Is Tim Walz bringing vibes to a knife fight?

JD Vance revealed Democratic weaknesses — but they may not matter.

A common refrain among a certain type of liberal commentator is that Democrats should be winning the election by 20 points! The economy is great! Joe Biden got a lot done! And Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy. It’s only misinformation, perpetuated by Trump but accentuated by the mainstream media, that’s keeping the election close.

After watching last night’s VP debate, I’m more skeptical about this claim than ever.

The debate itself probably won’t matter. VP debates rarely do, especially one like this that was fought to a draw in polls. In CNN’s survey of debate-watchers, JD Vance won 51-49 — but that’s well within the margin of error.

There are many reasons to critique Trump’s selection of Vance, and he’s one of the least popular running mates of all time. Republicans were extremely flat-footed in the period after Democrats successfully pressured Biden into ceding the nomination to Kamala Harris, oddly unprepared for the candidate swap. One lingering consequence is that Democrats were able to define Harris and Tim Walz favorably and Vance unfavorably as the “childless cat lady” guy who was romantically inclined toward couches — the latter claim is misinformation if you’re scoring at home, but media fact-checkers tend not to care about misinformation perpetuated by Democrats.

But Vance probably benefited from low expectations. He’s a blogger at heart, a sharp guy who can turn a good argument even if he contradicts himself later. 

Tim Walz, conversely, was clearly nervous in the first 15 minutes, which often bakes in media and voter perceptions. If he was rusty, he may have suffered from the Harris campaign’s weird phobia of having their candidates do media appearances, something presumably inherited from the fact that it’s basically the same staff that ran Biden’s campaign and continually misattributed Biden’s very obvious communication problems to media unfairness. Harris and Walz are perfectly fine communicators, and if they’re going to run the country for the next four years, they can go on a few more podcasts.

But a Washington Post voter panel found that Vance won exchanges on foreign policy and immigration¹ even though they’d come in with a substantially negative impression of him. Elections mostly aren’t about policy substance, but if they were, it’s not so clear that Harris and Walz would win.

That’s because the argument from Democrats Should Be Winning By 20 Points Guys only makes one side of the case. The economy is good, though not great, and Republicans are well within their rights to remind voters of the high inflation earlier in Biden’s term. Biden did accomplish a lot on the domestic policy front. The Trump-democracy argument isn’t really my beat, but I basically buy the case from Vox’s Andrew Prokop that although the guardrails mostly held in Trump’s first term, there’s no guarantee they would for another four years, especially after January 6. In his worst moment of the night, Vance refused to admit that Trump had lost the 2020 election.

However, the exchanges Vance won in the debate reveal real weaknesses for the Democratic ticket too. In surveys, immigration consistently ranks as the second-most important problem for voters after the economy, and you can’t just attribute that to misinformation. Border crossings are way up:

Meanwhile, the most important news of the day on Tuesday wasn’t the running mate debate, but the escalation of tensions in the Middle East after Iran fired 180 missiles at Israel, which is almost certain to provoke further retaliation. In Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House system — yes, I have a lot of critiques of the Keys, hopefully more on that soon — both foreign policy keys cut against Democrats. Conditions in the Middle East have deteriorated under Biden’s watch, and Biden’s term also saw Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The number of deaths in interstate conflicts is up:

Whereas the number of people living under democracy is down:

And these two issues are tied together, by the way — those migrant flows partly reflect instability in the rest of the world. Fortunately for Harris, most voters do not care about foreign policy unless American troops are involved or there are attacks on American soil.

Also fortunately for her, elections are literally just popularity contests in some sense, and Harris and Walz are more popular than Trump and Vance. But if the VP debate represented a brief return to normalcy — it was a cordial and substantive evening, and Walz clearly seemed to think that playing the happy warrior role suited his brand² — it was also a reminder that this election would probably still be close in more normal times. Between immigration, foreign policy failures, the high inflation of 2021-23, a thermostatic voter backlash to leftward shifts on cultural issues, Harris’s flip-flops after her sharp left turn in 2019, and Biden’s fitness for office, a more disciplined and normal Republican campaign would have a lot of ammunition to work with.

1. Though lost them on health care and abortion.

2. I’m not so sure about this as a point of tactics, by the way. The term “sanewashing” is going around among liberal media critics, the idea that the media is too willing to normalize Trump and Vance’s behavior. Wasn’t Walz sanewashing Vance? He said nothing about the Republican ticket’s conspiratorial claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets, for instance.