For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.
And then things went off the rails.
In the final question of the debate, moderators asked the Ohio senator about threats to democracy, and in particular his statement that as vice president he would not have certified the 2020 election. In his response, Vance tried to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, riot and Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the election, revealing why he would be a dangerous vice president.
Vance claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20” and said, “I believe we do have a threat to democracy in this country, but it’s not the threat that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It’s the threat of censorship.” This strange misdirection requires Americans to disbelieve what they saw and what Trump said in favor of an extremely online conservative talking point.
Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, sniffed blood and asked Vance point-blank whether he believed Trump had lost the 2020 election. Vance refused to answer, and instead rambled again about censorship. “You guys wanted to kick people off Facebook,” he said, as though that allegation was worse than stealing an election.
A vice-presidential debate is important not because it is likely to shift the polls—it isn’t—but because it tells voters something about the policies of the two people who could become president. Although both candidates dodged the moderators’ direct questions, voters may well have gained a more complete understanding of the two parties’ platforms on climate change, the economy, and immigration, and how widely they diverge. Both candidates were civil, even polite. But Vance’s answer on fundamental issues of democracy—or rather, his refusal to commit to it—suggested that such a basic question should have arisen far earlier in the night.
For most of the 90 minutes, Walz was clearly struggling. Ahead of the debate, both sides tried to set expectations, with Democrats warning that Walz was historically a shaky debater and the Trump campaign insisting he was great at it. The Democrats were closer to the mark. Walz came out seeming nervous, and though he calmed down, he never looked comfortable. He frequently sounded like he was spinning his wheels, with none of the casual conversationalism that has been his trademark in his brief time in the national spotlight. He was somber and effortful.
The Minnesota governor’s worst moment came when he was asked why he’d said he was in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when in fact he’d arrived later that summer. Vance gave a circuitous answer about his personal biography, copping to occasionally being a “knucklehead.” Only when pressed in a follow-up did he finally just admit he’d misspoken, falling short of the image of the plainspoken plainsman he’s cultivated so carefully. Walz’s best moments came when he was most personal, such as when he talked about Minnesota farmers experiencing the effects of climate change or how meeting the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting shaped his views on gun control.
The best evidence of Walz’s poor performance was the fact that Vance, who has been a gaffe machine and can seem wooden and impersonal—“weird,” in Walz’s parlance—came across well by comparison. He seemed relatively smooth and competent even though he tried to change the subject or twist the context when asked to defend Trump’s past actions. For example, rather than defend Trump’s family-separation policy at the border, Vance said that “the real family-separation policy in our country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s open southern border.” (You would never have known from Vance’s answers that Harris is vice president or that Joe Biden even exists.) Pressed on Trump’s bogus claim that climate change is a “hoax,” Vance gave a misleading answer about Harris’s energy policy. When moderators clarified details about legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance complained that debate rules banned fact-checking.
On subjects such as abortion, where Vance’s past statements have been controversial, he was able to appear thoughtful and reasonable. Explaining why he had supported a national ban on abortion in the past but no longer did, he cited the results of a 2023 referendum in Ohio that supported abortion rights. “What I learned from that, Nora, is that we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust,” Vance said. Notably, this isn’t the same as taking a clear position on abortion. Trump has waffled on his position, but has boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade.
This kind of spin, however misleading, is a bit of a throwback to politics the way they used to be practiced. For much of the night, the debate was strikingly boring, in the best way—unlike the NASCAR vibe that we’ve become accustomed to since 2016, where viewers are watching to see if there’s a fiery crash. Vance’s final, appalling answer about January 6, though, was a reminder that Trump is a destructive force, which his running-mate, of all people, can’t hope to escape.
