Was Vance’s Debate Victory Enough?

Even more than the Trump–Harris presidential debate, the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz was conducted on progressive terms. From hurricanes to gun control to family policy to threats to democracy, practically every question was asked in a left-wing framework. 

This put Vance at a double disadvantage. Not only were the assumptions behind the questions loaded, but Vance is not a typical movement conservative, which means he didn’t have the counter-moves at his disposal that the movement has spent decades developing. When Vance focused on key Trump themes of immigration and economic nationalism, he was sure-footed. But the free-spending predilections of the New Right and Donald Trump’s wavering on social conservatism have left next-wave Republican leaders like Vance in something of a no-man’s land. 

Vance is smart enough to find his way out, but it isn’t easy—and for others it may prove impossible. If the GOP isn’t fiscally conservative on entitlements or healthcare and isn’t culturally conservative on abortion, where does that leave Republicans when they’re asked about subjects that can’t be brought back to immigration or strengthening American manufacturing?

The most important parts of a debate are the first 20-odd minutes, which casual viewers are most likely to watch, and the closing statements, which are most likely to be remembered by those who slog through the whole thing but don’t have their minds made up beforehand. Vance made a more favorable impression than Walz right at the start, with a more confident presentation than the Minnesota governor’s halting delivery. Vance had the stronger closing pitch, too.

In the opening rounds, Walz seemed to have trouble remembering what he wanted to say. He looked at times like he was surprised to be on stage. He stumbled especially badly when asked to account for his false claim to have been in China at the time of the Tiananmen massacre. Rather than own up to a lie, Walz took cover behind the clumsiness he’d displayed up to that point in the debate. Was it hard to believe that a slow-spoken, maybe slow-witted fella like Ol’ Tim might have misremembered and misspoken about being present for such an historic event? 

Walz is indeed a “knucklehead,” as he later characterized himself. But he’s also fundamentally a fraud who lies about his China experience, his military record, and his family’s IVF treatment (his wife never had any, contrary to Tim’s tales).

Vance’s running mate is no stranger to exaggeration and invention, of course. The difference is that the most influential people in the country don’t treat Trump’s lies as truths. Progressives like Walz and Harris are allowed to get away with it because their lies serve to support the even bigger lies on which the American ruling class depends—lies like the ones told by all the generals and national-security “experts” who have endorsed Kamala Harris and who for decades told the American people that victory in Afghanistan was mere months away. 

As Vance pointed out in the debate, experts backing Walz and Harris also promoted the lies and elite self-deceptions that wound up expanding China’s wealth and power at the expense of our own industrial workforce. The lies that sustain our wicked and inept ruling class are more consequential than anything Trump has ever said about his crowd sizes or the 2020 election. The lies many of Harris’s biggest fans told about Iraq killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians. 

There were lies, or culpably misleading simplifications, baked into the questions put to Vance and Walz by the CBS moderators, Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell. “Climate change,” for example, is an Orwellian assault on clear language and critical thought: Climate is always changing, of course, but those who use this phrase mean to imply that all dramatically bad weather—too hot, too cold, too dry, or too wet—is a political problem requiring the election of liberals (including liberal Republicans) as a solution. Vance used the more honest language that Trump prefers, referring to policies aimed at ensuring clean air and water. He argued that if Harris were serious about a cleaner, greener economy, Democrats would do more to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., rather than hampering relatively clean American energy and manufacturing with regulations that encourage dirtier development in China and elsewhere.

But the moderators’ premise was that Americans themselves are responsible for the severity of hurricanes. Vance didn’t go so far as Trump has gone in the past to question the very premise, which left Walz to offer technical remedies to a seemingly agreed-upon problem. 

Vance put a premium on agreeableness, which earned him some praise from pundits for the civil tone of the debate. Vance and Walz frequently expressed a measure of concord, on ends if not policy means. Vance was wise to show the softer side of the Republican ticket, since those who want a candidate who demolishes the polite facades of concentrated power are already voting for Donald Trump. Vance demonstrated that Trump’s GOP can speak mildly when the time is right. In this case, the moment to talk to those remaining undecided voters who might like what Trump and Vance have to say but don’t like the way Trump says it.

Walz, however, took full advantage of the quandaries Republicans have found themselves in as Trump stakes out a middle ground on abortion and embraces a larger role for government in providing child support, child care for working mothers, family leave, and in vitro fertilization. Walz and Harris are abortion extremists, but they make their case for imposing liberal abortion laws on a national scale by invoking specific instances of women who have suffered dangerously complicated pregnancies or miscarriages in abortion-restricting states or who have been victims of incest and rape. Such extreme examples serve as rationales for extremely open-ended pro-abortion policies, which would not punish abortionists who allow babies born alive to die. Vance interrogated the specifics of the liberal abortion law that Walz signed in Minnesota, and Walz had no answer when Vance pressed him on the details. But the details of women in tragic circumstances are far more memorable than the details of legislation, and Vance had no sentimental artillery to match Walz’s.

The discussion of child tax credits and other family benefits illustrated another difficulty: What’s to stop Democrats from outbidding Republicans every time? Democrats are always prepared to offer more money to more recipients, a fact demonstrated by the Harris-Walz ticket’s counter-offer of a $6,000 child tax credit in response to Vance’s campaigning on a $5,000 credit. Here too is a problem of premises. The fundamental principle of progressive politics is that Americans are feeble and unable to provide for themselves or their families; wise federal administrators must provide for them. The principle of conservative, small-r republican politics, by contrast, is that those administrators or experts weaken citizens and families by fostering such artificial dependency. The best way to care for children is not with federally mandated or subsidized babysitting programs, but by ensuring that good jobs are available for American parents at every level of education.

