Who won the Vice Presidential debate and whether that even matters — VP debates don’t historically move the election needle — is hard to determine, since the scores remain in the eyes of the beholders, like beauty. Quick polls show different winners and, of course, both Democrats and Republicans both claimed victory.
Republican VP nominee JD Vance was efficient and prepared, and he made his friend Donald Trump Jr. happy with his performance, which Trump Jr. called a “masterclass.”
JR: I thought it was a masterclass. I think he was actually very comfortable in so many of the issues
Collins: Do you think he was more comfortable in those issues than your dad was in the last debate? pic.twitter.com/uHS4Wxa2TP
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2024
Trump Jr.’s praise focused on Vance hitting his talking points on issues where MAGA Republicans “tend to fail,” as Trump Jr. said.
Those issues, like the scuttling of reproductive rights and other far-right causes, produce Republican communication “fail[s]” — as Trump Jr. admitted — not because Republicans are poor at expressing them, but because Republicans are good at expressing them.
Though the contentious issues like total abortion bans have many proponents among conservatives, those issues are broadly unpopular with the American public, and so the politicians pushing them have trouble, as Trump Jr. said.
Vance’s job is to energize the Republican base that holds those minority views, and have this narrower band of voters outperform the majority-opinion voters in November. In other words, if not a big tent, then a smaller, more potent tent.
In contrast, Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz presented a Harris-Walz vision that spoke to a bigger, more inclusive tent. Walz was specific about the makeup of the diverse “coalition” that he says has rallied around Kamala Harris‘s candidacy, saying he was “as surprised as anyone” by the mix.
Then Walz, below, placed in a single sentence three people who have probably never appeared together in one: the liberal independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the arch-conservative former Vice President Dick Cheney, and mega-pop star Taylor Swift, all of whom have pledged their support to Harris.
“They don’t all agree on everything,” Walz admitted, asserting one fact that the debate fact checkers definitely didn’t have to bother checking.
Walz: I’m as surprised as anybody of this coalition, Harris has built from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift and a whole bunch of folks in between and they don’t all agree on everything but they believe in a positive future in this country pic.twitter.com/8KdqbtOWL5
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2024