Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer
Tim Walz walked onto the vice-presidential debate stage knowing he wouldn’t do the one thing that got him onto Kamala Harris’s radar in the first place.
The Minnesota governor burst onto the national scene this summer by branding J.D. Vance and Donald Trump as simply “weird,” demonstrating to Democrats in repeated TV interviews that one particularly effective line of attack against the Republican ticket didn’t focus on calling them a threat to democracy. It landed him on Harris’s shortlist and she ultimately chose him as her running mate because they got along and she could see them working together, and his plainspoken argument about the Republican ticket’s extremism continued through the Democratic convention. This fall, however, his role has morphed. As Trump fearmongers about a crime-ridden dystopia defined by illegal immigration if Harris wins, Walz has been barnstorming battleground states where he is trying to keep the focus on Trump but also trying to put a reassuring, recognizable face — genial midwestern teacher and coach — on the agenda Harris is pitching.
After his matchup with Vance on Tuesday, it’s now fair to wonder whether this approach has been the right one. Walz has been mostly absent from TV interviews, the medium that made him a player, while Vance, who came up as essentially a pundit, worked smoothly to elide the questions from CBS News and to try to make Trump seem like a reasonable and coherent conservative. No one close to Harris thought the debate would change the course of the campaign, but they were far from thrilled in the opening minutes as Walz was both slow to rebut Vance and unsteady in explaining what Harris would actually do as president. He had a different goal, though, which was to keep pitching to the undecided voters, some of whom are only following the election casually and are still weighing their options and others who say they want to hear more about Harris. To that end, he tried to present an agreeable image of the Democratic ticket and repeatedly pivoted back to Trump instead of raising or litigating Vance’s wilder comments, such as about “childless cat ladies.”
For a while, though, you could see why people close to Walz spent the weeks leading up to the debate saying that he didn’t consider himself a great debater. Vance was slick and it looked like there would be no satisfying moment in which Walz would catch him in his evasions, say about Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants en masse and inevitably separate families. Vance seemed to have the initiative, succeeding in more or less pretending Harris, not Joe Biden, had been president for the past four years and that the result was chaos. It wasn’t until the candidates faced off on abortion — clearly a winning issue for Democrats — that top strategists started to breathe slightly easier, as Walz repeatedly insisted Harris wanted women in control of their own health care.
Still, by the midpoint of the debate I started hearing from high-ranking Democrats both inside and close to the campaign about how VP debates rarely matter much anyway. (Indeed, it reminded me of the 2016 debate when Democrats were perturbed that Tim Kaine — a moderate who’d been chosen in part to play the reassuring role of suburban dad — wasn’t more aggressive in taking on Mike Pence, a smooth right-wing communicator in large part thanks to his past in talk radio. By the next morning, all focus had returned to Trump and Hillary Clinton.) Some of the senior liberals who’d been pinging me throughout the night comforted themselves by saying at least these two were actually debating, not just slinging mud at one another. As the night dragged on and it became clearer that swing voters were not just unlikely to be watching but unlikely to be swayed by any one moment in the debate’s opening hour, a strange nostalgia began to set in. “This debate just reminds people of what politics could be like if Trump was off the scene. What it was like before he came down the escalator — and what it might be like if he’s taken away on a conveyor belt,” said a top Democratic strategist during the commercial break. This is someone who detests Trump and can’t stand Vance’s dark vision but appreciated the tone of conversation, at least. “It could be a debate on policy instead of a divisive debate about personalities.”
At least, that’s how many Democrats felt before the moderators asked about January 6. Walz directly asked Vance if Trump had lost the 2020 election, only for Vance to dodge by saying “I’m focused on the future,” and Walz replied, “That is a damning nonanswer.” That killed in a focus group of undecided voters in battleground states being monitored by the Harris campaign. By the following morning, the Harris campaign turned it into an ad.
If Harris advisers were skeptical the debate would move the needle much, they still knew individual moments could matter in shaping overall impressions of the ticket, especially if they were clipped and shared for the next few days. The January 6 exchange was by far the clearest example, but as they monitored the focus group, they saw more reason for optimism than their colleagues (and pundits) who were grading the debate purely on overall poise and delivery. The campaign found that the best-received moment for either candidate in the debate’s first 15 minutes came when Walz reminded viewers of Trump’s erratic nature. He hit a new high point with the voters when he pointed out Trump had promised and failed to build a border wall.
Both campaigns have wondered how to orchestrate excitement in the final month of the campaign absent another debate, which Trump has refused. Perhaps an October surprise of some kind will change the toss-up dynamic, but it seems clear the closing stretch of the campaign will be a slog for all four candidates. At least among Harris forces who are unnerved by how close the race remains, the January 6 back-and-forth did offer them some energy: Here was a clearly unacceptable — anti-democratic, unpatriotic, sneaky — position from Vance, framed as clearly as possible. Walz likely didn’t inspire many undecided voters off the fence on the power of his own arguments, and he underwhelmed even some of his own fans. But if the exchange over January 6 is the one that’s remembered from the debate, he will have done his job.
