The Real Losers of the Walz-Vance Debate: Every Voter Watching It

There is no question that the big loser at Tuesday night’s CBS vice presidential debate was the audience.

It is not just that the debate was boring, although it was often stultifying. It’s that the debate itself obscured more about the core issues in campaign 2024 than it revealed.

After watching this debate for almost two hours, a viewer would never have known that Donald Trump was a convicted felon, that he was judged liable for rape, or that he has been charged with stealing national secrets. You would not have a clue that he has said he would suspend the Constitution on his first day in office, that he and his running mate JD Vance were, in fact, racists and misogynists, that Trump’s signature policy proposal, a round-up of 10-20 million “migrants,” would likely tear the country apart and lead to the creation of concentration camps. You wouldn’t know that Trump has said he would throw his rivals in prison.

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If you were a viewer who knew nothing about the campaign or the people behind it, you would never know that Trump has said that we need a Kristallnacht-like day of violence in this country to “solve” our crime problem. You would not have known that he wants and has tried to pull the U.S. out of NATO, and that he and Vance have advocated pro-Vladimir Putin policies that would simply hand over Ukraine to Russia. You would not have known that Trump was twice impeached, or that a million Americans died from his mishandling of COVID, or that his family corruptly profited from his presidency.

You would not have known that Trump was a serial sex abuser, or that his first wife said that he raped her, or that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside and surrounded himself with Nazis and white supremacists. You wouldn’t have known that the Trump-crafted Supreme Court had granted him immunity, or what that might mean. You wouldn’t have known that they would likely strip away many core freedoms over the next few years—the freedom for people to marry who they love, and even the freedom to purchase birth control.

In other words, watching the debate, you would never have known why the stakes in this election were so high or why it is so different from any election in U.S. history.

Where issues were raised that might have made clear the extraordinary nature of the vote that is less than five weeks away, their meaning or consequences were muted or obscured by either the machine-gun-fire lies of the Republican candidate, JD Vance, or by the fact that seldom if ever did the moderators attempt to fact-check him or follow up when he evaded answers.

That was clear when, very late in the program, long after most viewers had switched to another channel, the issue of Trump fomenting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, came up, and Vance minimized the brutal riot all America watched, and then said the real issue was Kamala Harris’ “censorship.” By that he apparently meant that he objected to the federal government’s efforts to keep lies that were a threat to U.S. public health off social media.

His opponent, Tim Walz, the folksy Democrat who got off to a bit of a slow start but picked up steam as the night went on (he was very good on health care and women’s issues, for example) did challenge Vance on this. It was a good moment for him and for the debate but it was over in the blinking of an eye.

Seeking to overthrow the government was, apparently, to the producers or moderators, roughly equivalent in importance to a discussion about whether Walz got a date wrong by a few months regarding a trip to China, or one about a child tax credit (albeit that such credits are a worthy idea).

Throughout, because of the lack of fact-checking and follow-up, Vance was allowed to spout lies that were really at the core of each of his answers. (I’d be very surprised if independent fact-checkers tomorrow concluded that not a single one of Vance’s answers did not contain a lie or a deception or a deflection or some other form of misstatement.) That approach gave the debate the illusion of being a balanced back-and-forth. Which, of course, it was not if you actually knew what the candidates were talking about.

Trump’s economic record was a disaster. Inflation was low on his watch because the economy collapsed due to his mishandling of COVID (credit to Walz for trying to squeeze in that point). Trump’s record at the border was not better. Kamala Harris was never the border czar. Kamala Harris was not actually president for the past three years despite the constant implication of Vance that she was actually personally responsible for every single policy of the Biden administration.

When Walz pushed back—by pointing out for example that under Trump there was not world peace as Vance asserted or that Trump actually made Iran more dangerous by withdrawing from the nuclear deal—there were only occasional comments from the moderators to help viewers understand what was true and what was not.

The result was like an episode of Black Mirror (or the less well-known British series The Capture) in which the video feed was manipulated to create the illusion of a discussion about the 2024 campaign that actually failed to address what was important or distinctive about it.

Between weak question choices, absence of fact-checking, and lies it was in the end a kind of not-so-deep deepfake, a debate in the midst of the 2024 election that could actually have been from any senatorial debate in any state in the U.S. during the past 20 years.

Yes, it will get spun as a win by both sides and will probably have zero impact on the “undecided voters” who exist, like Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, in legend but have never been proven to exist. Yes, once a fact-checking occurs, Walz will have registered a big win because Vance lied just like the guy at the top of his ticket and when it came to the facts, Walz actually got most of them right and made his case more convincingly.

But don’t be fooled by the pundits who say “this was the kind of civil policy debate we’ve long aspired to.” It’s not civil to lie. It’s not a real policy debate when the biggest issues of difference were either not touched upon or barely brushed up against. And we should not aspire to this kind of exchange because it was not just bad TV, it was the latest example of the media normalizing what should be seen as shocking and unprecedented.

Depicting the choice between the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz tickets as just another run-of-the-mill contest that can be resolved by checking off different traditional categories of policy questions misleads the American people about the nature of this election. It is just as false as the worst of the hundreds of lies that made up the patter for J.D. Vance’s simulacrum of a real politician pitching real policies to the American voter.