3 winners and 2 losers from the Walz-Vance debate

The vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on Tuesday was something of a stalemate, though it did feature several striking moments and offered an interesting preview into what presidential politics might look like once Donald Trump is off the stage.

It isn’t clear yet how genuinely undecided voters responded to the debate — a CBS poll afterward showed 42 percent of debate watchers thought Vance won and 41 percent thought Walz did, while 17 percent thought it was a tie. A CNN poll showed 51 percent thought Vance won and 49 percent thought Walz did (CNN didn’t offer the “tie” option).

Scored purely on affect and debating technique — without regard to factual accuracy — Vance did a bit better. He stuck to his two-pronged strategy: first, to blame Kamala Harris for everything voters don’t like that has happened under the Biden administration; and second, to put a reasonable-seeming face on Trumpism. 

In doing so, though, Vance said many misleading or totally untrue things, such as that Donald Trump saved Obamacare, that immigrants caused the US housing crisis, and that Trump was merely peacefully discussing “problems” with the 2020 election rather than blatantly trying to steal that election from the rightful winner, Joe Biden.

Walz’s performance was rockier, and while he had his moments — he spoke effectively about health care, abortion, and Trump’s threat to democracy — his answers were less disciplined and more scattershot. He seemed flatfooted by a question regarding his past, reportedly untrue claims to have been in Hong Kong at the time of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 – not exactly the most important and pressing issue of the day, but something he probably should have prepared a better answer for.

So, on points, Vance may have won by a nose. But he did so in a way that is unlikely to matter very much, if at all, for the presidential contest. In general, vice presidential debates very rarely impact the polls. And this particular debate lacked any breakout moment likely to dominate headlines for days in what’s become a very crowded October news environment (Middle East escalation, Hurricane Helene, the port strike). 

This debate almost certainly didn’t change the race — we may not even be talking about it for much longer — but there were some interesting moments that told us more about the candidates and the politics of 2024 as we head into the campaign’s final month.

Winner: JD Vance’s code-switching abilities

Say what you will about JD Vance, but the man knows how to code-switch.

When he attended Yale Law School and when he promoted his book Hillbilly Elegy, he knew how to sound appealing to liberal elites. When he tried to cultivate the far right to win the Ohio Senate primary in 2022, he went all-out saying absurd and offensive things (in a way that has hurt him this year, when his remarks about “childless cat ladies” resurfaced).

And on the debate stage Tuesday, he was laser-focused on sweet-talking swing voters. 

Vance didn’t engage in bomb-throwing; he wasn’t an attack dog or an edgelord. He assured viewers that he felt their pain and that their pain was all Kamala Harris’s fault. (He solved the problem of how to hold Harris responsible for Biden’s record by simply rebranding the Biden-Harris administration as the “Kamala Harris administration,” pretending she was in charge of everything all along.)

When abortion came up, Vance — who said in 2022 that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and said in 2023 that he wanted to prosecute people who sent abortion pills through the mail — took the unusual rhetorical tack of admitting the public didn’t trust the GOP on the issue and that he and his fellow Republicans needed to earn their trust. 

For those worried about the whole “Trump tried for months to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden when he lost the election” thing? Well, let Vance set your mind at ease. Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20th,” 2021, after all. Who cares what happened in the two months before that, anyway? The real threat to democracy, Vance claimed, was the “censorship” of Kamala Harris.

That last pivot may have been a bit too smooth because when Walz asked Vance directly who won the 2020 election, Vance dodged again, claiming he was “focused on the future.” For anyone who remembers how Trump’s months-long campaign of lies helped cause the chaos of January 6, 2021, Vance’s answer will likely not be convincing. But this is a topic where he can only go so far to avoid angering the guy at the top of the ticket. —Andrew Prokop

Loser: The narrative that Tim Walz is a media phenomenon

When Kamala Harris suddenly became the Democratic presidential nominee and needed to perform an expedited running mate search, Walz stood out from the crowd of Democratic hopefuls by doing some compelling media appearances, including the one where he memorably dubbed Republicans as “just weird.” 

This seemed to contrast with both Biden’s and Harris’s tendencies to be extremely cautious about doing unscripted press, and made some Democrats overjoyed that they had found a politician who was out there putting forward a message in the media.

In retrospect, those strong Walz interviews were all with friendly interlocutors, not in the oppositional, high-stakes setting of a debate. Indeed, when the Harris camp vetted Walz for VP, he admitted that he was a “bad debater,” CNN reported in August. On Tuesday morning, Politico reported that Democrats were privately worried about how Walz would fare in the debate. And once the debate kicked off, some commentators watching it wondered where the Tim Walz who was good on TV had gone. 

Walz’s performance was not disastrous. Far from it. He seems to have come off just fine to viewers, per CBS’s post-debate poll, and he had several good moments. For instance, it was smart of him to ask Vance directly whether Biden won the 2020 election, and to call Vance’s dodge a “damning non-answer.”

