It might be that independent voters are thinking, We’ve seen this act before.

Let’s set the substance aside for a moment and acknowledge that by any artistic measure, Kamala Harris won Tuesday night’s debate. Except for a brief moment at the very beginning, when she stumbled on and ultimately refused to answer “The Reagan Question,” she seemed younger, sharper, smoother, and better prepared than Donald Trump. And why wouldn’t she? Harris had been squirreled away for days, memorizing catchy taglines and poll-tested platitudes in response to the questions that were sure to come. “Opportunity economy,” anyone?

In addition, both the ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were firmly in her corner throughout the event, disgracefully “fact-checking” Trump five times while refusing to call out Harris on any of her thoroughly debunked lies, whether on Charlottesville, or Project 25, or abortion, or cops dying on January 6, or those “suckers and losers” in our military.

And heck, when you have the moderators in your pocket, you don’t even need the earbud earrings.

As our Nate Jackson wrote yesterday, “She looked at the camera and spoke directly to voters, mostly avoided her typical word salads, appealed to emotion (especially for women), reacted with feeling at the right moments, aimed a well-practiced glare at the former president while he was speaking, and delivered some hard hits.”

All this, and yet Harris failed to impress that thin sliver of independent voters who’ll likely decide this election. As Reuters reports, “A group of undecided voters remained unconvinced that the Democratic vice president was the better candidate.” It adds:

Reuters interviewed 10 people who were still unsure how they were going to vote in the Nov. 5 election before they watched the debate. Six said afterward they would now either vote for Trump or were leaning toward backing him. Three said they would now back Harris and one was still unsure how he would vote.

Admittedly, 10 undecideds isn’t much of a sample size, but it wasn’t just Reuters. NBC News noticed a similar hesitancy among a handful of Arizona voters. Same with The New York Times, whose fence-sitters seem to understand that Harris represents the status quo and that Trump is the real change agent.

In interviews with undecided voters, many of whom The Times has interviewed regularly over the last several months, they acknowledged that Ms. Harris seemed more presidential than Mr. Trump. And they said she laid out a sweeping vision to fix some of the country’s most stubborn problems. But [and this is a BIG “but”] they also said she did not seem much different from Mr. Biden, and they wanted change. And most of all, what they wanted to hear — and didn’t — was the fine print.

Indeed, it was almost as if these folks were able to see through the cleverness and the choreography and focus instead on The Reagan Question: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Almost as if they remembered how much younger, sharper, smoother, and better prepared Democrat Barack Obama seemed to be in his three debates against Republican John McCain. Almost as if they asked themselves, “How did that work out?”

How did Harris “win” the debate and yet still fail to persuade the all-important swing voter? Maybe these Indies are savvier than I thought. Maybe they noticed the sickening sycophancy of the ABC moderators. Maybe they realized that Muir and Davis weren’t so much journalists as activists.

Which just goes to show that independent voters and progressive talkingheads aren’t impressed by the same things.

Conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, who’s no fan of Donald Trump, nonetheless knows a rigged game when he sees one. He writes: “While Trump lost the battle, he may have won the war. The naked suppression of news, the oozing bias, the ignorance of or refusal to reference key facts … made ABC and Disney the real loser Wednesday night.”

If independent voters are focused on substance over style this election cycle — if they’re putting performance ahead of platitudes — then Tuesday’s debate was far from the Trump disaster that wishful-thinking Democrats want us to believe it was.