely to resonate with non-college-educated voters who were not fully aware of the Cold War. He also referred to “the Nord Stream 2 pipeline” without immediately elaborating, and praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – an endorsement that may carry weight with the far-right online but means nothing to most ordinary voters.

Perhaps the clearest example of Trump failing to understand the difference between his supporters on Truth Social and his swing voters, however, came when he referred to the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, as “J6”—an acronym that few who have never been bound by the character limit of a microblogging platform would use or even recognize.

All that said, I’m no more the relevant audience for Tuesday’s debate than Laura Loomer’s superfans are. Whatever our political leanings, those of us who read the New York Times every morning or watch Fox News every night — and spend hours scrolling in between — live in a different universe than the people whose fickle loyalties will decide the November election. We know what references to JD Vance’s “couch” are meant to express. She know what it’s like to have healthy and fulfilling hobbies. We are not the same.

But I’m not relying on mere intuition when I say Harris won yesterday’s debate. The available audience polls and focus groups with swing voters suggest the Democrat crushed her rival, as do the betting markets. If that consensus holds, Trump’s inability to appeal to voters who aren’t like me – those who don’t immediately know what “J6” means – will be one reason for his debate failure.