Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo
JD Vance and Tim Walz share a moment of goodwill in New York City.
The biggest tell of last night’s vice-presidential debate came at the very end, in JD Vance’s unprecedented closing statement. It was unprecedented in that Vance didn’t even mention Donald Trump until his final sentence. Instead, he spent nearly his entire allotted two minutes attacking Kamala Harris.
That omission made clear, had it not been clear already, the Republicans’ and Vance’s strategy for the evening: play to undecided voters, who by definition are not Trump fans, by creating the illusion of an affable, reasonable, and willing-to-compromise Republican ticket (or, in Vance’s case, an affable, reasonable, and willing-to-compromise JD Vance). Make the debate about the sins, almost all of them imagined, of Kamala Harris, and certainly not about the truths about Donald Trump. If possible, steer the discussion away from Trump altogether. When Tim Walz brings up Trump’s words, distort them to mean something else. When he brings up Trump’s deeds, deny them altogether.
That required some revisionist history on steroids from Vance. Trump didn’t try repeatedly to repeal Obamacare, Vance said; instead, Trump enhanced it. Trump didn’t preside over a decline in manufacturing employment; he brought it back. As to Vance himself, he never supported a nationwide abortion ban; instead, he’d come to understand that Republicans simply had to work more to earn women’s trust.
At that point, Walz should have at least suggested that the first way to do that would be to support the reinstatement of Roe, and should have asked Vance if he did. At a minimum, he might have brought up Vance’s savage disdain for childless women. He didn’t.
Throughout much of the debate, particularly during its first hour, Walz proved incapable of countering the deluge of falsehoods that Vance put forth, their Goebbels-esque brazenness notwithstanding. The only one he did counter, forcefully and effectively, came right before the debate’s conclusion, when Vance argued that Trump had permitted the peaceful transfer of power … on January 20th, omitting what Trump did leading up to and then on January 6th.
Just as Harris had used her prosecutorial chops to shred Donald Trump during their debate, so Vance used his own legal argumentation skills to run some rings around Walz, who was plainly unaccustomed to dealing with such adept obfuscation, particularly when couched in Vance’s one-night-only dulcet tones. Vance was Hyde disguised as Jekyll, while nothing in Walz’s background had prepared him to rip off that mask.
Even when Vance wasn’t shape-shifting and lying, he managed to advance some memorably ridiculous arguments. He attributed the nation’s shortage of affordable housing not only to the presence of immigrants but also to the high price of gas (reducing Americans’ discretionary income), which was the result of Harris’s lack of enthusiasm for fossil fuels (even though the nation has produced record levels of oil and gas during Biden’s presidency). Often, the proper response to the ridiculous is ridicule, but ridicule was not part of Walz’s rhetorical or characterological arsenal last night, though his calling Trump and the MAGA movement “weird” shows that he can rise to the occasion, if not, alas, on a debate stage.
Did any part of last night’s debate swing the swing voters? I highly doubt it. Vance apparently was pitching to those voters who might be swayed by the thought that at least some of a second Trump administration might be as housebroken as Vance appeared to be last night. On the other hand, he specifically referred to the endorsements that Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard have conferred on Trump, a stray shot in the dark for the crackpot vote.
It was never clear to me, however, who exactly Walz was pitching to. His calling card was his everyman decency, but I’m not sure that the handful of still-undecided voters will be convinced to vote for Harris on that score.
But keep in mind that the Harris-Trump debate ended up having no major effect on the candidates’ standing in the polls, even though polls showed that most Americans who saw it believed that Harris had handily won the evening. Last night’s debate will have even less effect than that, though it certainly validated my colleague Bob Kuttner’s assessment that JD Vance is one smooth and dangerous operator.
