The first and likely only vice presidential debate of 2024 was a far cry from the emotional rollercoaster of the first two presidential debates, the first of which ended President Joe Biden’s candidacy and the second of which drew a profound contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump. The discussion tonight had few fireworks; it was dense, as Vance and Walz moved swiftly through their talking points. It was more Midwestern nice: there were nearly no personal attacks, but lots of agreement through gritted teeth.
The most notable takeaway, perhaps, was the way in which Vance strenuously tried to distance himself from the persona he had only recently sought to craft: that of an incendiary, right-wing populist firebrand, an emissary from the fever swamps. Instead, the guy we saw tonight tried to reanimate the carcass of the man who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, a persona Vance had seemingly discarded sometime after January 6 as he sought to be Trump’s running mate.
Vance grasps for a rebrand
Throughout the night, Vance tried very hard to present himself with a soft touch, adding copious doses of performative humility. He repeatedly emphasized how he grew up in a hardscrabble town in Ohio and is close to his family. At a few points, he went so far as to assert that he and Walz agree on policy points. There were fewer mentions of Springfield than his persona on the stump might have led us to expect. “Christ have mercy,” he exclaimed after hearing that Walz’s son witnessed a shooting.
At no point did he specifically disown the Trump agenda, or other far-right positions he has espoused. The aim seemed to be to dispel the critiques that stem naturally from Vance’s own words about childless cat ladies and pet-eating Haitians without putting daylight between Vance and Trump, or Vance and his backers.
His personal mission was clearest during a section on abortion: Vance kept repeating the idea that Republicans need to earn back the voters’ trust when it comes to reproductive health care. That sounds good on paper, but what does it really mean in practice when the next thing that comes out of Vance’s mouth is that he thinks access to abortion, and all the other crucial health care that comes with it, should come down to what state you live in?
On this topic, the rebrand lines up with what Vance (and Trump) have been doing in the past couple of months: making vague promises about reproductive health care as they continue to praise the wisdom of the SCOTUS ruling that created the current crisis in the first place.
Walz makes the stakes clear on question about January 6
Though the debate was marked by displays of midwestern politeness, the final question, on January 6, saw it take a bit of a turn, and Vance’s mask began to slip. Vance tried to breeze through the question, saying that Biden was, eventually, inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021, as he attempted to claim the real scandal was Biden administration efforts to tamp down COVID misinformation.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz replied.
Vance was here, Walz said, because Pence would not do what Trump asked. “Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage. What I’m concerned about is: where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he can do anything, including taking an election, and his vice president isn’t going to stand up to him?
“Will you stand up?” he asked “Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn’t?”
“So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”
Vance does a slippery debate-club dance on climate
It’s rare for these debates to front a question about climate change, but, in the wake of the highly destructive Hurricane Helene, it was perhaps unavoidable. Climate was the second topic tonight, after foreign policy.
Walz touted the Biden administration’s record on clean energy. Vance, somehow, managed to avoid saying he thinks climate change is real or happening: “Let’s say it’s true, for the sake of argument. So we don’t argue about weird science, let’s say it’s true.” He then made an argument about what he would do if 40-plus decades of scientific consensus were maybe, somehow, correct.
That answer, too, had layers of irony. Vance demanded that the U.S. government direct more investment in domestic solar panel production, saying that we cannot let the Chinese produce a key technology for the energy transition.
It was a surprising pivot from the question, which mentioned Trump’s repeated assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance at least implied that was incorrect, but the problem for him, as Walz pointed out, is as follows: The Biden administration, across a few pieces of legislation, already pushed for exactly what Vance said should happen.
Lifelike VP candidates, radically different tickets
At a few points, Vance seemingly sought to take credit for policies that Democrats had implemented. Early on, for example, he suggested that Trump would prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had committed crimes — that’s already policy. He did the same with respect to solar panel production.
But the mixture of style and substance here goes to a larger point: that Vance was trying to embody a Trumpism that could exist without The Donald. It’s still Trump, with the mixture of policies and style that’s become so familiar; there’s just a younger, bearded midwesterner delivering it.
Vance managed to bring a new sheen to what’s becoming a familiar style. But there were a few moments that revealed the gulf in radicalism between the two tickets.
Take the contrast in the scandals the moderators asked about: On the one hand, the moderators asked Vance why he suggested in 2016 that Trump was America’s “Hitler,” only to become his running mate less than a decade later.
On the other hand, they asked Walz why he said that he was at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests when, in fact, he was in China at another time that same year. Walz stumbled through this question, conceding that he can be a “knucklehead.”
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