Veep Debate Wrap

(Julia)

First, Walz sounded as populist in places as I’ve heard him talk about executives going to Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s taxes. In other ways he rejected the populist framework confidence in expertise is invoked as a crucial difference between the tickets.

Second, Vance followed the playbook I laid out at the beginning of the summer – before the Democratic candidate switched. Vance tried to put things in a retrospective framework, highlighting Trump’s record and repeatedly talking about what Harris has and hasn’t done as vice president (rhetorically positioning her as the sitting president). In the second half of the debate, this framework was somewhat challenged in the policy discussion, but Vance approached it with great discipline early on.

But this plays differently when it comes to the veep debate: Walz is much better positioned to defend Harris than she would be to defend herself (and explain the vice president’s tricky role). In that sense, Vance put Walz on the defensive at times, but also put him in the role the VP candidate is about to play.

This was actually a pretty substantive debate, which made me wish I could see such a debate where both candidates were actually good-faith actors. Both candidates talked a lot about their running mates, as they should.

But there is another part of this story in light of the way Trump’s term ended in January 2021. Vance said Trump participated in a peaceful transition of power, which certainly appears worth repeating. 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 Friday after I get some sleep, but the most important thing to know about him is that he’s not Mike Pence. there, and we all know why.

(David)

It was a surprisingly – and for me disappointingly – cordial debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz on Tuesday evening. Vice presidential debates don’t mean much, so I want them to be entertaining. Give me a few good zingers, or a fly on someone’s head, to make it worth missing playoff baseball.

There wasn’t much of this. Walz did a fine job, but for some reason Harris’ campaign has sapped almost all of his exuberant charm, reducing him to a boilerplate pol. Vance is smooth and polished; The fun for me is seeing how he sidesteps the madness of his running mate. He knows he can’t publicly disagree with everything Trump has said about climate change, tariffs, health care or the 2020 election, but he doesn’t necessarily want to say those crazy things himself. His carefully prepared workarounds and solutions were usually quite impressive.

With exceptions, especially in the area of ​​abortion. So he tried a strategy of telling a story that led to a lesson in favor of the family, and capping it off with a call for the states to decide. None of the pieces fit together, but that’s fine; it worked with other subjects. But here it was shocking for him to introduce a dear friend who had had an abortion, because if she hadn’t “it would have ruined her life, because she was in an abusive relationship” – and then left her behind to leave, presumably with her life ruined in a post-Dobbs land. And then he framed the lesson as if to reinforce the mistake: “There’s so much we can do policy-wise, just to give people more options.” Well, except for the option that wouldn’t ruin her life.

As it turns out, Vance’s clever dance around Trump’s nonsense ended up giving Trump a new line of nonsense. When asked about school shootings, Vance bizarrely blamed migration, claiming that “thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a huge influx of the number of illegal guns controlled by the Mexican drug cartels” into the United States . That’s not true; guns are used out from the US to Mexico – which has increased, but especially during Trump’s term in office.

Well, Trump went to Truth Social to explain the false claim. “Kamala has allowed millions of illegal weapons into our country. She is a DANGER to our children and our schools!” he wrote. Expect this to show up in his stump speeches soon. Thanks JD!

(Jonathan)

Oh, I love the bulleted style:

• I can’t emphasize enough that the VP debate is a largely silly exercise that just doesn’t matter all that much. Unlike the presidential debate, there’s no particularly good reason to do this, although I don’t know if it’s actually harmful.

• Tim Walz was more popular coming in, but JD Vance actually had the most to lose – given his poor election numbers and his unusual lack of experience, a bad night would have raised a lot of questions about him in the future. In the event, Vance was as prepared as he could be, and did a fine job most of the time. He’s unlikely to be a problem in the future.

• It’s somewhat strange that Democrats didn’t make Vance’s inexperience an issue, but as a result he didn’t have to answer a single question about his (minimal at best!) qualifications.

• Walz had the best line in the gun segment debate, responding to Vance’s argument that everyone should just adopt a siege mentality, harden all the doors and windows and put security guards everywhere. Walz: “Sometimes it’s just the guns.” This is about a 70/30 issue that favors Democrats’ positions, and Walz has neatly navigated the rhetoric.

• But the crux of the debate only emerged with the final question, which was about Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. I don’t know if it was a conscious strategy or not, and again, the discussions about the VP debates won’t matter in November, and especially there are no undecided voters who watched the entire debate. But as a bit of theater, Walz’s decision to emphasize how much they had in common during the debate left him panicking about Vance’s inability to admit that Trump had lost extremely effectively in 2020. It restored the shock value to something absolutely shocking.

• And we’ll see, but since they both chose a strategy of being nice to each other, that last segment really stood out and might end up drawing the bulk of the coverage, which could probably undermine any one likely to that point. Vance did well” storyline.