IN SEATTLE – If you only watched the last five minutes of the debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, it would have appeared obvious who had the better night.
Asked about previous comments suggesting the 2020 election was not fair, the Republican tried to dodge the question and say he wanted instead to focus on “the future”.
Yet, Walz pounced. It was not true Donald Trump had gracefully disputed the results, he said.
“He lost his election and said he didn’t. Officers were beaten at the US Capitol that day. Some with the American flag. Several later died,” he said, passion rising in his voice. “A president’s words matter.”
The trouble for Tim Walz and for the Democrats is that he landed that blow after an hour-and-half during which Vance had largely dominated.
Walz, 60, did not have a disastrous night and in second half of the debate, when he talked about issues such as abortion access and affordable child care, he held his own.
But for large portions, especially on issues such as the economy and immigration, which polls show are of crucial importance to voters, Vance proved he was the smoother debater.
Very importantly, Vance opted not to be an in-your-face attack dog as if often is, but presented a more civil version of himself.
There were no attacks about childless cat ladies, or Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. At times he even tried a flash of humour.
“Honestly, Tim, I think you’ve got a tough job here, because you’ve gotta play Wack-a-Mole.”’
“You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver rising take home pay, which, of course, he did. You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver the lower inflation, which, of course, he did, and then you simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record.”
With barely a month until election day, Democrats had gone into Tuesday night’s debate trying to lower expectations, aware that for all the positive things he brings to the ticket, he is not a first class debater.
Walz was good in smaller settings, they said, and taking to groups of people and stressing his everyman credentials. They said that Vance, a graduate of
Yale Law School, was a practised debater who had further honed his skills with a flurry of media interviews since Trump picked him to be his running mate.
And that was largely how it played out, with Vance putting on a moderate polish to everything Trump has said and done, and to every policy he had proposed.
He even had an explanation for how he had once voiced loathing for Trump and likened him to Hitler.
“I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he said. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believe some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record. But most importantly, Donald Trump delivered for the American people.”
Vance was also able to make the point the Trump campaign had wanted the former president to make himself with more vigour, when he and Harris debated last month – saying she’d already had three-and-a-half years to enact any policy she supported. Why hadn’t she already done so.
Walz was able to deliver a blow of his own on the issue of abortion.
Vance, who is socially very conservative, had previously suggested he would support a national ban.
“Donald Trump put this all into motion,” Walz said. “He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe versus Wade.”
In an attempt to appeal to moderate voters, Vance said he did not back a national ban and said Trump’s view was that individual states should decide whether to limit abortion.
Several times during the debate, Trump posted on social media in full caps.
“EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,” he wrote half way through the event.
On paper, Vance and Walz share at least part of a similar Midwest and heartland biography.
Walz grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska, while Vance was raised amid poverty and drug abuse after his grandparents moved to Ohio from Kentucky’s Appalachia – events he would write about in Hillbilly Elegy.
Yet their journeys forked at a path in the road: after college Walz spent two decades as a high school teacher in Minnesota before entering politics and being elected to Congress. He then made a successful run for governor. For more than 20 years he was a member of the National Guard.
After completing law school, Vance joined the US Marines, before studying at Ohio State University and then securing a degree from Yale.
Tuesday’s debate was far more civilised than the encounter between Harris and trump, when the VP managed to rile the former president with barbs about the size of the crowds at his rallies..
They shook hands at both the beginning, and did so again at the end. It was also more substantially about policy.
Will any of it make any difference?
Typically vice presidential debates have not been shown to move the dial very much. But in a close election, where a few thousand votes could make the difference between victory than defeat, then it might.
And if that is the case, Democrats may be for feeling less joyous. And Republicans will certainly be celebrating.
