Oct.02
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You Can't Spell "Temper Tantrum" without T-R-U-M-P

Tim Walz and J.D. Vance met for their first and only debate of the campaign last night, and showed the country that the key to having a normal debate is making sure Donald Trump is not on stage. It was a generally substantive, generally collegial affair, and one almost entirely without the drama that attends a Trump debate.

If you haven't watched the debate, and you would like to, you can do so here:



You can also read a transcript here.

Normally, when we write up the debates, we work our way through each of the key players on stage. However, the way that last night's meet-up unfolded pretty much demands that we consider Walz and Vance together, as they were similar in a lot of ways, including their basic approaches to the debate.

The Candidates

Nerves: Before the debate, Walz admitted that he was nervous. And for the first several minutes, it showed. Take a look at his answer to the very first question that was posed to him:



Note the frequent appearances of the disfluency "uh."

After a few minutes, however, Walz settled down, and was actually quite good. He's an experienced teacher with extensive public speaking experience, and his instincts clearly kicked in. He looked into the camera, spoke clearly, was mindful of his body language, and generally projected an air of competence.

Vance, who decided to forego his usual eyeliner, was also nervous at the outset. He did not overrely on "uhs" and "ums," but he did speak far too rapidly. You can see his first answer here:



Like Walz, Vance also settled down after 5-10 minutes. And like Walz, Vance performed very capably. The difference between Walz and Kamala Harris, in terms of delivery, is relatively small. Harris was better, but not by leaps and bounds. The difference between Vance and Donald Trump, by contrast, is enormous. The content of Vance's remarks was problematic (keep reading), but he certainly looked like a grown-up and a serious politician. Trump looks like someone who is 5 minutes from: "We just can't take care of dad anymore, and he's going to have to move into an assisted living facility."

What Was the Question, Again?: Vance and Walz both looked like veteran politicians (and, for that matter, veterans). They both also demonstrated a veteran politico's ability to answer the question they wanted to answer, rather than the one that was actually asked. We watched the whole debate, and yet have no idea whether Walz would support a preemptive strike on Iran, or Vance actually believes that the U.S. Army can be used to execute mass deportations.

This said, Vance was generally a bit clumsier when it came to dodging the moderators' questions. If you watch his first answer, for example, you will see that he was absolutely, no doubt about it, going to get 45 seconds of "I'm just a hillbilly" stuff in there first, regardless of what the first question was. The single most obvious dodge of the whole night, because the moderators returned to it several times without success, was whether or not Vance believes Trump won the 2020 election.

Normalcy: So, both Walz and Vance looked and acted like grown-ups. And both Walz and Vance looked and acted like politicians. They generally behaved themselves, and did not often speak over each other or the moderators. There were also numerous occasions, on both sides, where they acknowledged that the other side has a point, or the other side is honestly interested in doing the right thing for America. There were even moments where one candidate expressed appreciation or empathy for the other, such as when Vance told Walz that he (Vance) was sorry that Walz's son was witness to a public shooting.

Not to keep dumping on Donald Trump, even if he deserves it (did you hear he decided the best way to honor Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday was to badmouth the Peanut Farmer?), but the debate gives one hope that The Donald really is sui generis, and that once he exits the political stage, a lot of the obnoxious stuff will exit with him. Vance is plenty Trumpy, but he was still able to act like a human being.

Authenticity: Both men clearly came in to the debate looking to emphasize their credentials as "regular folk." They both had some success, we suppose, though Walz did a better job than Vance did.

First of all, Walz is better at projecting "regular guy," because he clearly IS a regular guy. Some of his "man of the people" content was clearly pre-planned, but a fair bit of it seemed to come out naturally and organically, like when he quoted scripture (Matthew 25:40) or said "I'm a union guy" or talked about environmental legislation by mentioning its impact on his farmer friends.

Second, the current incarnation of Vance (who is something of a chameleon) is pretty far removed from "regular guy," especially on the campaign trail. Shakespeare observed that "one man in his time plays many parts," and returning to the role of "hillbilly" is not so easy for the Senator. Whereas Walz managed to get many and varied "regular guy" details in there, Vance basically kept repeating the same details, about his poor family, his mother's drug abuse, and his being raised by his meemaw. We almost expected him to provide a link to the Amazon page for Hillbilly Elegy.

Track Record: Walz and Vance spent some time trying to make an affirmative case for their running mates. But, at least to us, it seemed that they put higher priority on tearing down the other man's running mate.

This is yet another area where we think it was advantage Walz. Donald Trump is considerably easier to critique, since there is more there to criticize, and since he was actually president. One of Walz's very most effective moments was when he talked about the Sen. James Lankford (R-OK)-negotiated border bill that Trump torpedoed:



Truth be told, Walz did a better job of laying that out than Kamala Harris did in her debate. On the other hand, he gave a clumsy answer about his own experiences in China, and his previous misstatements therein. Harris did not have any fumbles as significant as this one.

Vance had two related issues on this front. The first is that he did not have a president to tear into, he was attacking a vice president. We think that roughly 100.0% of voters know where the buck stops, and it ain't with the VP. The Senator's tortured attempts to slam the "Harris Administration" (really the Biden Administration, of course) were further undermined by his propensity to exaggerate. To give one example, among many: "So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand." Unless you already dislike Harris and the Democrats, this is a bit hard to take seriously.