Vance and Trump understand this, but they both face obstacles in communicating it. In Trump’s case, he has a tendency to oversimplify and dramatize, which is exactly what he did when he said the U.S. will take in so much revenue from his tariffs that child care will seem like a small expense. Although the spirit of Trump’s claim was conservative and republican, it was too vague to avoid raising doubts in voters’ minds. Vance is more winking, yet that has a downside too, as the possibilities of specific government interventions that might help confuse the basic question of whether parents should have to rely on Washington, D.C. to raise a family. 

The healthcare debate follows a similar track, and there too the Republican position is starting to seem like a watered-down version of what Democrats are offering. If voters want Obamacare, will they vote for Trump and Vance to fix it—or for Harris and Walz to give them more of it? The standard conservative card to play is to warn of what Harris or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders means for the private healthcare and insurance most Americans want to keep. It’s not obvious what the new GOP alternative is. 

The CBS moderators confronted Vance with Trump’s remarks from the last presidential debate about having “concepts of a plan.” Trump was refreshingly honest when he said that—he wasn’t offering a technocratic, people-pleasing but legislatively implausible answer to a hard problem, and Vance explained that well on Tuesday. Yet the moderators wouldn’t have brought it up if they didn’t think it was a weakness for Trump and Vance. The Republican ticket doesn’t need the kind of over-conceptualized policy blueprints that were characteristic of the Mitt Romney campaign a dozen years ago. But the GOP does need to differentiate its overall approach from the Democrats’. 

Again and again the debate returned to left-wing narratives. At one point, Norah O’Donnell asked about “America's gun violence epidemic, the leading cause of death for children and teens in America is by firearms,” a phrasing that cleverly conflates two things—the horrific but rare mass school shootings that receive overwhelming media attention whenever they happen, and the far more frequent gang-related and non-spree shootings that account for most firearms-related deaths of minors. (“Teens” are the major component of O’Donnell’s “children and teens” framing.) Restrictions on AR-15-style rifles and more background checks will not reduce the major sources of teen gun violence. 

Vance tried to correct the false setup behind the question by mentioning both mental illness and “the terrible gun violence problem in a lot of our big cities” as the roots of the problem. Spree murders are typically the work of deeply troubled young men whose problems are known long before they can get their hands on a weapon, but who are treated leniently rather than stopped before they can kill. And urban crime is the backdrop to the gun violence that imperils still more teenagers. 

Yet Vance could hardly counter decades of propaganda in the one- or two-minute segments in which he was allowed to speak. Walz blasted him for daring to mention mental illness as a factor in school shootings and deflected attention away from violence in urban schools to rural suicides—a serious problem, to be sure, but not the driving force in teen firearm deaths nationwide. Under Harris and Walz, law-abiding Americans will find it more difficult to buy guns, while criminals will not. For all that Harris and her running mate claim to enjoy the exercise of their Second Amendment rights, their agenda on guns is very much the same as that of liberal Democrats going back more than 30 years, to the peak of violent crime in America’s cities. 

Predictably, the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol was another topic the moderators broached only from the Democratic Party’s perspective. Vance was asked whether he would accept certification of the 2024 election, and Walz demanded to know whether he’d admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance didn’t take the bait, but instead began talking about censorship as a greater threat to democracy. Here he missed an opportunity, however: The two assassination attempts on Trump this year are the most serious acts of political violence aimed at altering the outcome of an election that our nation has witnessed in decades. The rule of law, meanwhile, has been not only harmed but perverted by the lawfare Democrats have waged against Trump. If American democracy is endangered, Democrats bear much of the blame, yet few in the media hold them to any account, certainly not in televised debates. 

As progressive storylines have become deeply embedded in America’s elite culture—in the media, academy, and in both political parties—the GOP has struggled to adapt. Old-style movement conservatives in the party have ready responses to liberal arguments on guns, abortion, healthcare, and climate. But these arguments often sound stale, and they were developed in an America where educated voters had not yet become so liberal. Trump’s response to the predicament has been to cede ground in some places while challenging the elite consensus profoundly on immigration, trade, and foreign policy. Some Republican policy wonks, meanwhile, want to scrap the old conservatism without embracing Trump’s combativeness and assault on expertise. Vance is aware of the arguments for all of these courses, and he knows they all have their limitations, too. That makes him a thoughtful politician, but it also leaves him more vulnerable than an ideologue would be when confronted by the elite progressive orthodoxies of Tim Walz and CBS News.

Yet Vance had a simple truth on his side that couldn’t be overcome by any amount of narrative spin or Newspeak. That truth was the record of America’s suffering and humiliation while Kamala Harris has been in office, compared to the peace and flourishing the country enjoyed when Donald Trump was president. After Walz closed by boasting about Dick Cheney’s support for the Harris campaign, Vance reiterated that Harris shares responsibility for everything that’s happened since 2021, from inflation to the immigration crisis to the outbreak of new wars in Europe and the Middle East. Dick Cheney and Joe Biden are a hell of a pedigree for Harris and Walz. Trump won the 2016 election because Americans were sick of Bushes and Clintons. If they’re sick of the worst of the neocon right and establishment left, they’ll elect Trump again—this time with J.D. Vance as his VP.