Last night’s vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz should have unnerved America. It proved that the spares are better than the duo running for president. Compared with the presidential debate, when Kamala Harris baited an irascible Donald Trump for 90 minutes, this ranked as a Socratic dialogue. The VP picks actually talked about policy and didn’t shout at each other. Vance’s comment – “I appreciate what Tim said about Finland!” – summed up the tone. In a campaign which has been anything but, at one-point Walz described their differences as “philosophical”.
The Harris team have so far used Walz like a campaign’s mascot, warming up crowds with his Donald Duck smile and affected high-school coach demeanour. He’s done few interviews. This lack of practice on cable TV each day showed in the debate. He was nervous. He tripped through his allotted two minutes. In one memorable faux pas, he said: “I’ve become friends with school shooters.” He was flummoxed by a question about why he had said he was in China during the Tiananmen Square protests when he was not. He used prepared put-downs at random, which created clanking non sequiturs, and spent too long talking about his home Minnesota (did you know the Great Lakes contain 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water?).
This gave Vance the space to craft his image. He needed to push back against the perception that he’s an angry, online poster who talks about women like a creepy anthropologist. Instead, he was measured and polite. He said how “awful” it was that Walz’s son had witnessed a school shooting, for instance. He tried to sound empathetic on abortion, calling for Republicans to earn “people’s trust back on this issue where they, frankly, just don’t trust us”. He lamented that women lack childcare options and said providers must be paid more.
The consensual tone masked serious disagreements. Vance’s populism is alien to Walz. Take their exchange on experts. While Walz paraded analysis from Wharton Business School, Vance railed against credentialism. “They have PhDs but they don’t have common sense” he said. “For the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus ‘we not doing it anymore’.” Walz does not understand, let alone harness, voters’ anger at the elites and the experts. In his closing statement, he unironically praised Harris’s coalition, from “Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift”.
Throughout the debate, Trump seemed to loom over Vance’s shoulder. Vance knew his boss was watching: Trump was live-blogging the debate, like an aspiring pundit. Vance’s detailed, long-standing opposition to Trump (he once called him America’s “Hitler” and said in 2020 that Trump’s “economic populism” had failed) seemed to make him anxious to prove his loyalty. At one point, he panickily blamed media coverage for making him think Trump was Hitlerian. He refused to admit that Trump lost the last election, nor would he accept that carbon dioxide causes global warming. (But “if we did [accept that]”, he said, then onshoring jobs and domestic manufacturing should be the priority because they lower emissions.) Vance has combined a gentlemanly approach to the opposition with an unwavering loyalty to Trump.
In any case, this debate will probably not change the result on 5 November. But it could change the 2028 election. Parties remember past debates when choosing candidates. Vance’s performance will shore up his position within the party, making a run for the nomination in 2028 more likely. In the least, this will boost his authority within the campaign and his position in the potential administration. Or perhaps, Trump will get angry that his running mate is getting the limelight – and that voters are starting to notice.
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