So I think this debate was basically a draw. Vance was smooth and organized. He approached normality. He was often clearer than Tim Walz was. Tim Walz is not a terribly articulate debater. That’s something the Harris campaign tried to telegraph last week. And I think it was a good idea to do that. On those fronts, Vance did better. Vance was also on message. He literally tied everything to inflation and immigration. Even the most preposterous things he brought back to those issues. Vance definitely did well on that front too.
But Walz did better than I think some people may realize because with all the jumbliness and clackity clink he got in the story of the women whose lives were lost or endangered by Trump state abortion bans. Again and again, there were key points, key stories that the Harris campaign clearly wanted him to say from the stage and he did, even if they were surrounded by Walzian word fugue. And that really matters more than how focused he was as a speaker. He got those things. That matters more.
This started to play out more in the second half of the debate. There was an exchange on abortion, there was an exchange on health care, and there was an exchange on democracy. Walz won all of those. He won them not just in some logical sense. But I think he won those in the eyes of most viewers. That happened not because he bulldozed Vance with rhetoric or debating razzmatazz but because Vance’s argument just didn’t make sense because it was obvious he was hiding the ball. He went to town about bringing back denial of insurance for preexisting conditions and claimed that Obamacare is now awesome because of Donald Trump. Perhaps most striking, he refused to say who won the 2020 election. Again, it’s not so much that Walz destroyed Vance but Walz hung with him and just let him destroy himself because most people don’t agree with what he’s selling. I think we will hear more about Vance’s refusal to say who won that election.
Final point. It drove me crazy that Walz spent half his time saying Vance was probably a good guy and they could probably agree on a lot. Drove me crazy. It drove me nuts that Walz didn’t swing hard at some hanging curveballs Vance threw over the plate. (He finally did on democracy.) But I’m not the audience for this stuff. I think the avuncular nice guy thing probably worked for him with the people who matter. Not my cup of tea but I’m not the average voter.
So overall verdict: Vane was smoother, more focused, more organized. But for all his wobbliness Walz got in the stories and the images I think the Harris campaign wanted in there. By the second half of the debate there were repeated questions where Vance was ducking and bobbing and denying the obvious because he and his candidate are just on the wrong side of the public. So overall I think basically a draw. In a way they both did well, even though they did everything differently. And final point: remember that this whole debate probably didn’t matter in the first place unless there was some massive gaffe. And there wasn’t.
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