The first and only vice presidential debate made one thing clear: Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is a nice guy. But sometimes nice guys have to bring out the knives–and Walz failed to do that.
Walz’s Republican vice presidential opponent, JD Vance, is a dangerous man. He lies through his teeth. In the debate he repeatedly obfuscated, dodged, and flat-out fabricated answers, refusing to acknowledge, for example, that he said he would have refused to certify the 2020 election, that he supported a national abortion ban, and that he knowingly spread a false story about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in an Ohio town. He wouldn’t even admit that Trump lost in 2020.
Vance changes his stated positions with the political winds; he is a man who wants power so badly that he is willing to join the ticket of a candidate he once compared to Hitler. If Trump loses for a second time, Vance may simply refuse to admit it and may be very willing to take American democracy down with him.
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He also out-performed Walz on Tuesday night.
Televised debates, for better or worse, are performances, and performances are as much about style as substance. Both Walz and Vance are men with solid policy chops who clearly do care about the minutiae of governance, a fact that set this debate apart from the one between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
But Walz and Vance are also men with two very different personalities and styles. Walz is affable, a Midwestern dad who does well on campaign stops, at donut shops and diners. Vance styles himself as just a nice Rust Belt boy, but comes across as exactly what he is: a Yale-educated lawyer turned venture capitalist who learned under the tutelage of some of the most predatory and destructive reactionary right-wing minds in America. Vance’s American Psycho persona doesn’t usually play particularly well in person, but on Tuesday, it worked well in front of the camera.
The Harris campaign was perhaps hoping that Walz’s kindness would stand in sharp contrast to Vance, who often comes across as kind of a jerk. But Walz’s jovial-dad thing only meant that he didn’t hit Vance hard enough when Vance repeatedly lied, or made comments that suggest some seriously off-putting politics.
Vance, for example, answered a question about childcare policy by talking about how hard it is for his wife, Usha, to be a working mom—even though Vance is a working dad to those same children, but seems to have not taken on the burden of balancing work and family, instead expecting that his wife (and her mother) do the women’s work of caring for kids.
Walz could have highlighted that obvious bit of sexism, or Vance’s previous comments about childless cat ladies, or his remarks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that, “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at The New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had” when his own wife was up until recently working as a corporate lawyer.
Instead, Walz repeatedly sought to find common ground with Vance, saying he agreed with him on a number of issues.
In reality, Walz and Vance really don’t agree on much. Many of Vance’s positions are unpopular, including his general refusal to support even very common-sense gun safety legislation. During the debate, he suggested the answer to school shootings was better locks on schoolhouse doors and not the solution that has actually worked everywhere else in the world: fewer guns in people’s hands. Walz did emphasize that the guns are the problem, but he also repeatedly ceded the moral high ground on a series of issues when he said that both he and Vance agreed there was a serious problem and both were dedicated to solving it.
Vance’s positions on reproductive rights are similarly unpopular. At the debate he claimed he had never supported a national abortion ban, simply a national standard—which is a different way of saying a ban. He claimed to support IVF access, but when he had a chance to vote (twice) for a bill that would have protected IVF, he first voted to block the bill and then skipped the vote (and the rest of his party largely voted against it); he also endorsed a Heritage Foundation report that proposed restricting IVF in the name of “pro-life” and “pro-family” values. But he wasn’t pressed on those noxious stances.
Is Vance, or anyone, really dedicated to solving America’s gun violence problem if they refuse to do anything about the guns causing the problem? Does Vance really support IVF access if, when given the opportunity to guarantee that access for all Americans, he’s voting in opposition? Viewers didn’t get answers to those questions, because Walz didn’t put Vance on the defensive. Instead, he repeatedly gave him the benefit of the doubt.
No one wanted to see two grown men in a televised slap fight. But Vance is a smart and articulate man whose primary weaknesses are his thin skin, his defensiveness, and his bizarro politics. He’s wise enough to lie about his bizarro politics, because it’s very clear that his actual positions are widely unpopular. And at the debate, his thin skin simply wasn’t pierced—because his opponent didn’t try to pierce it. As a result, he looked like a polished politician ready for the national stage, and not like the petulant, intemperate man-child we’ve seen emerge when he’s triggered. And until Walz finally found his footing at the very end of the debate, he seemed like a small-state governor out of his depth.
Both of these men are smart. Both seem to have sincere ideological commitments, although Vance is quite willing to bend his if it moves him closer to power. Both have not just broad ideas of how to make America great, but specific plans on how to get there. But that is where the similarities end. Vance’s plans are generally cruel and reckless. Vance the man is dishonest and dangerous.
And unfortunately, that reality simply wasn’t exposed on Tuesday night, for the same reason that Walz will make a very fine vice president if he can get into office: He is reflexively generous, genuinely gracious, and sometimes just too damn nice.
