The thing about vice-presidential debates is that you typically only remember them when someone really screws up. There was Dan Quayle comparing himself to John F. Kennedy, which set Lloyd Bentsen up for an all-time zinger. More recently, there was Sarah Palin being, well, Sarah Palin. These blunders persist in the political memory because the running mates in question failed at what is usually their main requirement in these undercard bouts: to reflect well on the judgment of the nominee.
But, of course, there’s nothing about this race you’d call usual. On one side, you have Donald Trump—not just a convicted criminal and aspiring authoritarian who already tried to overthrow democracy but an increasingly-unhinged 78-year-old, whose running mate stands to inherit his movement, at least in theory. On the other side is Vice President Kamala Harris, who ascended to the top of the ticket only two and a half months ago, and is now trying to preserve the Democratic enthusiasm that had waned under Joe Biden while convincing the handful of swing voters who will decide the election that her campaign is about more than good vibes.
Will JD Vance and Tim Walz’s Tuesday night’s debate performances help their respective candidates’ causes?
Vance was more articulate than his boss—a low bar to clear—and made an effort to sound more like a traditional politician than an alt-right 4chan thread. He toned down the outrageous rhetoric, disguised the most unpalatable and destructive MAGA policies in several layers of euphemism, and seemed comfortable on stage. He articulated Trump’s case with the skill—and passion—of a debate club kid who was eager for the limelight. Walz, by contrast, appeared nervous and uncomfortable in the debate format, and struggled at times, even though he had the stronger argument on a range of issues—particularly on the “fickle leadership” of Trump, as he put it in the first question of the night, about the escalating hostilities in the Middle East. But neither candidate likely did much to change the dynamic of this race.
It should’ve. Vance was a more agile debater than Walz, but his performance was fundamentally dishonest: He misled viewers about his own record, he completely lied about Trump’s, and tried to soften the sharp edges of the MAGA agenda. “I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he said at one point, explaining how he went from describing the former president as “America’s Hitler” to working for the guy. (At one point, he even claimed Trump “salvaged” Obamacare—the health care plan Trump explicitly sought to destroy.) Walz had his own stumbles; his explanation as to why he said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests when he apparently was not, for instance, was maddeningly wanting. “I’m a knucklehead at times,” the Minnesota governor said. But the facts, as it pertained to policy, tended to be on Walz’s side—which is perhaps why Vance, in a rare moment of visible frustration in Tuesday’s debate, pushed back on moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan when confronted with the reality that most of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio he demonized are in the country legally.
“The rules were you weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance objected.
Obfuscations aside, the ugliness of Vance’s politics showed through, particularly on immigration—where he may not have encouraged memes about Haitian migrants eating cats, as he does when he’s not on primetime television, but nevertheless cast incoming Americans as an existential threat to those already here: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield,” Vance said, “are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”
It was, by comparison, a more substantive debate than the last—in no small part because Donald Trump was not at one of the podiums. It included a question about climate change, which the last debate infuriatingly did not. Walz noted, correctly, that Trump has called global warming a “hoax,” and even suggested he could profit from it. Vance deflected, saying that he and Trump supported “clean air and clean water,” but didn’t want to get into the “weird science” of climate change. It also featured a matter-of-fact question about democracy: While Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, respected the democratic process and certified the 2020 election results, Vance has indicated he would not. What has he to say about that? “We should fight about those issues, debate those issues, peacefully in the public square—and that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said,” Vance claimed. (That’s not all Trump said!) “Joe Biden became the president,” Vance acknowledged, before accusing Harris of supporting “censorship”—the true “threat to democracy.”
Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for over 250 years in this country,” Vance said.
That’s not remotely true. Walz may not have made that case with the eloquence of Jack Kennedy. But it’ll at least stand up to the fact-check.