It was the example they explicitly mentioned, at least.

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 too 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.

yeah, expect Harris's lead to shrink a little bit

Because of the debate that ended up tied with Walz winning by double digits among independents?

It might come as a surprise, but VP debates were found to have had literally zero impact on elections over the past 50 years. Even the most (only one?) memorable of them didn't move the needle in the slightest, which was Quayle being trounced in 1988.

Sometimes people tell me they don't know the dif between where Biden stands on the issues and where Harris does. I've noticed some definite differences not only in the ways that Biden and Harris have campaigned, but also in terms of the policy programs they respectively champion. Biden basically wasn't advancing any new ideas this year. He seemed to have no re-election platform to speak of and just ran on his unpopular record, believing he could change opinion about it. Harris, by contrast, is running on an actual platform, not just the very mid Biden legacy. Having been handed the reigns just a few months out from election day, she's had little time to craft a detailed one, but has managed pretty well on comparatively short notice, producing speeches dedicated to various issues. The most important of these is her economic policy speech, as the cost of living, jobs, and the economy are of course consistently the top-ranked issue on the voters' minds. Here it is:

(If you're looking to skip past the opening remarks and get straight to the policy substance, skip ahead to around 17 minutes in.)

She divides her plan into three categories: 1) strategically-placed tax breaks for families, aspiring home owners and small business owners, and workers and consumers in general, which she describes as her top priority, 2) cost-of-living controls, which I liked just as much, and 3) the weakest plank in my opinion, supporting and subsidizing biotech innovations, including crypto and A.I. development, among other things, not all of which do I necessarily agree with. (That last item would be symptomatic of her being a California Democrat, IMO.) The very existence of this plan differentiates her quite clearly from Biden in my mind. It carries a fairly strong populist undertone that positions her vision for the economy firmly in capitalist territory yet also distinctly left of Biden's very status quo non-message when he was running.

Also very noteworthy, IMO, was her recent immigration policy speech:

I noticed that she led her speech with extensive plans for shoring up border security that went even beyond simply her previously-announced commitment to signing the bi-partisan bill endorsed by the border patrol union that Trump effectively tanked earlier this year into law. In that regard, she went further than Biden in her commitments, seeming to position herself to his right on the issue. What impressed me the most about the speech though was her detailed plan to address the fentanyl crisis in particular, which got its own dedicated sub-section in the speech. One doesn't hear Democrats discuss the fentanyl crisis much at all, let alone with such clarity and specificity. It made me confident that she will take forceful action and as a top priority. She of course also remarked about supporting a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who've been living here for decades and meet specific requirements, which is a standard-issue Democratic position that I agree with. The latter though was reserved for much later in the speech and described in less detail, making it clear that border security will be a Harris administration's higher priority, which is also as it should be.

Those speeches cover the two highest-ranked issues of the voters. The third highest-ranked in most surveys is abortion rights, and I've noted that Harris has come out in support of scrapping the Senate filibuster to pass legislation restoring the protections that Roe V. Wade had previously afforded, which is actually the same position Biden has embraced. (I wish we could just have a national referendum on abortion rights like you can in the individual states, but apparently we don't believe that participatory democracy should apply at the federal level in this country for some reason I don't understand.) Indeed, Harris's positions on other issues seem similar or identical to Biden's, including championing an all-of-the-above energy policy and a negotiated end to the Israel-Hamas War, etc. Mostly commonplace, fairly moderate positions. But on the economy and immigration respectively -- the top concerns of the voting public -- she strikes out on her own more, carving out a stance left of Biden on the economy and right of Biden on border security, both of which meet with my strong approval. I feel like she's very in touch with the mood of the country and takes the public's concerns about the Biden White House's shortcomings to heart. I don't feel like she's terribly beholden to woke politics or campaigning on her identity hardly at all despite the fact that many do in fact take pride in the opportunity to elect someone who would be our first female president ever, including 70% of us independent women.

(I'm sorry to fawn so much over Harris, I've just come to like her a lot. Also I've noticed that we don't discuss actual public policy very much on this thread. It's mostly just the horse race and Trump/Republican-bashing.)

Pete Buttigieg is GOATed, I know it has been said before but I hope that Harris places him even higher in her administration (if she wins), like Secretary of State? Dude is awesome, super intelligent, an amazing speaker, folk like Pete, Whitmer and Shapiro need to be the future of the Democrat Party. I think Pete would represent America amazingly to European and Asian allies, Ukraine, etc.

The reason why policy doesn't get discussed much here is that Trump has next to nothing that he is clear about. On almost all topics he flip-flops, evades the question or tries to run on lies to have a problem that only he can solve. Trump doesn't care because he runs for himself to escape convictions and prison time.

It's funny that the more level-headed Republicans suggest that Trump should stick to policy and attack Harris's record instead of attacking her personally. Trump doesn't have a proper understanding when it comes to a lot of topics, so he's actually better off doing his own thing. Attacking Harris's record is a similar dead end because for one, there's not much that a vice president gets to decide, and two, tying Harris to Biden isn't a good plan when Biden's policies have kept creating jobs and got inflation under control. That's why Trump's own strategy is actually the best course of action for the Republican party.

Biden hasn't been a great president, but I think everyone expected that going in already because there was no excitement for either candidate in 2020. 2020's election was about cleaning up Trump's mess and hopefully set the stage for a return to more normal times. Biden was about playing it safe and being more about a presidency of transition, because he should have never run for re-election to begin with at his age. Nevertheless, the Democrats managed to salvage the bad situation they got themselves in by convincing Biden to step aside.

2024 is the first time since 2012 that the sentiment isn't that America gets to choose only between two shitty candidates. Now that doesn't put Harris above criticism, but it's a huge improvement over recent times.

I'd love to discuss policy more as well, just this race makes it kind of hard. Like, a policy discussion at this stage of the race almost by necessity pits Harris' policy against Trump's, and it is so blindingly clear to me that Harris' is better that I don't have much to say on the topic. I've had criticisms of some of her policy positions (like the whole "no taxes on tips" thing), but they all feel so meaningless when actually contrasted with her opponent. So, unless someone actually wants to come in and defend Trump's policy positions, there isn't much for me to really feel a need to discuss and it feels like every time someone flirts with defending Trump, they immediately get 10 replies and run away... 

Trump gets treated with such kid gloves when it comes to policy details. Basically tariffs+drill baby drill+deport millions of immigrants will solve all of America’s problems.

I worked his Presidential campaign. He took a photo with me at 1am in the morning after a full day of political events. Such a nice guy. 

Totally unverified but chatter was he was originally hoping to get UN Ambassador from Biden after dropping out. I thought he would be perfect for that and a good step to Sec of State. Dude speaks 7 languages and served in the military!