A Choose Your Own Adventure Debate
Who won the vice presidential debate? It depends on what your criteria is.
The most important takeaway from Tuesday’s vice presidential debate is the one I made before the debate: it didn’t matter. There is virtually no chance it moved a significant pool of voters. CNN’s focus group of seven undecided voters found that a grand total of one of them made a decision on who to vote for because of what they saw (and he is now voting for Kamala Harris). The network’s insta-poll found that a mere one percent of Harris’s voters and one percent of Donald Trump’s voters decided to switch their votes because of the debate.
In short, the night had almost no impact on the trajectory of the campaign.
Nonetheless, millions of people watched, and they saw one of the more interesting debates to score in recent memory.
Who won? That really depends on your criteria.
If this was 1996 and we were scoring each question like rounds in a boxing match, Ohio Senator JD Vance probably won — despite a slimy, lie filled performance. Because while many of his answer were full of lies and/or incredibly vague, thereby disguising the extremity of the policy he was advocating, he was polished, on message, disciplined, and won more points. He also ditched his usual fire breathing rhetoric, instead stressing agreement, coming off as amiable and, at points, as empathetic (at other times, his attempts at empathy rang false). If the goal was to soften his image, it seemed to work.
Now, some of Vance’s answers are going to get shredded by fact checkers, and if voters realize the extremity of what he was actually supporting — especially on abortion, child care, and health care — those answers will hurt Vance. But most voters never see fact checks, and style usually trumps substance in debates.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wasn’t terrible. He had very good moments — especially on abortion, immigration, housing, healthcare, guns, and democracy. He also, however, had awkward or bad moments and missed opportunities. They included a weak first answer on Iran, where he sounded noticeably nervous, a contorted, terrible answer on accusations he lied about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and some spots where Vance clearly had the sharper answers, or attacked without Walz really answering back as effectively.
The most significant of those came with Vance’s repeated assertion that Harris was currently vice president and therefore it didn’t matter that many of her plans sounded good, because she hadn’t implemented them while in office. Now there were several easy rebuttals to that: vice presidents don’t set policy. They aren’t in charge. They’re advisers to presidents, but not the ones who can just make things happen. Additionally, a lot of what Harris has proposed requires legislation and Republicans in Congress have obstructed Democrats’ ability to pass anything. But Walz didn’t make either point.
That’s just one example, but this sort of thing happened multiple times, especially in the first half of the debate.
At other moments, it felt like Walz was missing openings to go on offense or made solid points, but ones that could’ve been sharper.
Vance absolutely drove viewers nuts who cared about truth and honestly. And Walz had a certain folksy charm and a good grasp of policy. But if this was a performative art, Vance did well stylistically and probably won on debating points, albeit closely.
The problem for him is it’s not 1996. It’s 2024. What matters more is viral moments — the moments that live beyond the debate and reach the majority of voters who didn’t watch. And the most significant of these came at the very end of the debate when the moderators asked about democracy and January 6th, 2021.
That set up Walz to press Vance directly to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. It’s a simple question with an unambiguous answer — one that almost all swing voters know.
And yet, Vance blinked, responding, “Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?” It was a pathetic cringe-worthy, clumsy attempt to dodge. Vance simply refused to tell the truth — which would have upset his running mate who demands total fealty — and showed he doesn’t care about democracy.
Walz pounced, observing that it was a “damning non-answer.” He then prosecuted his case cogently and explicably on why that non-answer mattered so much. He reminded viewers, “look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage,” and questioned whether Vance would “keep your oath of office even if the President doesn't?”
At one point in the exchange, Vance also made the contorted argument that Trump posed no threat to democracy because he handed power over on January 20, 2021. But that, of course, happened only after he tried and failed to execute a coup that would have kept him in power despite clearly losing. It’s another answer that not only rang false, but came off as absurd. People don’t like someone who tries to blatantly lie to their faces like that.
This is the moment you’ll see the most of over the next month (one CNN reporter noted that she had received a text from someone at the Harris campaign that they were already cutting an ad with Vance’s answer). The blunder also reinforces voters’ worst perceptions about Trump and Vance — that they lie and represent a threat to democracy.
Another possible viral moment came when Vance once again repeated his lies about Springfield, Ohio and how undocumented immigrants had done such damage to the “real Americans” who live there. Now, not only is that kind of us vs. them rhetoric repugnant (if potentially effective), but the Republican governor of Ohio and the Republican mayor of Springfield have repeatedly called it a lie and worked to refute it. The moderators, therefore, quite sensibly, tried to point out that the Haitians in Springfield are here legally, under a program that dates back decades. Vance responded by whining about how they promised they wouldn’t fact check him, and talking over them until they cut his microphone off.
Not only did the exchange sound whiny, but as several commentators including MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace and lawyer Jill Filipovic, observed, a lot of women will see Vance talking over the moderators as a male politician mansplaining to women journalists because they dared to call him out for lying. Again, for two candidates women already distrust, this reinforces their negative perceptions.
On a night when Vance largely succeeded in softening his image for those watching, it may not matter because the voters who didn’t watch the debate — the vast majority of them — will only see his worst moments.
By contrast, Walz’s worst moment came on the Tiananmen Square question, and it seems like a stretch that many voters find it relevant that a vice presidential nominee was two months off about when he was somewhere 35 years ago. Memories are fallible and whether or not Walz told the truth on the matter has zero impact on people’s lives in 2024. It’s the kind of thing where they might roll their eyes and say “politicians,” but not care very much. So while Walz’s hemming and hawing was painful to watch — and he was telling the total truth when he said he talked too much sometimes — it’s not likely to have an impact.
Both insta-polls that I’ve seen, one from CBS and one from CNN, found very narrowly that Vance won (by one point and two points respectively). Yet even that CNN poll found that a slightly higher percentage of Trump voters said the debate would prompt them to reconsider their votes than Harris voters.
Overall, it was a choose your own adventure kind of night — one when Republican commentators could exalt that their guy won, while liberals on cable news gleefully talked about how he got his clock cleaned. Different voters will take different moments away from the debate. And if this is the last “big” moment of the campaign, it did little to alter the fundamental state of play: Harris is still a narrow favorite, and the election is shaping up to be pretty similar to 2020.
Brian, I certainly hope you're right that Vance's most revealing moments, later in the debate, get widely rebroadcast!