NEW YORK — JD Vance arrived on the debate stage the butt of endless jokes from Democrats. He was unpopular. And even some Republicans had second-guessed Donald Trump’s decision to pick him as his running mate.
But on Tuesday, Vance reasserted his place in the race: He’s the lone Republican on the national ticket delivering a sharp message aimed squarely at Kamala Harris. In contrast, Trump spent the night hurling insults not at Harris, but at Tim Walz, repeatedly dismissing him in social media posts as “Tampon Tim.”
If Vance’s out-performing of Walz was primarily on style, he also excelled, for the most part, in his plan to prosecute Harris over the uneven economy. Vance spoke colloquially and resisted the too-online MAGA rat-a-tat that’s consumed coverage of the freshman Ohio senator since Trump chose him this summer.
For Vance, who had been flailing for weeks, the debate marked a rare win in the campaign — and an opportunity to improve his image five weeks before the election.
Whereas Walz seemed unsteady and unsure of his mission — he fell short of centering the danger Democrats and never-Trump Republicans contend Trump poses to the country, as Walz’s advisers had workshopped with him — Vance executed on his objective: on issue after issue, from immigration to energy production to foreign affairs, the Republican focused on Harris and asked what she’s done during her time in the White House.
“When did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris,” Vance said during a tone-setting first exchange, which came hours after Iran fired scores of missiles on Israel. “So Governor Walz can criticize Donald Trump’s tweets, but effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world.”
Vance followed a similar formula in accusing Harris of pushing energy production to American adversaries, advocating positions that would undo Trump’s deportation policies, and helping steer an economy under which prices for housing and everyday goods rose during her tenure.
“If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, then she ought to do them now, not when asking for promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago,” Vance said. “The fact that she isn’t tells you a lot about how much you can trust her actual plans.”
Indeed, Walz allowed Vance to go unchallenged until late in the evening — for Democrats, something of a painful repeat of President Joe Biden’s fatally flawed debate with Trump. Walz improved deeper into the second hour, though even then he was overly deferential, a point Democratic surrogates didn’t exactly contest.
“Tim Walz was extra ‘Minnesota nice’ tonight,” said Jaime Harrison, the Democratic Party chair. Vance, on the other hand, “seemed very slick.”
Republicans, in contrast, were basking in a post-debate high.
“JD Vance couldn’t have been better,” said Donald Trump Jr., who lobbied his father hard to pick Vance as his vice presidential nominee. “I wouldn’t have changed anything.”
So relentless was Vance’s critique of Harris that, should he and Trump win in November, Vance might come to regret assigning so much power to the vice presidency. It took more than 90 minutes for him to address Trump’s lies about being victorious in the 2020 election. And it was that answer that Democrats were gleeful about. Vance refused to say whether Trump lost, leading to Walz’s strongest moment of the evening (the other being a complaint from Vance when he was fact-checked by one of the moderators).
Vance himself seemed to recognize the hole he had dug for himself coming into the debate. For months, he was the poster child for liberal dunking — over his dismissal of “childless cat ladies” and for advancing a conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants in his home state feasting on cats and dogs. Even Vance’s robotic chit-chat while ordering donuts fed into his counterpart’s argument that he’s, well, “weird.”
On the first question, Vance stepped back to introduce himself, unspooling an origin story familiar to readers of his bestselling book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I went to college on the GI bill after I enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq, and so I stand here asking to be your vice president with extraordinary gratitude for this country, for the American Dream that made it possible for me to live my dreams,” Vance said.
“And most importantly, I know that a lot of you are worried about the chaos in the world and the feeling that the American Dream is unattainable. I want to try to convince you, tonight, over the next 90 minutes, that if we get better leadership in the White House, if we get Donald Trump back in the White House, the American Dream is going to be attainable once again.”
While it may have been a reset for Vance, the debate offered few memorable exchanges between the two political combatants — not even a fly. Their preparation for the debate was asymmetric. Vance, who bobbed and weaved, did scores of tough interviews with national news media. Walz, after a brief introduction as Harris’ running mate, made himself scarce. Vance’s reps paid off.
The contrast with the Harris-Trump debate was also apparent and acknowledged by other Democrats besides Harrison. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), one of the Harris campaign’s supporters in the spin room Tuesday night, said the vice president “did what she needed to do in her debate” so Walz had less of a need to be aggressive.
“I think that when you’re talking about someone who is trained in this space, such as JD Vance, and you’re talking about someone who’s not necessarily trained in this space, this was a nerve-wracking thing,” Crockett said.
On several occasions, Vance did what Republicans had hoped Trump would have done in his debate with Harris three weeks ago: On the issue of immigration, he argued that the influx of immigrants was driving up housing prices, rather than — as Trump had — repeating the bizarre and false argument that Haitian immigrants were eating pets.
Even when Walz brought up Springfield, Ohio, the source of that fake rumor, Vance refrained from going down that path in front of a national audience.
On abortion, rather than echoing Trump’s messaging, which has long included defending the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and suggesting that “everybody” wanted the issue returned to the states, Vance took a softer tact, saying Republicans needed to do “much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue.”
The line was not a policy break from Trump — Vance in the same answer defended differing abortion laws between states — but it contrasted with the former president’s style on an issue where Trump has struggled massively. Trump, for his part, took to social media during the debate not just to ridicule Walz but also to declare he would not sign a national abortion ban, with his all-caps posting notably different from Vance’s on-stage demeanor.
Meanwhile, Walz and his wife, Gwen, headed to a pizza parlor after the debate and shook hands with people. Walz ignored shouted questions from reporters asking him to clarify why he said he had befriended school shooters and repeated the claim he had been in Hong Kong in June 1989, when news reports have shown he was not.
But he did respond when asked what he believed his strongest moment was.
“The public got to see a contrast, and I think the ending sums it up. The democracy issue is important,” he said.
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