JD Vance wanted to focus on the future, he said. His past, and his party’s, intervened.
For some 90 minutes, Mr. Vance, a proud Republican ambassador to the online right, had largely tailored his debate-night message to a mass audience, avoiding most detours into conservative fever swamps, as if determined to deliver a rolling rebuttal to Democrats’ longstanding suggestion that he was “weird” and out of step.
But when the debate turned, near its final frames, to the subject of the 2020 election, Mr. Vance faced a choice: He could validate, once more, Donald J. Trump’s relentless lies about his defeat four years ago. Or he could try something else in the spirit of moving forward.
It did not seem like a difficult decision for him.
“What President Trump has said is that there were problems,” Mr. Vance said when asked about his own past assertion that he would not have certified the 2020 election. “We should fight about those issues, debate those issues, peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said. And that’s all that Donald Trump has said.”
His debate opponent, Tim Walz, stared at him, unblinking, and then looked down at his lectern.
“Remember,” Mr. Vance said of Mr. Trump, “he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House.”
This accounting was short a few details — the violence, the deaths and injuries, the alleged criminal scheming, the “Hang Mike Pence” of it all.
Mr. Vance pivoted jarringly to the subject of censorship. Mr. Walz glanced up at the camera, silent, like a television character breaking the fourth wall.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate,” Mr. Walz began when it was his turn again, assessing an evening that was sometimes wobbly for him. He was about to enjoy it more.
For all their occasional paeans to civility on Tuesday evening, this was the moment that crystallized an unshakable truth about this election: One side still refuses to acknowledge the truth about the last one — the persistent falsehood that has come to define so much of the era’s fragile and rampaging politics.
“We need to tell the story,” Mr. Walz said. “I mean, he lost this election and he said he didn’t.”
Mr. Walz often speaks with a how’d-I-even-get-here feint toward political humility, as if he intends to decorate the Naval Observatory in Carhartt camo and has not given much thought to other plans.
At his most effective, he is a kind of Labrador retriever of a communicator: affable, game, just happy to be there — but liable to tilt his head in performative confusion when something sounds off to him.
On Tuesday, after some dissembling episodes earlier in the debate — particularly concerning past misstatements about his proximity to the Tiananmen Square massacre as a young man — Mr. Walz made a bid for the high ground, summoning more compelling details from his biography.
He was a teacher, he noted, and a football coach.
“I worked with kids long enough to know,” he said, “sometimes you really want to win.”
But Republicans like Mr. Trump were already laying the groundwork to contest the current election, he continued, and perhaps even to imprison their political opponents.
“A president’s words matter,” Mr. Walz said, punctuating his own. “A president’s words matter. People hear that.”
Mr. Vance had heard enough.
“It’s really rich,” he said, chopping the air with his hands, “for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.”
He moved to equate past Democratic complaints about election outcomes, including invocations of Russian interference in 2016 through Facebook ads and other means, with the response in 2020.
“Jan. 6 was not Facebook ads,” Mr. Walz shot back, as Mr. Vance smiled slightly.
Mr. Walz had a question for his counterpart.
“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Mr. Walz said of Mr. Trump, turning grandly to Mr. Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim,” Mr. Vance replied, “I’m focused on the future.” He swerved to a point about Covid and censorship.
“That,” Mr. Walz said, “is a damning non-answer.”
There was a reason, he added, that Mr. Pence was not on the stage as Mr. Trump’s running mate anymore.
And it was worth asking, he said, what that could tell viewers about Mr. Vance.
“America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice,” Mr. Walz said, his eyes getting bigger, “of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”
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