As he campaigned for the Democratic vice presidential spot, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz potently skewered Republican VP pick J.D. Vance as “weird” — creating a party-wide attack line on the GOP ticket that quickly got under Donald Trump’s skin. Team Trump has been baffled by the attack — as well as the idea that Vance is uniquely unlikeable, rejecting it as media spin.
During the vice presidential debate, Walz was downright nice — “too nice,” in the estimation of many members of the Democratic Party brass. He hardly pressed Vance on his most controversial past comments. Vance, meanwhile, appeared slick, but presented himself as much more agreeable than usual.
The debate lacked fireworks — but the end result, apparently, was a good night for both men, according to snap polls from several news outlets.
Across the two-hour broadcast, the two midwestern pols seemed trapped in a skipping record of congeniality, often at the expense of drawing critical distinctions between the worldviews of their respective running mates. Walz let Vance walk away virtually unscathed from several lines of questioning — including the many disparaging remarks Vance has made about women, his admitted lies about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the senator’s extremist views on abortion.
By the time the debate concluded, the Trumpworld elite were largely elated — or, in some cases, breathing sighs of relief — as they fist-bumped one another, declaring that Vance, the allegedly “creepy” weirdo, had appropriately acquitted himself. At a watch party hosted by the ultra-MAGA New York Young Republican Club at Manhattan’s Playwright Irish Pub, there were whoops and loud cheers for mentions of mass deportation; rounds of booing and hissing at Walz; and plenty of grinning and applause for Vance’s manicured lines attempting to put a kinder, gentler, more rehearsed face on late-stage Trumpism.
They remained ebullient even as, near the end of the televised event, Vance predictably doubled down, as virtually the whole of the Republican Party has, on Trump’s anti-democratic lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that President Joe Biden won — outright refusing to admit that Trump lost.
As Rolling Stone conversed with the Democratic Party upper crust, it was clear that those on the Democratic side were not completely thrilled with their guy’s performance. Throughout the 2024 VP debate, various Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, longtime party operatives, progressive movementarians, and former Obama and also Biden administration officials messaged or called in snippets of live reviews of Walz’s performance to Rolling Stone.
“Too nice,” was a term used independently by three different Democratic sources — a lawmaker, a former Biden official, and a party fundraiser — to describe Walz’s approach to Vance. For instance, one former senior Obama administration official tersely remarked that Vance would “leave with barely a mark on him” after Walz handled him “like a friend, having an argument.”
Several of the national Democratic Party sources took solace in the reality that vice presidential debates rarely move the needle to any significant degree in modern American elections, and also that it didn’t immediately register as a clear blunder or disaster for their — or either — potential VP. Still, some of those in the upper ranks of the party looking for Harris’ veep pick to humiliate or pants Vance were left disappointed as the clock inched closer to midnight.
After all, one of the prominent roles that Team Harris tapped Walz for was to be an anti-Vance and anti-Trump “sledgehammer” — an attack dog who could make progressive media and the liberal rank-and-file’s hearts flutter. And yet, if the snap polling in the direct aftermath of the veep debate is to be believed, the lack of an emotionally satisfying, figurative knockout blow may not matter one lick.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), a surrogate for the Harris-Walz campaign in the debate spin room, told Rolling Stone that while many had hoped for a clash-of-the-titans style showdown between the two VP picks, that doesn’t have “to be everybody’s style.”
“I think that we were able to get a lot more substance out of this debate, out of Governor Walz, than we’ve gotten in any other debate, because we didn’t get it out of Donald Trump,” she added.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who was also in the spin room, added that Walz is fundamentally “a nice guy. He’s not going to try to be somebody other than who he is. And the more the American people get to know Tim Walz, the more they’re going to like him.”
Snap-polling conducted in the immediate aftermath of the debate may support those assessments. Multiple surveys conducted by major news networks produced a virtual tie between Vance and Walz — one that did not shift the dynamics of the presidential contest, but boosted both VP prospects A CNN poll found that while Walz’s performance gave him a 23-point bump in favorability, Vance’s own substantial bump failed to push him out of the negatives.
Indeed, some in the Republican professional class have been perplexed in recent months as to why Trump’s running mate approval numbers are remaining so stubbornly low in the polls.
Though various voter testimonials — to say nothing of the hard polling data in states and nationally — suggest that Vance is a uniquely unlikeable American political figure, much of Team Trump has rejected that as media spin and doesn’t consider it a legitimate problem. They like the guy and think he’s normal, nice, and relatable. They think he’s funny. So many of them believe, even when their guard is down, he’s a charmer and a smooth talker — and that the media simply hasn’t given him a fair shake.
“He’s very down to earth,” a Trump campaign official insists. “If you meet him, he’s nothing like what the media makes him out to be.”
When asked In the spin room if she felt Vance could use the debate to recalibrate his rhetoric on women, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) reassured Rolling Stone: “I know that J.D. respects every single woman.”
“If the media would allow people to actually get to know him,” Britt added, any gaps that exist in his public perception will “close.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) made a similar assessment in the pre-debate spin frenzy, telling reporters that the debate would — for many voters — be the first time they hear from Vance without the lamestream media “acting as the arbiter and interpreting his beliefs.”
On Tuesday night, millions of American viewers and voters got what may have been their lengthiest single glimpse of the Ohio senator seeking to be Trump’s apprentice to executive power.
By early Wednesday, initial signs pointed to Vance and Walz each fighting — if you can even call it that — the other to a draw. In the morning, the Harris campaign announced that Walz — whom the campaign brass had been giving a sparse media profile for the past several weeks — would now embark on “an aggressive post-debate travel and media blitz,” including visits to critical battleground states.