Most political pundits declared that Republican Senator JD Vance got the better of Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the sole vice presidential debate on Tuesday evening. Walz made a few slip-ups, such as when he accidentally said he befriended school shooters and had to own up to the fact he had not been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
Many were also surprised by the fact that Vance presented a more restrained and less awkward version of himself than has been seen on the campaign trail so far.
Put together, these facts have made commentators likely to say that Vance was the winner.
The truth is a bit more complicated than that. Snap polls from CBS and CNN both showed that Vance only slightly edged out Walz or the two were tied, contrary to what those pundits said.
In some ways, Vance’s performance should not have been surprising. When I reviewed hours of Vance’s debate footage during his 2022 campaign for Senate in Ohio, he did much of the same stuff he did this week. He talked about his Mamaw and his mother’s drug addiction; and when he got frustrated with the moderators, he confronted them directly. He made almost identical remarks when discussing how he went from hating Trump to running to be his number-two.
Walz’s performance didn’t surprise me either, since he largely relied on his record, tried to keep it local and talk about his record in Minnesota — though he missed the chance to defend Minnesota’s abortion law when given the chance from moderators — and didn’t go in too hot against Vance, despite him famously giving Trump’s running mate the “weird” reputation.
The governor seemed to go out of his way to be deferential to Vance, which some liberals may not have liked. They might have preferred that he threw some haymakers — but that’s not what necessarily would have gone down well with other Americans.
Onstage, America saw the Vance that parlayed his talents into a ticket out of Middletown, Ohio and into Yale Law School, venture capital, and becoming a bestselling author. This was the Hillbilly Elegy version of Vance that many liberals consulted in 2016 to explain the Trump phenomenon. It’s a powerful persona.
Walz seemed to finally land some blows when the debate pivoted to the 2020 election and January 6 riot. As a Senate guy, I couldn’t help but think about how Vance had started to sound like his fellow Yale Law grad-turned-right-wing populist, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, as he rattled off complaints about censorship from Big Tech and tried to say Facebook posed as big of a threat as the storming of the US Capitol.
Nonetheless, Vance got one advantage here: he improved his image. For the past few months, he has polled lower than usual for a running mate. His comments about “childless cat ladies” and teachers who are not parents from his years as a podcast pundit significantly hobbled him. The story about immigrants eating cats and dogs — which he later admitted was made up — didn’t help, either.
The debate appears to have helped turn his fortunes around. The snap poll conducted by SSRS for CNN found that before the debate, 52 percent of registered voters had an unfavorable opinion of the senator. That number dropped to 44 percent afterward. And where 30 percent of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Trump’s running mate before the stage lights flickered on, that jumped to 41 percent immediately after the debate wrapped up.
Walz also saw his numbers improve after the debate in the same poll. His favorables shot up from 46 percent to 59 percent and his unfavorables dropped from 32 percent to 22 percent.
That might prove to be good enough for Vance. Walz stumbled a little, but none of his mistakes proved fatal. Meanwhile, Vance needed to rehabilitate his image with a significant number of voters who think he is mean, disingenuous or too right-wing — and it looks like he did that well enough.
And while Walz’s numbers did shoot up, his numbers were high already. Some polls shows he is more popular than his would-be boss Kamala Harris.
This is not to say that this will determine the outcome of the election. Few people decide their vote based on the vice presidential debates. But it does mean that Vance has some momentum at last. What he does with that momentum — and whether he squanders it with more failures to seem personable on the stump — remains to be seen.