When it was first announced that Kamala Harris would be replacing President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, I had my doubts about her ability to win the election. She had a poor performance in her first bid for the presidency in 2020, and there have been many questions about her achievements and visibility as vice president in the past three years.

For me, though, any questions about Harris’ ability to beat Donald Trump were put to rest on Tuesday evening, when she successfully exposed the darkness of much of Trump’s rhetoric — and made the case for a Democratic vision simultaneously, something that Democrats have struggled to do up to this point.

Strategically, I believe the worst mistake that Trump made during the debate, one which he has made continuously in recent months, was to put America down, assuming that everyone shares in his sense of pessimism over the state of the nation.

He mentioned several times throughout the debate, as he has in past debates, that America is a “failing nation.” He even seemed to express more confidence in the security of some of our adversaries than in our own. “They allowed criminals, they allowed terrorists to come into our country,” Trump remarked while discussing the border. “Crime in Venezuela and crime all over the world is way down.”

To be clear, there is nothing about this message, or much of the sentiment that Trump conveyed on Tuesday night, that is expressly conservative or patriotic in nature. In fact, it is not only un-American, but anti-American. Because when you say that America is a failing nation and suggest that one would be safer in a socialist autocracy like Venezuela than here in the U.S., you are not only attacking the American government: you are attacking the American people.

There is certainly a way to criticize American governance without wrapping up American citizens in your attack or suggesting they are to blame for our problems. In the past, Trump has done this: he has been able to criticize “elites” or talk about “draining the swamp” in a manner that makes clear he is not blaming everyday Americans but views them as victims of the establishment’s failings.

Yet in the past couple of months and on Tuesday night especially, I have not seen Trump make this distinction. Instead, he has expressed disdain for the American people and has not made clear attempts to his separate his attacks on the American system from the people who make up this country.

Harris, on the other hand, centered her discussions of issues around the hopes of American voters. “I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people, and that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy,” Harris said.

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At this point, it is not yet clear to what extent Harris’ optimistic declarations about the future will be backed up by much substantive policy. And I do worry that they may not be, considering the fact that Harris has not outlined many of her policy proposals thus far.

Yet one thing is clear: Americans will always gravitate towards a candidate who shows they have hope for our nation over one who seems he could not think more poorly of it. This may seem obvious, but it appears it was lost on Donald Trump. Because recently, he has called America a “failing nation” far more than he noted how great it is.

The pessimism and at times incoherence of Donald Trump’s rhetoric makes me wonder if the values of true conservatism will be able to reemerge as the driving force behind the Republican Party. When I say true conservatism, I am referring to the kind of reverence for this nation’s history that made Republicans want to incorporate tradition into their vision for the future — not abandon the future altogether.

John McCain, a lifelong conservative who Harris, not Trump, rightly praised during the debate, once said that “America’s greatest strength has always been its hopeful vision of human progress.” Such a sentiment puts to shame the lack of vision on the part of Trump, who said during the debate that he only has “concepts of a plan” because he is “not president right now.”

It is worth considering whether a candidate with so much apparent disdain for the Unites States can even be called “conservative.” Because whether you hold conservative values or not, it is hard to deny that traditional conservatism is rooted in a patriotic love for country. And right now, this is not something Republicans are successfully conveying.

This election, fundamentally, is about who can sell their vision for the country’s future. And at this point, I still have concerns about Kamala Harris’ vision. But after watching Tuesday night’s debate, it seems like Trump does not even have an alternative plan; he only has attacks.

So, while many Americans will still have to be convinced that a Kamala Harris presidency would be successful, one thing is clear at this point: an imperfect vision beats no vision. Amid a lot of uncertainty, I think we can count on that much.

Olin Rose-Bardawil of Florence is a student at the Williston Northampton School and the editor in chief of the school’s newspaper, The Willistonian.