New York — “I guess we now know the story about Walz being nervous and a bad debater wasn’t an expectation-lowering exercise — it was a leak,” said one top Republican leaving the just-concluded vice presidential debate between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance late Tuesday night. Indeed, when the debate began at 9:00 p.m., it was clear from its first moments that Walz was just what the stories had said — nervous and a bad debater. It was also clear that JD Vance was going to win the debate decisively.
Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of the Trump campaign, said he could tell what was happening almost immediately. When I asked what the key moment of the debate was, LaCivita quickly answered, “The first 20 seconds.” Why was that? “Because the first question out of the gate is dealing with leadership on the world stage, everything going on in the Middle East, and Tim Walz comes up on stage and he’s completely rattled. He does not project the image of the type of leadership that you want in the White House. So right then and there framed the whole thing.”
Yes, it did. Walz’s shaky start cast a pall over the night for Democrats, and even when he got better, which he did, Walz still wasn’t as good as Vance. The Republican out-argued Walz on world crises, on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, on immigration, and fought him to at least a draw on gun violence.
Then there were the moments when Walz inexplicably beat himself. When co-moderator Margaret Brennan asked about Walz’s oft-repeated tale of having been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, when in fact he was in Nebraska, Walz went into a long song and dance about being from a small town. And then he said, “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.” And then he said that he is given to talking too much. “I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric,” Walz said. In that moment, he did an excellent job of arguing that he is too emotional to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. And then, finally, when prodded by Brennan, he admitted that he “misspoke” about Hong Kong. Why didn’t he just do that to begin with?
Brennan then turned to Vance for his own tough question, which concerned all the harsh criticisms Vance levelled at Donald Trump back in 2016. Now, he’s Trump’s running mate; does he just tell the former president what he wants to hear? It was a question Vance knew very well. I was talking recently to a veteran of Vance’s 2022 Senate race, who noted that Vance held 75-plus town halls during that campaign, and someone asked the you-bashed-Trump-but-now-you-like-him question every single time. Vance has had a lot of practice answering it. And on this occasion, unlike Walz, he began with, “I was wrong…” Vance said he criticized Trump and then changed his mind because 1) he believed some negative, and inaccurate, media accounts of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and 2) “Donald Trump delivered for the American people rising wages, rising take home pay, an economy that worked for normal Americans.”
Vance handled the question designed to make him uncomfortable far better than Walz did. And then, when the discussion focused on the economy, Vance analyzed Walz’s position in a way Walz never could. “Honestly, Tim, I think you’ve got a tough job here because you’ve got to play whack-a-mole,” Vance said. “You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver rising take home pay, which, of course, he did. You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver lower inflation, which, of course, he did. And then you’ve simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries, and housing unaffordable for American citizens.” Vance recounted some of his family’s struggles to pay the bills and concluded with, “We can do so much better. To all of you watching, we can get back to an America that’s affordable again. We’ve just got to get back to common sense economic principles.”
By this time, Walz’s partisans, in the worlds of politics and journalism, were nearly beside themselves. America’s Coach was choking the game away. A little more than an hour in, the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser tweeted, “Where is the Tim Walz who went viral after ‘weird’ Republicans? Not showing up on that debate stage so far tonight.” To which the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty answered, “This is not his best setting.”
Indeed it wasn’t. “Vance is going home tonight with Walz’s wallet,” tweeted The Atlantic’s David Frum. “Vance didn’t even have to snatch it. Walz just handed it over…”
Trump’s side knew it. After the debate, Donald Trump Jr., who is close to Vance, called the night “absolutely incredible. It was just a master-class performance…just a blowout.” Rep. Byron Donalds called Vance “dominant.” Senior advisor Jason Miller said Vance “exposed tonight that Tim Walz and Kamala Harris are all slogans — there’s no substance to any of it.”
So the die was cast. But then, after more than 90 minutes of debate, came the moment Democrats were waiting for, the moment they had envisioned Walz turning the tables on Vance and proving the Republican to be unqualified for high office. Co-moderator Norah O’Donnell turned the conversation to the “state of democracy” and asked Vance about his statement that he “would not have certified the [2020] presidential election.” Would Vance and Trump try to challenge the next one, too?
Vance answered at some length before Walz asked Vance about 2020 in a much more direct way. Trump “is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said to Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?” Vance dodged the question. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” he said before trying to change the subject. “That is damning,” Walz said. “That is a damning non-answer.”
Democrats cheered from coast to coast. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who came to the post-debate Spin Room to speak in support of Walz, told reporters, “Of all the 90 minutes, one minute really, really mattered, and that was when JD Vance actually defended Donald Trump, which is nearly impossible for most Americans to believe, in denying that Joe Biden had actually won that election. So where are we going to head from here if they don’t believe in our democracy?”
The Democratic political world collectively said it was about time Walz spoke up. The crew at MSNBC was elated. They just hoped people were still watching so late at night.
And then there was Chris LaCivita. When I asked him to react to what Klobuchar had said, he was entirely unconcerned. “I think if you’re voting on the issue regarding what happened in 2020, you’ve already picked a side,” he explained. Democrats have placed great emphasis on 2020 and “protecting democracy,” but “they’re not talking about the issues that matter to the American people.”
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“When you poll or look at January 6, no one talks about it,” LaCivita continued. “They’re the only ones that talk about it. It’s not an issue. It’ll be a great issue for the hardcore registered Democrats who are going to vote for Kamala anyway, but that’s not what the campaign is about, turning out and advocating to that small group of people who are actually going to decide the election.” I said he seemed confident that Vance’s 2020 answer did not lose any votes. “Zero, none,” he said.
If LaCivita is right, then even Walz’s Big Moment turned out to be not so big, as much as it might have excited the talking heads at MSNBC. Given that it came more than an hour and a half into the debate, it might not have been seen by that many people, anyway. And even if it was, it seems unlikely it would have outweighed the long debate that preceded it, with Vance outperforming Walz at nearly every turn. So maybe LaCivita’s theory that Vance’s victory was clear in the first 20 seconds is correct. “We just looked at his expressions and you could tell he could sense it,” LaCivita said of Vance. “He just knew how it was going to go.”