JD Vance couldn't *quite* gaslight the audience for the full 90 minutes.

The format favored Vance, but he couldn't make it the whole way without being creepy and weird.

I wrote a thread on Bluesky yesterday afternoon, preregistering my expectations for what would happen in the VP debate. Here were my predictions:

-Big-picture, it’ll be considered a draw.

-Walz will have moments that remind the people who love him why they love him. He’ll continue to be charming and relatable.

-Vance will perform better in this setting than he does with normal human beings. (It’s a low bar.) He’ll also perform better than Trump. (Incredibly low bar.)

-Vance’s main rhetorical tactic will be to say a ton of lies, ending with a question he invites Walz to answer. Walz will then have to choose between rebutting the lies and engaging the question. Either he lets the lies stand, or he gets accused of being evasive. The moderators won’t push back on the lies, so this is an easy rhetorical trap for Vance to deploy.

-Walz will stick to his strengths, and have some good barbs ready. But he is at his best talking to normal people. And there will be zero normal people on that stage with him. Vance will also be less easy to bait than Trump, and will do his best to sound non-weird/non-sociopathic.

-So Dems will be pissed at the moderators and heartened by Walz. Republicans will be pissed at the moderators and glad that Vance had a better-than-Trump performance. Low information voters will be confused and frustrated. And the talking heads will call it a draw.

---

Having watched the debate… yeah, I think those expectations held up pretty well.

Vance entered the debate as a historically unpopular VP candidate. He is an inexperienced politician who is more comfortable talking to MAGA podcasters and techbro billionaires than normal human beings. He is creepy and offputting in most social settings. He’s just an awful retail politician.

He had a couple of relative advantages on the debate stage, though.

(1) The format lets him to pivot away from any question he is asked and just talk for 1-2 minutes about whatever he wants. The lack of fact checking means he can just fabricate claims and bear no responsibility for anything he has proposed, said, or done. JD Vance in scripted, 1-2 minute bursts is basically the strongest version of JD Vance. So he was bound to look better than he has in all other settings.

(2) Donald Trump is such a catastrophically bad debater that Vance looks effective by comparison. All of Vance’s attack lines at the debate were ones that Trump flubbed in the debate against Harris. He didn’t have any especially clever or noteworthy moments, but it was like watching an actor finally nail the lines on the page after months of mishaps.

The Trump-Vance narrative of the election is that (a) things were great under Trump, (b) everything is a disaster now, (c) Trump will return us to the good times of 2017-2020, and (d) anyone who tells you otherwise is a rotten liar. It’s basically an electoral gaslighting strategy. And Trump is kind of terrible at it, because he keeps sounding like an even-further-degraded version of himself, and an electoral majority really didn’t like him the first time around.

Vance has the relative advantage of gaslighting the electorate while being just sort of an unknown, vaguely off-putting figure. It isn’t good, but it is less-bad than Trump, and also less-bad than Vance in any other setting.

Walz, by comparison, is at his relative weakest in this debate format. It was clear from the opening line that he was staring at the clock, speaking just a little too fast, worried about getting his points in before the timer ran out.

Walz is extraordinary in longform interviews where he can talk for as long as necessary to articulate his governing philosophy and the contrasts between the two campaigns. His skill in those settings is basically what earned him the VP nomination. But he isn’t a polished debater. He is an extraordinary retail politician, and uniquely capable of seeming both normal and fundamentally decent. And Vance, by contrast, is a train wreck in longform interviews because he can’t just ignore the question and run out the clock with a gaslight answer.

The debate format flips those strengths and weaknesses.

Nonetheless, the moments from this debate that are going to resonate were all JD Vance errors. First was the exchange between Vance and moderator Margaret Brennan, after Vance had insisted that Springfield, Ohio was overrun by illegal Haitian immigrants:

Brennan: “Just to clarify, Springfield’s Haitian migrants have legal status.”

Vance: “The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact check!”

Second, and even more damning, was Vance’s dodge of the January 6th question. Vance had already dodged the moderators’ questions, insisting that Trump had peacefully ceded power and that the real threat to democracy comes from Facebook’s moderation rules. Walz dug in and refused to let him slide. Walz asked, plainly, “Did [Trump] lose the election?”

Vance replied “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”

And Walz, just nailing the moment, interjected “that’s a damning non-answer.”

That was the critical moment when the mask slipped. Vance lied about Trump’s economic record and his health care record and his abortion record. He offered ludicrous non-answers on housing and climate change. And all of those lies and nonsense helped prop up his broader gaslight-narrative goal.

But the guy couldn’t say “yes, Donald Trump did in fact lose the 2020 election.” Because then Donald Trump would get mad at him. And he’s a spineless toady who believes today whatever he needs to believe at this particular moment.

It was a record-scratch moment. It will likely be the sole thing that people still remember from this debate five weeks from now. Trump and Vance want you to believe that everything was going great until Biden took office. They also can’t admit they lost the last election. Those guys are just completely unhinged from reality, ain’t they?

Vance nearly held it together for the full 90 minutes. This was as good as he was ever going to look. It was the best possible format for a confident, craven liar like him. But ultimately, all the memorable moments were times when he couldn’t quite maintain the faćade.

Those are my immediate reactions. It was a debate that went roughly as-expected. I don’t think it will much change the contours of the race. And while it is likely to be a terrifyingly close election, it seems at this point as though Harris/Walz is in the stronger position. [knock-on-wood]