Analysis and highlights from the Vance and Walz vice presidential debate

I can’t believe that we went that entire debate without either Walz or the moderators bringing up one of the most memorable of Vance’s many weird statements. In 2021, Vance said on a podcast that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

In a word: Yikes. But while I can understand the moderators wanting to stick to policy and substance, you’d think that given Vance’s statements about child care and families, that someone would have mentioned his deeply unfortunate belief that people without kids are somehow “more sociopathic” and worthy of scorn.

Chris Hayes speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

JD Vance is very good at this. I mean, this is what he’s been doing since he was in college, talking to libs and being kind of like, “Well, I sort of agree with you here but here’s the other part of this,” and he did that all perfectly fine tonight.

Joy Reid speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

A smooth lie is still a lie. Vance is incredibly smooth but during those 90 minutes, he managed not to say anything memorable. There’s nothing clippable in what he said. They were just all smooth, bland lies. 

Vance got outdone by Walz. He was relatable and delivered on the substance. He didn’t go in there to slay Vance, he went in there to show himself and he showed himself to be bipartisan. He showed himself to be reasonable. He showed himself to be practical. 

A lot of people are complaining that he didn’t knock Vance out and that he wasn’t rhetorically cruel but that was not his job. It was obvious that his job was to sell Harris as president and he did that very well. He won the debate.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

In a statement after the debate, the Harris campaign praised Walz’s performance and, in particular, highlighted his argument against Vance’s defense of Trump’s election denialism — while also calling for Trump to debate Harris a second time, just days ahead of the election.

“Vice President Harris believes that the American people deserve to see her and Trump on the debate stage one more time,” the campaign said. “She will be in Atlanta on October 23 — Donald Trump should step up and face the voters.”

Nicolle Wallace speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Vance spent the night building an intricate and beautiful fort out of toothpicks and it was perfect. But in the end, he sneezed on it and the whole thing fell apart and he had to walk out of that room over the broken toothpicks. 

This debate was devoid of personal attacks, and we saw the candidates repeatedly agreeing with each other on certain proposals and sentiments. Both men were cordial onstage and they largely focused on discussing policy — a huge difference from last month’s presidential debate, where Trump grew increasingly agitated and unleashed ugly personal attacks on Harris.

The veep debate is a lower-stakes event, and the candidates had the difficult task of touting their campaign’s platform while defending their presidential nominee from attacks. Vance had a harder job on that front. At the very least, Vance showed tonight that he is a far more disciplined — though no less extreme — politician than Trump.

I approached tonight’s debate expecting it to depict the stark contrast between the affable Walz and the acerbic Vance. And that’s exactly what happened.

From start to finish, Walz kept up his nice-guy affect, declining to take potshots at Vance and limiting his Trump criticism to policy. Vance, on the other hand, was amicable toward Walz at times and seemed to have entered the debate intent on presenting a gentler image than he has shown on the trail.

But Vance’s prickliness and extremism were on full display at various points, including his false claim that Harris is allowing children to be sex trafficked and used as drug mules, as well as his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election.

In most debates, candidates typically refer to each other by their titles: “As the governor has said,” “I disagree with you, Senator,” etc. Walz stuck with this, calling his opponent “Senator Vance” throughout the night. Vance did that at first, referring to “Governor Walz.” But then, time and again, he used his opponent’s first name. “Look, I think what Tim said just doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said at one point. “It is a disgrace, Tim,” he said at another point. In one instance, he even squeezed in calling moderator Margaret Brennan by her first name at the same time: “I want to talk about this tariff issue, in particular Margaret, because Tim just accused this of being a national sales tax,” he said.

There are a lot of moments from this debate that will stand out as we hash this out over the coming days. But there was a small aside that caught me at the time and is going to stick with me. Vance was defending Trump’s approach to housing, arguing that federal lands should be used to build new homes. “We have a lot of Americans that need homes,” he said. “We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes.”

That sums up so much of the Trump 2024 campaign: blaming immigrants for every ill that America faces and proposing that mass deportation of millions would solve those problems. It’s a troubling proposition, and one that a lot more Americans support than I’d like.