Veep Debate Wrap
Populism, some gun nonsense and clarity, and the shock of January 6: Your GP/BP writers sum it up.
[Julia]
First, in some places, Walz sounded as populist as I’ve heard him, talking about executives going to Mar-a-lago and Trump’s taxes. In other ways, he rejected the populist framework, and invoked trust in expertise as a crucial difference between the tickets.
Second, Vance followed the playbook that I laid out in the beginning of the summer – before the Democratic candidate switch. Vance tried to place a retrospective frame on things, highlighting Trump’s record and talking, repeatedly, about what Harris has and has not done as vice president (rhetorically positioning her as the incumbent). In the second half of the debate, the policy discussion challenged this framing somewhat, but Vance approached it with a lot of discipline early on.
But this plays differently when it’s the veep debate: Walz is much better positioned to defend Harris than she would be to defend herself (and explain the tricky role that is the vice president). In this sense, Vance did put Walz on the defensive at times, but also placed him in the role that the VP candidate is poised to play.
This was actually a pretty substantive debate throughout, making me wish that I could watch a debate like that where both candidates were actually good faith actors. Both candidates talked a lot about their running mates, as they should.
But there’s another part of this story in light of the way that Trump’s term ended in January 2021. Vance said that Trump participated in a peaceful transfer of power, which seems certain to be replayed. Walz also went there with Mike Pence. There’s a lot more to say about Vance as this year’s VP candidate, and I’ll say it in my post on Friday after I’ve had some sleep, but really, the main thing to know about him is that it’s not Mike Pence up there, and we all know why.
[David]
It was a surprisingly – and to me, disappointingly – cordial debate Tuesday evening between JD Vance and Tim Walz. Vice Presidential debates don’t mean much, so I like for them to be entertaining. Give me some good zingers, or a fly on somebody’s head, to make it worth missing playoff baseball.
There wasn’t much of that here. Walz did fine, but for some reason the Harris campaign has tamped out almost all of his ebullient charm, flattening him into a standard-issue pol. Vance is slick and polished; the fun for me is in watching him skirt around his running-mate’s insanities. He knows he can’t publicly disagree with anything Trump has said about climate change, tariffs, healthcare, or the 2020 election, but he doesn’t necessarily want to say those nutty things himself. His carefully prepared redirections and workarounds were mostly quite impressive.
With exceptions, most notably on abortion. For that, he tried a strategy of telling a story leading to a pro-family lesson and wrapping with a call to let states decide. None of the pieces fit together, but that’s fine; it worked with other topics. But here it was jarring for him to introduce a dear friend who had an abortion because if she hadn’t “it would have destroyed her life, because she was in an abusive relationship” – and then leave her there, presumably with her life ruined in a post-Dobbs country. And then he phrased the lesson as if to reinforce the error: “There’s so much that we can do on the policy front just to give people more options.” Well, except the option that wouldn’t ruin her life.
As it turned out, Vance’s clever dancing around Trump’s nonsense ended up feeding Trump a new line of nonsense. Asked about school shootings, Vance bizarrely blamed migration, claiming that “thanks to Kamala Harris’s open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexico drug cartels” into the Unitesd States. That’s untrue; guns are run out of the U.S. into Mexico—which has increased, but mostly during Trump’s time in office.
Well, Trump went to Truth Social to expand on the false claim. “Kamala has let in millions of illegal guns into our Country. She is a DANGER to our Kids, and our Schools!” he wrote. Expect that to pop up in his stump speeches soon. Thanks JD!
[Jonathan]
Oh I do love bullet-point style:
I can’t emphasize enough that the VP debate is a mostly silly exercise that just doesn’t matter very much. Unlike the presidential debate, there’s no particularly good reason to do it, although I don’t know that it’s actually harmful.
Tim Walz was more popular going in, but actually JD Vance had the most to lose – given his lousy polling numbers and his unusual lack of experience, a bad night would have produced a lot of questions about him going forward. In the event, Vance was as well-prepped as can be, and mostly did a fine job. It’s unlikely he’ll be an issue going forward.
It’s somewhat odd that the Democrats haven’t made Vance’s inexperience an issue, but as a result he didn’t have to answer any question about his (minimal at best!) qualifications.
Walz had the single best line of the debate in the gun segment, responding to Vance’s argument that everyone just has to adopt a siege mentality, hardening all the doors and windows and putting security officers everywhere. Walz: “Sometimes it’s just the guns.” This is a 70/30 or so issue favoring the Democrats’ positions, and Walz cut through the rhetoric nicely.
But the heart of the debate didn’t show up until the final question, which was about Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. I don’t know whether it was a deliberate strategy or not, and again, VP debate stuff won’t matter in November, and in particular no undecided voters watched the entire debate. But as a bit of theater, Walz’s decision to emphasize how much they had in common throughout the debate made his freak-out over Vance’s inability to admit that Trump lost in 2020 extremely effective. It restored the shock value to something that absolutely is shocking.
And we’ll see, but since both of them chose a strategy of being nice to each other, that final segment really stuck out and might wind up drawing the bulk of the coverage, which may undermine a likely-to-that-point “Vance did well” story line.
Very insightful overview of the debate -- thank you! The two moderators used each other to move the candidates (mostly Vance) on to the next question. The telling moment was Vance talking over Margaret Brennan and her response: thank you for reminding everyone of how the legal process works. Along with abortion, another Vance moment of patriarchy and patronizing that was likely heard more loudly by some viewers.
What I find most upsetting is that it appears the Dems have tried to squash Walz's joy and showing his joy. I wanted him to be a 'coach' or teacher last night, scoring JD's comments and being more Kamala-like - or himself - in countering Vance. I thought the moderators were .. blech or feh, choose one or both. ABC did a great job of fact-checking via social media. And the line of the night for me was when Vance said he thought there was to be no fact-checking!