The News
NEW YORK — Tim Walz and JD Vance had the same mission on Tuesday night: Sell a national debate audience on their running mates, and do no damage to themselves.
Only one of them said that he could be “a knucklehead at times,” and mangled an answer about befriending the victims of school shootings into becoming friends “with school shooters.” But both tickets walked away happy.
At their only vice presidential debate, Vance confidently defended both Trump and his own record, often dropping the combative approach of his rallies and interviews to mention another MAGA economic plan. Walz, who had talked down his debating ability when he joined the ticket, prioritized his defense of Harris and his attacks on Trump, and tripped up more when defending himself.
“Honestly, Tim, I think you got a tough job here because you’ve got to play whack-a-mole,” Vance told Walz, patronizing him — and trying to break the fourth wall for viewers — over how he built his answers around attacks on Donald Trump. In Vance’s telling, the 45th president not only “didn’t have a major conflict break out” on his watch — he had rescued the Affordable Care Act, and “peacefully” handed over power after the Jan. 6 riot.
Walz fired back when he could. “He would have repealed the ACA had it not been the courage of John McCain,” the Minnesotan said after Vance’s potted history of Obamacare repeal. Toward the end of the night, Walz delivered the argument that Democrats wanted to make against Vance since the summer: The Ohio senator passed Trump’s test, of a running mate who would not have certified the 2020 election.
“When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” said Walz, whose jaw dropped when Vance would not say that Trump had actually lost to Joe Biden.
But before that moment, the candidates often emphasized areas where they said they might agree on policy, from housing, to immigration, to family support, thanking each other for substantive back-and-forths that felt like they came from another era of political debates. And in one of a few lighthearted moments, Walz and Vance agreed that they could both screw up on the microphone — a truce that the Democrat needed more than the Republican.
“I’m sympathetic to misspeaking on things,” said Walz.
“Me too, man,” said Vance.
In this article:
Know More
It was not the knife-fight it could have been. That was clear when Walz answered the inevitable question about why he’d embellished some of his life stories. Why did he say he’d been in Hong Kong during China’s 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters in Beijing, when he did not arrive until later that summer? Walz described his upbringing in Nebraska, briefly described his teaching trips to China, admitted a “knucklehead” error, but missed his mark.
That could have been a cue for Vance to unload on Walz. In conservative media — and outside the CBS Broadcast Center, where pro-Trump protesters waved tampons to mock Minnesota’s policy of providing them to high schoolers of any gender identity — Walz has been lampooned as a fist-pumping clown who let rioters torch Minneapolis abandoned his National Guard unit by retiring before it saw combat.
But moderators followed up by asking Vance about one of his own rhetorical mistakes — saying that his now-running mate “could be America’s Hitler” — and the senator moved right on. “I’ve also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he said, reheating an answer he’d given many, many times when asked about his MAGA conversion. He never mentioned some of the negatives that some ardent conservatives think should disqualify Walz from any office.
“He chose not to take it out because he thought the guy already called himself a knucklehead,” said Howard Lutnik, a co-chair of the Trump transition team, in an interview after the debate.
Similarly, Walz passed up some chances to portray Vance as the “weird” extremist obsessed with Americans’ reading habits and personal lives. At times, he pointed to the senator as a potentially sensible figure led astray by his domineering running mate.
“I believe Sen. Vance wants to solve this, but by standing with Donald Trump and not working together to find a solution, it becomes a talking point,” Walz said in a round on immigration, sticking with the Harris position that the stalled Senate border bill could solve the problems Trump talked about.
Vance returned the favor: “I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.”
Some Democrats watching were less than happy with these exchanges. Vance’s biggest polling vulnerability heading into the night was that he was seen as an off-putting social conservative; Walz’s biggest asset was that he was seen as a lovable avatar for Middle America. A debate in which both came off as likable, they feared, was a net positive for Vance.
Still, others were glad to have a break from the usual tenor of presidential politics. Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, said she liked “the civility between the two.”
“The American people got a nice glimpse of Walz,” she added. “He came across knowledgeable, articulate with grace and humility. The other guy was good, too bad it was all lies.”
Another potential bank-shot benefit that Democrats mentioned afterwards: If Vance is perceived as having had a good night, Trump might feel upstaged and reconsider not doing another debate with Harris.
David’s view
In Philadelphia, Kamala Harris thrilled Democrats, looking right at Donald Trump and delivering the attack lines they’d dreamed of hearing. Walz didn’t do that. Trump miffed his best arguments by getting distracted by those attacks, and didn’t lay out his central theme, that Harris can’t credibly run on policies her administration never implemented, until the end.
Vance did that right away. He didn’t deliver the debate performance of Republican dreams, but he gave them another one, more akin to the speech he gave at the national convention. It was more important to portray Trump as a success and a savior, which he did, than to follow conservative sites like Alpha News into the weeds on Walz’s biography. If you didn’t know that House Republicans were probing Walz’s ties to China, you wouldn’t have learned it from Vance.
The Middletown kid who mastered code-switching — winning over an NPR audience one year, and a Turning Point USA crowd the next — re-calibrated for a national audience that didn’t know him or Walz very well by dulling his harsher edges and saving his sharper lines for issues he thought he had the advantage on.
Walz didn’t do the same for Democrats, until the Jan. 6 exchange, which his party immediately tagged as its highlight. He won the brief veepstakes race over candidates who talk more like the college-educated Democrats who donate to campaigns and watch MSNBC. It was easy to see the moments when Pete Buttigieg or Josh Shapiro might have counter-punched Vance, like when the Republican kept describing a manufacturing and energy crisis that wasn’t actually happening under Biden.
Walz grabbed onto Vance’s closer, that Trump would “double down and invest in American workers and the American people” to fix the environment, to take a stab at the point but it was less clearly articulated. “We got close to an agreement, because all those things are happening,” Walz said in response.
An English teacher marking each candidate for sentence construction would hand the whole night to Vance. Some of Walz’s lines were simply garbled: “I’m still on the fact, on this, economists — Sen. Vance, you said you don’t like the economists, which economists are saying that it is immigrants that’s adding to the cost.” Simply by speaking clearly and calmly, Vance got over some ideas that Trump has never been able to.
Room for Disagreement
Walz may have been the less confident debater, but Democrats also argued he had his best answers on the issues they wanted discussed the most the next day: Abortion, health care, and January 6th. The flubs that thrilled conservatives the most were on issues — gun safety and support for Israeli airstrikes on Iran — that aren’t necessarily winners for Republicans.
Notable
- A CBS snap poll after the debate found both candidates significantly improved their favorability ratings with viewers, a reflection of the relatively friendly conversation. They were virtually split on who won as well: 42% said Vance, 41% said Walz. For comparison, a CNN snap poll after Mike Pence’s first debate as Trump’s running mate, in 2016, found a 7-point GOP advantage.
Kadia Goba and Shelby Talcott contributed to this report.