Lies: There was much attention given to CBS' announcement that the moderators would do little to no real-time fact-checking during the debate, in contrast to what happened during the Trump-Harris debate on ABC. It was, and is, hard to avoid the conclusion that CBS was worried about getting the sort of blowback that ABC got. No less than Dan Rather, former anchor of the CBS Evening News, slammed his former employer as "spineless."

As it turns out, this was not all that big a problem. Live fact-checking works well with outright falsehoods. It is much less plausible with politician lies. And to the extent that Walz, and particularly Vance, issued forth with falsehoods last night, those falsehoods were almost exclusively politician lies. The "Harris border wand" line is a politician lie; it's not entirely a fabrication, it's more a biased framing coupled with some exaggeration. To take another small-ish example, Vance said that Trump governed based on "commonsense wisdom." That's ridiculous, but it's not exactly something that can be fact-checked.

The most egregious politician lies came from Vance, near the end of the evening. Pretty much the most tense exchanges of the debate involved the events of 1/6. Vance has to tote his running mate's water at all times, and he certainly can't admit to any wrongdoing on that particular day, so he made three assertions of extremely dubious merit: (1) Trump left office peacefully and without resistance, (2) Democratic censorship of conservatives is a worse threat to democracy than anything that happened on 1/6, and (3) the party that REALLY refuses to accept election results is the Democrats, because Hillary Clinton complained about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

We think all three of those assertions are nonsense, but they are as much opinion as they are fact, which is why fact-checking would be tough or impossible. We also tend to think that because Walz and Vance both indulged mostly in politician lies, low-information voters could have a tough time discerning what is truthful and what is not. Not because these low-information viewers are stupid, but because evaluating much of what Walz and Vance said requires context that only fairly well informed viewers would have.

The Moderators

On the whole, moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan did a pretty good job. They largely maintained decorum, they asked some good questions, and they were clearly well prepared. Of course, it helps when, you know, there's no Donald Trump on stage.

As we note above, the fact-checking thing turned out to be much less a problem than anticipated. That said, we do have two criticisms for the duo. The first is that they tried to do too much. Yes, we get it, they and their network get 90 minutes in the sun, and then that's it for 4 years (or more). However, their questions did tend to be too long and complicated, which really invited the candidates to just talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. Also, their repeated declarations that "we have a lot to get to" got tiresome. We have previously taken the position that depth is better than breadth. Nothing that happened last night caused us to revisit that opinion.

Our other criticism is that, as journalists, they were sometimes unacceptably sloppy in their verbiage. In particular, talking about "the border crisis" and "the childcare crisis" effectively advances Republican messaging on those issues. Moderators, who are ostensibly as neutral as Switzerland, should not be doing that.

Takeaways

Now that we've put our thoughts to paper (well, to pixels), let's take a look at what others have to say. The debate is big news, and takeaways pieces are pretty easy to write, so most major outlets already have one up.

CNN:

The Hill:

The BBC:

ABC News:

NBC News:

The Washington Post:

Fox had a takeaways piece, too, but they didn't break it into sections, so it doesn't fit this format. If you want to read it, however, it's here.

Surveying the lists above, it appears that the main storylines are: (1) the debate was a civil/grown-up affair, (2) Vance's 1/6 answers were problematic, and (3) Walz dropped the ball on the Tiananmen Square answer. We don't object to that list, though we thought that Walz did answer the Tiananmen Square question as well as he could.

There have already been a few insta-polls. The Washington Post's swing-state voters panel had it 14-8 (63%-37%) for Vance. Debate host CBS did a poll, with 42% of respondents giving the nod to Vance, 41% to Walz, and 17% calling it a tie. CNN's poll had it 51% for Vance, 49% for Walz.

Reader Response

We erred a little bit in our own insta-poll setup, but readers were able to figure it out. About 10% of Electoral-Vote.com respondents felt that Walz helped himself a lot, whereas 25% thought he helped himself a little, while 15% thought Vance helped himself a little. That means half of the respondents thought that neither candidate moved the needle. On a scale of 0-100, where 0 is "no impact" and 100 is "changed the entire trajectory of the race," readers gave an average score of 16. So, it was a minor tremor, at most, and not an epic earthquake.

Here is a selection of reader comments:

Thanks to everyone who weighed in!

The Bottom Line

With voting already underway in 20 states, this is probably the last "major" scheduled event of this campaign cycle. Not only is Donald Trump insisting he won't debate Kamala Harris again, but yesterday he unexpectedly pulled out of the customary 60 Minutes special in which both candidates are interviewed. Harris will still appear, but Trump was apparently frightened of appearing on any outlet that will not feed him a steady diet of softballs.

As readers can probably tell from our remarks above, we think Walz had the better night overall. It was nowhere close to a blowout, as with Trump-Harris, but we think it was a slight win for the Democrat. That said, because we believe the debate would have been very tough to parse, unless a viewer was already pretty well informed, we tend to think it won't have much impact on the election. Well-informed voters are usually already pretty set in their choices by this point in the cycle. This is not a particularly bold assessment, as VP debates rarely seem to have much impact.

So, those are our thoughts. We are now, quite literally, in primetime for October surprises. Beyond that, it looks to be full speed ahead to November 5. Although we will have one more debate item on Friday. (Z)


This item appeared on www.electoral-vote.com. Read it Monday through Friday for political and election news, Saturday for answers to reader's questions, and Sunday for letters from readers.

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