It was not exactly a masterful showing, though. Walz seemed uncomfortable in the format compared to the smooth-talking Vance, he didn’t really seem to have one overarching message that he kept returning to, and he often missed opportunities to call out Vance’s lies and misrepresentations. 

Walz’s answer on his own misrepresentation of his 1989 visit to Hong Kong — in which he talked about his Nebraska childhood for a while before concluding he “misspoke” — was genuinely bad. Fortunately for him, of all the issues that came up on the debate stage, that’s the one of least relevance to substantive issues affecting Americans today, and the least likely to affect voters’ decisions about whether to cast their ballots for Harris. —AP

Winner: Obamacare

One of Vance’s more remarkable lies of the night was this: Donald Trump saved Obamacare. 

He said the law “was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden in health care costs” before the former president took office in 2017 and started loosening some of its rules.

“I think he can make a good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along,” the Republican vice presidential candidate said.

Donald Trump supported the Republican Congress’s effort to roll back most of Obamacare, including undoing some of the regulations for preexisting conditions and making major cuts to Medicaid. It failed because of John McCain.

Trump dramatically cut funding for enrollment outreach. He tried to introduce Medicaid work requirements for people covered by the ACA’s expansion (but was stopped by the courts). He deregulated short-term insurance plans that left people vulnerable to thousands of dollars in bills if they had a serious medical emergency.

In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, the ACA marketplaces covered 12.7 million people. In 2020, when he lost the election to Joe Biden, they covered 11.4 million. After four years of Biden, 21.4 million Americans are getting their insurance through HealthCare.gov or one of its state counterparts.

Voters have come to trust Democrats on health care much more over the years since the law Republicans tagged as “Obamacare” passed. More than 60 percent of Americans now say they like the ACA. 

In 2010, Obamacare was the culprit for the Democratic wipeout in Congress, but its political fortunes have turned dramatically. In 2018, Democrats won the House, largely by running on a message that without a Democratic check, Trump’s myriad efforts to topple the law would succeed. Ever since, it has been a political asset for them against Republicans — forcing Vance to simply pretend that Trump’s health care record is different from what it is. —Dylan Scott

Loser: The moderators

From the start, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, the CBS news moderators, made it clear they did not think it was their job to keep the candidates grounded in reality. 

“The primary role of the moderators is to facilitate the debate between the candidates, enforce the rules, and provide the candidates with the opportunity to fact-check claims made by each other,” Brennan told viewers. And for the most part, the moderators allowed the candidates’ answers to go unchecked. 

The questions themselves were either not probing enough or poorly framed. When Brennan turned to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign promise to build 3 million homes, for example, she confoundingly asked Walz where those homes would get built, not how. 

And despite Trump’s continued election denial and Vance’s previous statements that he would not have certified the 2020 election results, the moderators left questions about the fate of American democracy till the very end. One of the debate’s most memorable moments was when Vance wouldn’t answer Walz’s question about whether Trump lost in 2020. 

Viewers don’t have to look too far back to see how it is, in fact, possible to have good debate moderators. ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis did a much better job moderating last month’s presidential debate. They fact-checked the candidates in real time — making it hard for even Trump to get away with lying — and pressed both Harris and Trump with tough questions. They also tried to avoid letting the candidates dodge questions entirely. 

Luckily for O’Donnell and Brennan, they’re not going to stand out; they’re not the only debate moderators who have stumbled in the Trump era. The voters, on the other hand, are the unlucky ones.  —Abdallah Fayyad

Winner: A surprising amount of decency

After nine years of increasingly toxic political discourse and six weeks of mud-slinging between the two No. 2s on the trail, it was reasonable to expect a nasty affair when Trump and Harris’s attack dogs were unleashed on one another on the debate stage.

So it was a little shocking that Walz and Vance not only refrained from hurling personal attacks at one another, but even found common ground at many points. Midwest Nice prevailed: kind on the surface, followed by the occasional sting.

While Vance was criticizing Harris’s approach to the southern border, he seemed apologetic: “Tim, I agree with you,” Vance said. “I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think Kamala Harris does.”

Later on, the two would find comity over the effects of off-shoring and trade deficits. “Much of what the senator said, I am in agreement with him on,” Walz said. And after Walz mentioned his son had witnessed a shooting, Vance reacted sympathetically: “I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting and I’m sorry about that. I want to say — Christ have mercy. It is awful.”

This seems to be the way the debate will be remembered, if at all. It made both candidates seem more normal, civil, and human than they had seemed before — a particular advantage for Vance, who came in needing to soften his image. It may have been strategic politeness, but it was notable in an era when so much politeness has been dispensed with.

In snap polls of debate watchers, both Walz and Vance saw increases in their favorability ratings. Focus group respondents seem to be saying similar things. “I hadn’t seen a debate like this in a very long time,” one undecided Michigan voter told CNN’s Phil Mattingly. “They supported each other. They were kind. And it was warm and fuzzy — you could watch it without being offended.” —Christian Paz