A little late, I know, but thought I'd share my thoughts on this week's running mate debate tonight:
After living through one Donald Trump presidency, I have no interest in sugar coating the truth: Tim Walz sucked. He's a good man, but a bad debater. It says what you need to know that on the following evening's prime time cable news shows, only those on Fox News had the debate as their lead story, while the Democratic Party-oriented MSNBC, by contrast, buried their coverage deep in the second half of their programs and largely confined it to a couple favorable soundbites, anxious to move on quickly. And in the liberal press, there's a bunch of complaining about the hosts, which is what the losing side always does. (Apparently they didn't provide Walz enough assists. Doesn't CBS know it's their job to win Tim Walz's debate for him?) That's not to say this was June Biden-Trump debate scale catastrophe or anything by any means. The post-debate polls thus far suggest that Vance was only narrowly (as in by a low single-digit percentage) considered the winner of the evening and that the audience's opinion of both VP candidates improved as a result of watching, so nothing monumental happened here. Still though, throughout the entire thing, I couldn't help wishing it was Josh Shapiro up there instead. In fact, astute followers of my posts will have noticed that I was rooting for a choice like that back when the veepstakes were on and offered no public response to Walz's selection. That's because, while passable, he wouldn't have been my choice precisely for reasons like this.
Problems with Walz's performance range from the delivery to frankly his entire approach. We all noticed that he was clearly nervous and no, it wasn't confined to a few moments. JD Vance controlled the debate for nearly the entire time. This nervousness on Walz's part led to a lack of clarity at key moments, like when he was attempting to lay out his running mate's plan for the economy. He vaguely rushed through a list of policies in a single sentence rather than offering even a brief, single-sentence explanation of each item, and that probably didn't help the undecided voter understand where the Harris ticket stood on those issues very much. Lots and lots of stuff like that happened across the evening.
The much larger issue though was that Walz seemed to more or less want to replicate the Joe Biden approach to debating on steroids, going into overkill on agreeableness, focusing near-exclusively on policy, and, most painfully of all, running more on the deeply unpopular Joe Biden record than on the Kamala Harris "new way forward". Much of Donald Trump's problem at the top of the Republican ticket has been incoherence. He has a couple of paths available to him: he can either try to cast Harris as Joe Biden 2.0 or he try to cast her as the woke candidate who ran a failed presidential campaign back in 2019. At the core of his trouble is that he doesn't want to choose between those critiques, but instead seeks to portray them as both somehow true at the same time. At once he will compare her directly to Biden while also using the (very lame) nickname "Comrade Kamala" to cast her as a dangerous far-left extremist. It doesn't make any sense. Vance, by contrast, seemed more keen to pick one narrative and stick with it. He sought mainly to tie Harris to Biden, often referring to the Biden White House as "the Kamala Harris administration" and such like this, and Tim Walz's response nearly all the time was to defend the Biden legacy instead of distinguishing his running mate from the unpopular president in any real way. Harris herself did a better job of that in her debate with Trump. There was no "Clearly I am not Joe Biden" moment to the running mate debate; no "You are not running against Joe Biden" moment. There needed to be.
Also, frankly Walz should've made things more personal on occasion. He should've occasionally brought his opponent's character into question like Harris did Trump's and like he (Walz) often quite famously has on the campaign trail. It was none other than Tim Walz who popularized the whole "weird" labeling of Republicans and that was mainly in respect to his critiques of Vance in particular. Why wasn't Vance's career in venture capitalism, i.e. in destroying American jobs for a profit, part of the narrative on debate night? Why wasn't his (Vance's) fascination with characters like neo-monarchist intellectual Curtis Yarvin or his calls for more restrictive divorce laws or for parents to be granted more than one vote per person part of the discussion? Agreeableness is one thing, but IMO there were just a few oo many "I agrees" and not enough reminding people that JD Vance is a dangerous weirdo who wants many Americans to enjoy fewer rights in the future than they do right now. (Seriously, when Vance joined the presidential ticket, even Austin was like "Okay we give up, we don't want to be weird anymore." 
) In the absence of such reminders, a clearly well-prepared Vance was able to largely succeed in recasting himself as a halfway reasonable guy and soften the image of his running mate in the process to a degree.
Clearly Vance had gotten the culture's message that demure is in and weird is out. ("Demure" being essentially a stylized way of saying "mature" or "professional". For examples, click on my profile, select the option that reads "Posts", then choose anything. 
) The JD Vance who showed up to the debate on Tuesday didn't seem to be the same man who only shortly before had proven too socially inept to successfully order doughnuts. He was polished, spoke smoothly like he was comfortable in the presence of other life forms from Earth, creatively reimagined many of his running mate's positions in real time, and used the phrase "I agree" more times than I could keep track of, almost every time in a superfluous way. Taken together, it all added up to the viewing audience going from a starkly negative opinion of him going in to a net positive opinion by the end, with his personal favorability rating rising more than Walz's (already higher) one with the viewing audience. In short, Vance started the debate as someone Americans felt wasn't fit to be president and emerged as someone at least a plurality now felt was qualified for the job. It was part of Tim Walz's job to stop that from happening.
Does any of it matter? Probably not much. Vance's big win in the debate was by an average of just three percentage points across the various post-debate viewer surveys, people still liked Tim Walz better as a person (as you can also see at that link), and viewership was substantially lower than the Harris-Trump debate. But hey, I can now say that I have edified you with my thoughts.
Last edited by Jaicee - 3 hours ago
