What to really expect from tonight’s Tim Walz vs JD Vance vice presidential debate

| 7:55 pm EDT October 1, 2024
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There have been times when the vice presidential debate was crucial in a presidential election. After Mitt Romney lied his way through his first debate in 2012 and President Obama couldn’t correct them fast enough, it fell on then-Vice President Joe Biden to even the score in his debate with Paul Ryan. Biden indeed won the debate by a mile, and helped buy Obama time until he was able to come back and win his own second and third debate.

One could argue that tonight’s vice presidential debate has the same stakes, only with the parties reversed. Donald Trump is losing the election by every possible metric. He lost his own debate to Kamala Harris in historically embarrassing fashion. And he seems incapable of helping himself at all on the campaign trail. So now it’s up to his running mate, JD Vance, to turn around the narrative. But I don’t think that’s possible, for a couple reasons.

First, Trump has made this election all about him. It’s a referendum on whether you love him or hate him. The idea that Trump is suddenly going to go up meaningfully in the polls, simply because his nondescript running mate had a good debate? That’s a stretch. With the way Trump has already framed things, it’s hard to imagine tonight helping him even if it goes well for him.

Second, precisely because Trump wanted this election to be all about him, he intentionally picked a bumbling yet subservient running mate like Vance. Of course Trump is too narcissistic to figured out that more Americans hate him than love him, and that he could have benefited from a charismatic running mate. So now Trump is in the unenviable position of needing his running mate to lead the way into contention tonight, after having made a point of picking a running mate who couldn’t lead his way out of a paper bag.

So it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Vance doing well tonight would help Trump, and it’s also hard to imagine Vance doing well tonight period. It is going to be a bit of a mess because the cowards at CBS News have announced they’re not going to fact check things in real time, which means Vance will be able to lie as much as he wants. But Walz should be able to do to Vance what Joe Biden once did to Paul Ryan, more or less, and that should be that.

This debate will likely be seen by the persuadable general public as a win for Tim Walz, or a tie if the lack of fact checking turns it into too much of a muddled mess. Either way, I’m not sure it’ll have much impact on the election overall. Or at least not an immediate one. The most meaningful aspect of tonight’s debate may come when the Kamala Harris campaign inevitably starts using JD Vance’s most extremist moments from the debate in upcoming TV commercials.