J. D. Vance Got the Conversation He Wanted at the Vice-Presidential Debate

Vice-Presidential debates are normally for the archives: the transcript gets recorded and then filed away. Strain your memory and try to recall: Who won the debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney? Biden-Ryan? Even Harris-Pence, just four years ago? In the rush of the Presidential race, these events were simply speed bumps. The best way to approach Tuesday night’s version was with a certain measure of historically earned skepticism. Was there any reason to think that this Vice-Presidential debate would actually matter—would even be remembered—by Election Day, now a little more than a month away, when so few have in the past?

Maybe not. But during ninety remarkably fast-talking minutes in New York—verbally, both candidates are speed demons—the Ohio senator J. D. Vance moved the narrative of the race in a small but perceptible way toward the Republican side. Vance was first to every touchstone that mattered—the first to introduce himself personally to the American people and to bring up the meagre and pressured working-class circumstances in which he was raised, the first to insist that his was the ticket to favor “clean air” and “clean water,” the first to credit his running mate, Donald Trump, with an “economic boom unlike we’ve seen in a generation in this country.” His intent seemed simple—to persuade voters, who are broadly dissatisfied with the direction of the country, that the Democrats are largely responsible for it. But Vance also had an advantage in cunningness. The young senator even managed to turn around a question on family separation, one of the more reprehensible episodes of the Trump years. “Right now in this country . . . we have three hundred and twenty thousand children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” he said. “The real family-separation crisis is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s wide-open southern border.” (In August, a D.H.S. inspector general’s report found that the agency was unable to keep track of all unaccompanied minors who have been released or transferred from U.S. custody after entering the country.)

The pace was sometimes a little too much for Tim Walz. In interviews that he gave after his selection as Harris’s running mate, he said that he had warned her before being picked that he wasn’t a very good debater. There was some evidence of that on Tuesday night. Certain points came naturally to him—Trump’s “fickle leadership” on the world stage, how many of the people who worked for Trump in the White House oppose his candidacy this time. But even economic-populist talking points sometimes got garbled in Walz’s throat, as when he expressed his sympathy with “teachers, nurses, truck drivers, whatever.” (Explaining why he’d changed his position on an assault-weapons ban, Walz said, “I’ve become friends with school shooters,” when he meant the families of their victims.) Earlier in the day, there were reports that Walz had wrongly claimed that he had been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square uprising. Hardly a mortal sin (he seems to have gone to China a little later that year) but embarrassing. Inevitably, Walz was asked about the issue during the debate. “I’m a knucklehead at times,” he said. At one point, Walz said, in finishing an answer, “I hope we have a conversation on health care.” Smoothly, Vance said, “Please.” Then they didn’t, for a while.

The story of the debate—and perhaps of the latest chapter in the race—lies in what they were being asked to talk about. One advantage the Minnesotan had over Vance was an actual record of accomplishment. He was at his best ticking off the state’s achievements under his leadership—reductions in child poverty, a building boom that helped stabilize housing costs in Minneapolis, and a best-in-the-nation health-care system—and contrasting that record with Trump’s: “He gave a tax cut that went predominantly to the top class. What happened there was an eight-trillion-dollar increase in the national debt.” But the first half hour was dominated by Iran, by a very long section on immigration, and by an economic exchange framed around the deficits—all issues friendly to Republicans. Abortion, the issue Democrats would most prefer to emphasize, came up nearly forty-five minutes in. The most damaging moment for Vance came after a question about whether Trump had lost the 2src2src election, which he didn’t answer, pivoting instead to complain about “censorship.” (He also refused to respond to a question about whether he would challenge the results of this year’s election.) “That is a damning nonanswer,” Walz replied. But that exchange came in the final fifteen minutes of the debate.

Of course, the sequence of topics isn’t up to Walz. But it isn’t just the result of choices made by the moderators, either. Harris’s campaign has run toward the center in recent weeks—most notably on gun control, on the border, and on Israel—in an apparent effort to reassure moderate voters that she isn’t too radical for them. She has also been relatively quiet since her commanding performance at September’s Presidential debate, choosing, perhaps, to let Trump dominate the headlines and allow voters to remember what they so despise about him. Each of those tactical decisions is defensible, but together they have also made it easier for the news to be overtaken by issues favorable to Trump: “I hope we have a conversation on health care” might end up being the story of the Presidential race.

This has been a nervy week for Democrats. The stability and recovery that predominated in the summer has partly been washed away, by the war-auguring strikes in Lebanon and Israel and by the closer-to-home horrors of the floods from Hurricane Helene in the Southeast. (Trump managed to beat Harris, to say nothing of Biden, for an on-site visit to Georgia.) The basic Democratic advantage has always been that most voters don’t much like Trump and don’t want a return to his Presidency. But capitalizing on that fact requires some skillful articulation from the Democrats—to remind voters of what they didn’t like about their situation four years ago, when the Republicans are reminding them of what they don’t like about today. Walz didn’t do terribly. Democrats might have even caught a glimpse of the kinds of things that they should be talking about during the final weeks of the contest—perhaps more about Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which Walz denounced convincingly late in the debate. Election Day is just over a month away; this was the last scheduled debate. It’s going to be a tight finish. ♦