What I Learned from the 2024 VP Debate
If I'm gonna watch it, I'm gonna write about it!
I watched the 2024 vice presidential debate more in sorrow than in anger. There was reason for anger. Prior to the debate CBS News had waffled on whether they would fact-check the candidates. Given Tim Walz’s fuzziness on his personal biography and JD Vance’s outrageous lies about the residents of Springfield, Ohio, some anticipatory real-time fact-checking by the moderators would have been a good idea!
But it was mostly in sorrow, because by and large vice-presidential debates make zero difference in election outcomes. This is the most memorable moment, by far, of any vice-presidential debate:
It was one of the most devastating moments in televised debate history. It also did not matter a whit; George H.W. Bush throttled Michael Dukakis in both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 1988.
Given Trump’s advanced age and seeming cognitive decline, however, this debate was also a test of whether Vance would be up to the challenge. As MSNBC’s Hayes Brown observed, Vance does not exactly bring a wealth of political experience to the table:
Vance is in just his second year as an elected official. He has passed no major legislation, and several of those bills that he has submitted have had no co-sponsors at all. Before winning his seat in 2022, he was an author and a Silicon Valley gadabout and served four years in the Marines, mostly as a war correspondent.
This makes Vance the least experienced vice presidential candidate since then-Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska was tapped to join the GOP ticket in 2008.
No VP candidate wants to be compared to Sarah Palin. As Brown notes, however, Vance is polling worse than Palin at similar stages of their respective campaigns. The polls also show him to be way less popular than Walz. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake looked at all the polls and concluded, “Walz is modestly popular, and Vance is quite unpopular. That’s been the case for weeks…. it’s not just middle-of-the-road voters balking at [Vance]; it’s also a matter of Donald Trump’s supporters and Republicans being less enamored of their party’s running mate.”
On the other hand, Vance is a Yale Law School graduate and, “has already gained a reputation as a strong communicator and policy whisperer for the Trump campaign, as well as the torchbearer for the MAGA movement,” according to Politico’s Mia McCarthy.
So what did I learn?
The economic populism was depressing. Vance neutered Walz’s talking point on Trump’s disregard of policy experts by arguing that said experts were responsible for the awful U.S. economy generated by deindustrialization and globalization. Except that this is a horseshit claim and Trump’s policy proposals would make everything worse. But since the Democrats have chosen to similarly embrace economic populism, Walz wound up mostly conceding the point to Vance. This was a harbinger of (some) things to come, as…
There was a surprising amount of comity in the debate. Both Vance and Walz took pains at times to say that they agreed with a lot of what the other candidate was saying. There was almost no crosstalk and both of them were on their best behavior in dealing with the moderators.1 Given Vance and Walz’s discourse on the campaign trail I found this a bit surprising, to say the least. I suspect most viewers liked it: this was a calmer, more pleasant debate to watch than the Harris-Trump debate, for example. I would have liked to have seen more disagreement, however. Particularly because…
JD Vance lied a lot. Stylistically, Vance was the better debater with the smoother answers; Walz appeared particularly nervous in the first few minutes. Vance lied multiple times however — in his responses on climate change, school shootings, abortion, and health care. The last one was particularly risible — Vance kept claiming that Trump made Obamacare work when Trump actually tried to repeal it multiple times. Those were the answers in which Walz stood his ground and provided a solid contrast with Vance. But even those issues paled in comparison to the area of greatest disagreement. Which is why…
The most important moment of this debate came at the end. Debates matter both because of the viewing audience and because of the way they frame the next few media cycles. So it was noteworthy that the area where Walz pressed his attack the most was in response to JD Vance’s tendentious claim that Donald Trump oversaw a peaceful transfer of power in January 2021 and Democrats are overreacting. Walz pointed out that this was the most important difference between Harris and Trump, and that if what Vance claimed was actually true then Mike Pence would have been on the debate stage instead of Vance. There were some opinion writers who were super-eager to praise Vance to the heavens and filed their copy before this exchange. But I suspect this portion of the debate will have the greatest staying power over the next few days. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether I am right or not, because in the end…
This debate will not matter. This election is between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
There was one exception when Vance complained about fact-checking by but GOP whining standards it was pretty minor.
Vance’s misogyny was clear; he mansplained at length when a woman tried to be in charge.
Lemme offer you a cranky, currently quite drunk Bernie-crat's perspective, for what it's worth to you. J.D. Vance said a lot of decent-sounding things, and Walz theoretically agreed with them. Except... Vance is a hypocritical little shit, and Walz is not. Trump promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. He did not: Biden did. To my pleasant surprise, at that. Mea culpa, I did not expect that from him.
And goddamn. The sheer moral cowardice of J.D. Vance at the end there. Sometimes a "yes or no" question isn't actually yes or no. Loaded questions, false assumptions, and so forth. But "did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election" is not one of those times.