Senator JD Vance of Ohio was trying to un-weird himself.
Over the course of his debate on Tuesday night with Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, Vance did not directly repeat the most incendiary elements of the false and debunked claims he promoted last month about migrants in Ohio eating people’s pets. He did not have to talk about “childless cat ladies,” because Walz did not bring up the disparaging words that have come to define Vance in the minds of many in his party.
As Walz skipped opportunities to attack Vance more forcefully, Vance seized the chance to pitch a gentler version of himself and act out a political comity that has been lost in the era of Donald Trump. It seemed to be working.
And then came Walz’s question about the 2020 election.
Vance had just promised that Walz would have his prayers and best wishes if he and Vice President Kamala Harris were elected. Walz asked him whether Trump, who finished well behind President Biden in both the Electoral College and the popular vote four years ago, had lost re-election.
“I am focused on the future,” Vance said, before trying to change the subject to censorship, which has long been a familiar target on the right.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz shot back.
It was a moment that laid bare a deep gulf between two men onstage who seemed not to want to be terribly confrontational. And it also made it clear that Vance, an ambitious political figure who may well be thinking about 2028 and beyond, will need a lot more than a fairly mild 90-minute debate if he ever wants to fully soften his image.
“America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election,” Walz said, “of who’s going to honor that democracy, and who’s going to honor Trump.”
Nice-guy image
For much of the night, the two men seemed to want to steer the debate somewhere American politics doesn’t often go these days: friendly territory.
They pointed out where they agreed with each other. They said their real differences were with Trump and Harris. Each seemed, at times, to express empathy toward the other.
Walz’s political scaffolding is his affability, but it wasn’t clear whether the Minnesota governor’s lack of focused attacks on Vance was intentional or simply a reflection of his struggles as a debater. Was it a straightforward stumble, a Minnesotan discomfort with direct conflict, or an effort to help steer the nation’s supercharged politics to someplace a little less awful?
Regardless, it gave Vance a lot to work with.
Vance, who has a low favorability rating, seemed determined to project a nice-guy image of his own. He avoided some of the attacks he has deployed on the campaign trail for weeks. He never brought up Walz’s military record, which has been the subject of intense scrutiny. He said nothing when the moderators pressed Walz on the fact that he said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre when he was not, preferring to let Walz’s halting answer speak for himself, and he rolled compliments of Walz into insults of Harris.
“I think you want to solve this problem,” Vance said, referring to the issue of border security, “but I don’t think Kamala Harris does.”
He also took the rare step of acknowledging that his party had a problem when it came to abortion — a move that created a striking division between himself and Trump, perhaps in the name of electability. Most voters believe abortion should be legal in some or all cases, but Trump has bragged about appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and voters consistently say they trust Democrats on the issue more than Republicans.
“We’ve got to do so much better of a job and earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly just don’t trust us,” Vance said.
But then, in an illustration of why his party has struggled with the issue, he misstated his own position on a national abortion ban, saying he had never supported one when he had, and sought to cast himself as “pro-family.”
“I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies,” Vance said, as Walz hammered his party’s point on the importance of reproductive rights, though he did not remind viewers of the way Vance has spoken negatively of people who don’t have children.
Too close for comfort
It all amounted to a big night for Vance, who seemed to relish the opportunity to soften Trump’s record, and his own. He repeatedly evoked his “working-class” upbringing and a life story of struggle and redemption that he told in the book “Hillbilly Elegy,” which put him on the political map.
Yet, if the night was an attempt to widen his appeal, the exchange over the 2020 election set him back. The man who, the moderators pointed out, had denigrated Trump that year for not delivering on his economic populism was now trying to justify his boss’s effort to hold on to power he had not won.
Up until then, Vance had tried to give voters a glimpse of what might come after Trump: a little more civility, perhaps, and a deeper engagement with the policy questions that animated elections before Trump, a former reality television star, blew it all up. In many cases, he offered a smoother defense of conservative — and sometimes unpopular — ideas than what Trump had been able to when he was on the debate stage last month.
In that moment, though, it was as if Trump himself had appeared onstage, looming over his shoulder. Vance said Trump “peacefully” transferred power on Jan. 20, 2021, without acknowledging the lies and violence that swirled on Jan. 6.
Walz used the exchange to suggest that Vance and Trump were simply too close for comfort, no matter what Walz and Vance might have agreed on over the course of the debate.
“What I’m concerned about is, where is the firewall with Donald Trump?” he asked. “Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election, and his vice president is not going to stand to it?”
Vance did not answer that question. And then the debate cut to a commercial.
The great Midwest-off of 2024
Last night wasn’t just a debate about immigration, abortion and democracy. It was also a smack down between one guy from Minnesota and another from Ohio. But only one of them seemed to be debating with the intention of winning Mr. Midwest 2024. Here’s my appraisal.
Viewers could be forgiven for thinking last night that what Tim Walz really wanted was for Minnesota to be president.
He praised his state’s childhood tax credit, abortion-rights protections, free meals for schoolchildren, gun laws and investments in housing — much of which he signed into law himself. He spoke glowingly of the state’s low teen pregnancy rates and Fortune 500 companies. He sounded at times like he was taping a commercial for Rochester’s Mayo Clinic.
As he tore into Trump for constantly dismissing the expertise of scientists, economists and the national security apparatus, he said, “Pro tip of the day is this: If you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump.”
He even mentioned the state’s accidental byproducts of climate change.
“Our No. 1 export cannot be topsoil from erosion from these massive storms,” Walz said.
Vance rarely brought up his home state of Ohio, and when he did, it was not to brag about it. He mentioned his difficult upbringing several times and claimed that schools and hospitals in places like Springfield, Ohio, had been “overwhelmed” by the arrival of migrants.
Walz spoke warmly of his small-town upbringing in rural Nebraska.
But if anyone won the debate, it might have been Minnesota.
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