CNN’s Abby Phillip was seriously unimpressed with some of Tim Walz’s Tuesday night debate performance against JD Vance, accusing the Democratic vice presidential nominee of repeatedly letting his Republican opponent off the hook and allowing attacks to go unchallenged.
“JD Vance came to this debate to land a bunch of punches, and he did,” Phillip said. “He landed a lot of punches in between all the niceties and all of that. And the thing that really stood out to me was that Tim Walz did not seem prepared for it.”
“He didn’t respond to a lot of the criticisms and attacks that Vance put on the table,” she continued. “He allowed some clear falsehoods to just go completely unanswered. He allowed JD Vance essentially to dodge on a whole host of issues—on climate change, on the issue of his flip-flopping on Donald Trump. He allowed Vance initially to claim that Trump salvaged the Affordable Care Act—it took him several sentences to get to the part of his answer, Walz’s answer, where he actually responded to that.”
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“I mean, I think there was a clear lack of preparation and execution here on Walz’s part.”
Phillip’s CNN colleague Dana Bash responded to the analysis by saying she believed Walz actually had the opposite problem.
“I think he had too much preparation,” Bash said. “He had so many lines that he was clearly trying to say that he didn’t listen. When JD Vance said one of the many, many things he really hit Kamala Harris on—not Tim Walz, but Kamala Harris—he didn’t respond because he clearly had things in his mind.”
Bash added that the “lack of interviews” Walz has done with national and local media during the campaign “showed” during the debate. “He needed more reps,” she said.
