For the first time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump focused on policy rather than personal attacks, but the Republican nominee still managed to shock

For at least an hour on Wednesday night, America peered through a portal into another world. In this alternate reality, a Democrat and Republican debated the once familiar dividing lines of US politics – guns, abortion, tax – in a shockingly conventional style.

Close your eyes, ignore Donald Trump’s cartoon grimaces, Hillary Clinton’s stunned expression, and it sounded at times almost like a normal election.

Donald Trump refuses to say if he will accept election result in final debate Read more

But nothing is normal about 2016. Nothing can erase the memory of the first two debates, or the past 18 months of demagoguery, in the minds of voters just three weeks away from polling day. Just in case they were tempted to try, up popped the old Trump to jog their memory.

The shock, outrage and headlines from Las Vegas will focus on his brazen confirmation that not even the basic rules of the game are ones he accepts. Democracy? This candidate will tell us if he thinks he has lost on 8 November, not the other way around.

Fox News moderator Chris Wallace voiced the fear of much of the Republican establishment by posing the question as gently as one can in a 240-year-old democracy: “There is a tradition in this country of a peaceful transition of power,” he said, effectively asking if Trump will continue to make unproven allegations of voter fraud once the results are in.

“What I’m saying is I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense,” shot back the nominee with all the petulance of a grounded teenager.

As has often been the case this debate season, Clinton’s response was powerful but largely surplus to requirements. “That is horrifying,” she said. “He is denigrating our democracy and I for one am appalled.”

It almost made it sound like there was an option not to be appalled, but Trump’s own closest advisers have made clear that he – and perhaps conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Steve Bannon – are largely out there on their own with this one. Even Chris Christie and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway are stressing they believe elections are for voters, not candidates, to decide.

The issue may have roiled the political world this week, much as boasting of groping women overshadowed the previous debate, but what really distinguished the third and final television showdown of the reality TV election was the unusual amount of time both candidates devoted to attacking each other’s policies rather than each other.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clinton played Trump’s characteristic lack of discipline like a well-practised musician. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

It wasn’t until 30 minutes in, when Clinton accused Trump of hiring undocumented immigrants to build his hotels, that either candidate got even as remotely personal as in previous encounters. As if relieved that she still had the capacity to goad him into losing his cool, Clinton shot a broad grin as the Trump temper flared up on cue. “Gimme a break!” he demanded at one point, as if acknowledging her ability to play his characteristic lack of discipline and thin skin like a well-practised musician. “You’re the puppet,” was his childish response to a very grown-up question about whether Russia is pulling strings in his favor using orchestrated computer hacking.

But the relative calm that preceded these moments of old Trump, lucidity that returned again briefly when they turned later to foreign policy, allowed for some rare, more substantial moments of political swordplay.

Clinton condemns Trump's abortion 'scare rhetoric' in debate clash Read more

Trump, for example, was forced to spell out that he wants to use his supreme court appointments to overturn federal protection for women seeking abortion. Muttering that this would be left up to the states to decide in future could not hide the fact that this felt jarringly Victorian from a man whose own moral standards have been exposed for all to see.

Similarly on guns and tax policy, Trump may have sounded like a traditional Republican, but it was an echo of the tradition which has seen the party lose the last two presidential elections in an America that feels like it has moved on from the strictures of old.

“You can rip the baby out of the womb of the mother,” Trump blasted. “The government has no business with the decisions that a mother makes,” was Clinton’s reminder that there is nothing freedom-loving about overturning Roe vs Wade.

For the first time, it was the madness of Trump’s ideas rather than his erratic manner that took centre stage during this debate.

For some Republicans, the moments of relative calm, the brief nostalgia of familiar policy proposals, will come as a relief – perhaps just enough to stop his poll numbers plummeting further. For what looks like a growing majority of Americans who have already decided he is too ill-tempered and under-qualified to be president, the reminder that even his policies feel like a bad trip will not have made this a pleasant illusion.