JD Vance sure did step in it

| 9:09 am EDT October 3, 2024
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With something like a vice presidential debate, you often don’t know who really won it until you see what the headlines are about the next day. Most Americans don’t bother to watch the debate, and they instead only hear about the one or two soundbites that manage to make it into the next day’s news cycle.

While the vice presidential debate was going on, I thought JD Vance’s whiny feud with the moderators about fact checking was going to be the soundbite, because it was an objectively embarrassing moment for him. But then we got to the end of the debate and Tim Walz managed to create the real soundbite of the night by asking Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance’s refusal to answer the question, and Walz’s framing of it as a “damning non-answer,” ended up being the story.

Sure enough, most of the headlines, cable news discussion, and social media discussion on Wednesday were about Vance refusing to say whether Trump lost in 2020. That meant Tim Walz won the debate by default. Walz wasn’t perfect during the debate but he didn’t have to be. All Walz had to do was to make sure that the one big embarrassing soundbite of the night was about Vance and not about himself. And that’s what Walz managed to pull off.

Before the vice presidential debate I predicted that the biggest impact of the debate would come from the Kamala Harris campaign’s ability to turn JD Vance’s worst moments into TV ads. As it turns out, the Harris campaign is already running ads featuring Vance’s non-answer about Trump losing. It’s that big of a deal. Vance sure did step in it.

What’s particularly surreal is that even as JD Vance refused to admit that Trump lost in 2020, he also declined to claim that Trump won in 2020. Trump’s official line is that he won the 2020 election in a landslide, by whatever imaginary margin his addled brain makes up on any given day. But Vance wasn’t willing to go there – at least not on live national television.

Vance did end up reciting Trump’s election lies at a rally on Wednesday, blatantly enough that even Fox News cut away from him. It’s as if Trump called Vance last night and demanded to know why he didn’t answer the question during the debate. The real answer may be that Vance knows Trump is toast and is trying to preserve his own political future by not quite fully embracing Trump’s conspiracy theories. It’s one thing to say crazy nonsense to a rally crowd. It gets you in more trouble if you say it during a debate that serves as your national introduction.

Not that JD Vance has a future. Failed running mates rarely do. And Vance has chained himself to Trump’s non-viability in a way that’s going to stick to him going forward.

In any case, after giving it a day, we can now firmly say that Tim Walz won the debate based on how it’s playing out in the headlines. Given that this may have been the last debate of the election, the “big swing” moments may now be over. This election now comes down to grinding it out in the ground game: door knocking, phone banking, getting people to the polls, and the all the good old fashioned stuff that usually decides elections in the end.