Vice Presidentaial candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance were more civil with each other than expected in their one debate Tuesday night with each supporting their presidential candidates.
A sampling of reactions, courtesy of The New York Times:
“In these last five minutes, Walz destroyed Vance on a threshold question of character and democracy,” said Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law and a former policy adviser to Senator Marco Rubio.
“After tonight, Donald Trump needs to speak less and let JD Vance speak more. Vance’s weakest moments tonight have been in trying to defend Trump,” said Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster who worked for Republican candidates in previous elections.
“While the debate was civil and at times even substantive on policy, the candidates approached the debate differently: Walz took opportunities to lay out a vision for what a Harris-Walz administration would accomplish with respect to housing, immigration, and protecting democracy, while Vance downplayed or outright denied the policies and rhetoric of President Trump,” said Didi Kuo, a political scientist at Stanford University.
Walz seemed nervous for the first few questions but recovered and provided a strong defense of Kamala Harris while focusing on the many failings of indicted felon Trump.
“It was a chance for the long-unpopular Vance to try to right the ship, while it presented Republicans with a chance to lay a glove on Walz in ways they’ve thus far failed to. And of course, the name of the game was not so much building themselves up as helping their tickets,” reported The Washington Post.
Before the debate, word leaked out of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign that they were worried about Walz as a debater. It could have been dismissed as lowering expectations, but they clearly had at least some reason to worry.
It wasn’t great. And Vance appeared much more comfortable in his own skin, pitching a more broadly acceptable version of himself than what we’ve seen so far in his political career.
Walz began with a strained answer on the Iran-Israel tensions, repeatedly stumbling over his words at a time when many voters were first being introduced to him. He often looked down right after giving an answer. He seemed nervous, especially early on.
Even when delivering attacks on former president Donald Trump and Vance, Walz often didn’t explain what he was talking about in a way that was intelligible to casual viewers. (For instance, he cited Vance saying he would “create stories” about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, without saying he was talking about Vance’s defense of his false claims about Haitian migrants eating Springfield residents’ pets.)
It was especially awkward for Walz, though, when the debate turned to his apparently false statements about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.
Walz tried to talk around the question and focus on his biography and work in China, before trying to get past the question with, “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.”
But moderator Margaret Brennan wanted a firmer answer.
“All I said on this was — is I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I will just — that’s what I’ve said,” Walz said.
When things turned silent, Walz added that he was in the area during democracy protests and added, “And from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.” (Walz appears to have traveled to Hong Kong several months after the Beijing protests ended in a massacre.)
That should be one of the lasting moments of the debate.
Vance’s performance was mostly confident, and he seemed to take care to appear as a relatively standard-issue conservative Republican — to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, a “compassionate conservative.” That included repeatedly emphasizing empathy — in contrast to the culture warrior he has fashioned himself as in recent years with his comments on “childless cat ladies” and the like. Vance even seemed to suggest Obamacare was working (while suggesting Trump had somehow saved it, despite failing in his efforts to replace the health-care law).
Whether this has an impact on the popularity gap between the two, we’ll have to see.
Walz hit his stride on the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot and Trump’s obvious successful attempts to ramp u the violence and sedition against democracy and the Constitution.
“Toward the end of the debate, Walz had some of his strongest moments, and they related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 “The Post noted, adding:
Vance compared Jan. 6 to Democrats’ past claims about Russian interference, saying this “has been going on for a long time, and if we want to say that we need to respect the results of the election, I’m on board.”
Walz took the cue to press Vance on whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election, and Vance avoided the question by talking about the Biden administration’s efforts to crack down on covid misinformation.
“January 6th was not Facebook ads,” Walz shot back, citing Russian efforts to help Trump in 2016. Walz added: “That is a damning non-answer.”
It was indeed tough to see how Vance squared his emphasis on respecting election results with Trump’s many false claims about voter fraud, which Trump continues to focus on to this day. And Walz drove that home.
Walz added of Vance’s predecessor as Trump’s VP nominee: “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”
In most cases, debates between vice presidential candidates don’t mean much and have little effect on how people will vote in the uptomiong election.
If anything, the face-off between Walz and Vance Tuesday showed why.
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