Holy shit, it's the Dragon Prince on Netflix in real life!

Pence might as well be Viren!

Well, he is Vice President for sure!

I wonder if that fly will have any symbolism for Pence and Team Trump for the Christian community.

My reading of it was that Mike Pence was so boring that a fly mistook him for a corpse.

In all seriousness though, this was a good debate! I found it both a very refreshing and welcome relief from what we witnessed a week prior and a depressing reminder of which people should be the candidates instead of the mere running mates. There was a real exchange of ideas to be found here and one may actually have learned something about where the respective tickets stand on the issues of the day, in contrast to last week. It goes without saying that I strongly sided with Harris's stands on basically everything, ranging from health care to education to the environment and foreign policy to abortion rights to, needless to say, the coronavirus outbreak. I do have questions about the morality of deliberate ideological court-packing that apply to both of the candidates though and I'm afraid I agreed with Pence when he criticized Joe Biden's past opposition to the raid that took out Osama Bin Laden. Here though I'm really reaching for areas of agreement with Mr. Pence, one can tell, because they were exceedingly few in number.

As to who viewers felt did the better job, the only national poll on the subject I could find on that here the morning after was one conducted by CNN immediately after the debate and it depicted a clear perception of victory for Kamala Harris.

59% of viewers said Kamala Harris "won" the debate.
38% of viewers said Mike Pence "won" the debate.

It's worth pointing out that this is slightly less lopsided than CNN's analogous survey on the Trump-Biden debate last week, which saw a 60-28 divide favoring Biden. This difference suggests that Pence is an asset to Trump's re-election bid and a better debater. It also, however, suggests the existing support level for the Democratic ticket this year is pretty well baked-in at this point, and those viewers who say the debate affected how they intend to vote overall leaned toward Joe Biden as a result. And with an average lead of 9.7% in national polling, anything resembling the continuation of the status quo in public opinion should suit the Biden campaign just fine. Kamala Harris also improved her public image in this debate, according to CNN's survey: Going into the debate, 56% of the viewers said they have a favorable view of Harris, while a higher 63% said they had a favorable view of her after watching the debate. Mike Pence's favorables, by contrast, didn't move, standing at 41% both before and after the debate.

CNN's poll also found that men and women perceived this debate very differently. Overall, men seemed to feel this was somehow a close debate while women perceived it as a blowout.

Among male viewers:

48% felt Harris "won".
46% felt Pence did better.

Among female viewers:

69% felt Harris did better.
30% felt Pence "won".

Like I said a minute ago, it wasn't a close contest in my mind. Pence struck me as evasive and condescending throughout, refusing to answer the question he was asked far more often than Harris and both interrupting and talking over his rival and the debate moderator Susan Page alike a lot more often than Harris did the same. Lines from Pence like "Stop playing politics with people's lives" and his repeated refrain that "You’re entitled to your own opinion; you’re not entitled to your own set of facts" made my jaw drop, as did Pence's outlandish comparison of the Trump Administration's handling of this year's coronavirus outbreak, which has already killed more than 210,000 Americans, to the Obama Administration's handling of the swine flu outbreak of 2009-10, which killed fewer than 12,000 (i.e. a lot less than the regular flu!). I don't know that anyone could more dishonestly and disingenuously project more of their own side's painfully, painfully obvious faults onto their rival than that! Harris, in contrast, generally respected the rules of the debate, generally answered the questions she was asked, and managed to defend her boss with much greater honesty.

Pence also from time to time engaged in what us feminazis call "mansplaining", which refers to the phenom of a man condescendingly explaining to a woman something she would obviously understand better than he would, which Harris sometimes called. For example, it struck me as fairly arrogant of Mr. Pence to lecture the former Attorney General of California on the subject of law enforcement and also on her supposed blindness to white racism as a black woman who has lived the experience. These are both subjects that I think called for more humility from Mr. Pence than he was willing to offer.

We'll see what other polls on this debate indicate as they are released, but anyway that was my take on the debate and on the roots of why women, at least according to this first survey we have, overwhelmingly sided with Kamala Harris.

I think God's plan for Mike Pence involves him returning to Indiana in January.

Well, flies are attracted to piles of shit.

This post is a little bit sketchy IMO... generally you should avoid making broad assessments of groups like that.

Keep in mind, Christians are a broad group. About 63% of the democratic party identifies as Christian of some stripe.

I think the comment would be better if it were a bit more specific. For example, if it specifically identified Evangelical Christians who overwhelmingly support Trump (72% approval rate among them). And... I kind of agree that they do tend to gravitate towards politicians with really shitty policies.

It's definitely worth discussing that support, but comparing Christians to flies (which I get isn't exactly what you were doing) poisons the well a bit in that regard.

I don't get the huge support Evangelicals give to Trump beyond them hoping he'll stack the courts enough to overturn the Roe and Obergefell decisions (they're already starting to make overturning Obergefell the next Roe-level rallying cry for the party). And the response of Evangelicals as a group to the coronavirus has been, frankly, abhorrent.

Besides spreading Qanon theories about Bill Gates, I've seen too many evangelicals posting some pretty cavalier stuff about how people are too afraid of death and should embrace death and trust God. I'm sorry, but that's a Jonestown level of religious insanity, and I won't back down from that stance. Ugh.

Roe is the supreme court decision that legalized abortion in the US I'm pretty sure.

Actually I am not making any assessments, I am wondering how the community looks at something like this when symbolism is something that is shone throughout the bible.  It could be taken in multiple different ways and it would be interesting to see how the narrative is portrayed between different groups within the Christian community. In reality its no big deal but then again people are quick in general to use such things to form narratives which I can see happening.

Roe is the 1973 ruling that determined the right to an abortion without excessive government restriction, which has never been explicitly defined. It was decided 7-2 by a heavily conservative Supreme Court of whom four members had been appointed by Nixon with the intent of undoing much of what the Warren Court had done. Ironically, only one of the two dissenters was a Nixon appointee, William Rehnquist (who later became Chief Justice under Reagan). 

Catholics in the US tend to be more liberal than evangelicals. Catholics are generally opposed to abortion, but many of them do not feel they have the right to interfere in the reproductive decisions of another, which is Biden's stance. Catholics tend to be less likely to oppose gay rights. Catholics are also generally opposed to the death penalty, which is tied into their beliefs in the sanctity of life that lead to them opposing abortion. Catholics tend to live in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Southwestern US states, all of which tend to be more secular as a whole.

Evangelicals are much more hardline. Evangelicals staunchly oppose abortion and gay rights, and they are also offended by any kind of sexual activity outside of the context of a monogamous marriage where a male is the head of the household, which feeds into their opposition to abortion. Unlike Catholics, evangelicals also strongly support the death penalty. Evangelicals live primarily in the former Confederate states, with some of them in the Midwest as well. Where Catholics are more likely to support a social safety net, Evangelicals generally oppose social safety nets, feeling that any and all assistance should be provided by religious organizations.  Their tendency to be one-issue voters on the subject of abortion leads them to embrace politicians like Trump. Evangelicals have also been pretty susceptible to Qanon propaganda, and they are more likely to oppose face masks and other measures taken to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.