Vance-Walz vice-presidential debate: JD Vance steals the night from underwhelming Tim Walz

New York City is never an easy place on opening night. Not when the show features two relatively obscure midwesterners in an old-fashioned two-hander – and not on a sultry October 1st evening when the Mets are playing and there’s a new Robert Downey Jr play at the Lincoln Center and the sun slipping below the skyscrapers is making the Insta-shooters swoon, and when there are eight million voices with plenty to say in the five boroughs without listening to two guys yakking about politics.
Still, Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate between Republican nominee JD Vance and Tim Walz, plucked by Kamala Harris from a number of promising contenders in early August, was billed as one of the most consequential in US election history.
And from midafternoon, a small but loyal band of “Coach Walz” fans gathered outside the CBS studios, which is on the site of the old Sheffield Dairies on the quieter part of West 57th street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenue.
The NYPD had set the Republican fans down at the bottom of the avenue, on the other side of the street, and the two factions traded chants and jeers at each other as Manhattanites scurried past, walking their dogs, and running their errands and remaining rigorously unimpressed by the spectacle.
“Yeah, we are reclaiming it,” said Clarissa Lynn, who was carrying a banner that read: Tampon Tim: Stop the Red Wave.
“He should be proud to be ‘Tampon Tim’ because feminine products are really expensive and increasing their access in all schools for all students regardless of their gender identity is super important. I’m a teacher, and I know that kids sometimes don’t come to school because they don’t have access to sanitary products.”
Down the street, Joseph Ralko, a New Yorker and a film school graduate, was wearing a Maga hat as he explained his conversion from registered Democrat to twice-Trump voter.
“”I just think the liberals have gone too far left,” he said, wearily.
“I am not against necessarily a lot of the policies; it’s just they are so far gone we have to pull back a little. The hostility, the woke-ism. I know they blame Trump for a lot of it and he definitely is a part of it. But they are also in play, and it is the hypocrisy I’m sick off. I’d rather be told to my face that ‘I’m lying to you’ than be told everything is okay and get stabbed in the back, which I feel is what Democrats do.”
Ralko wore a Maga hat and spoke like a pacifist, laughing as he admitted that he was a political outlier among friends and colleagues in the film industry.
“I was open about it but not this open. I know who I am. If that loses friends, so be it. But my friends have stuck around. You know, humans are humans and we bond over what we bond over.”
His plan was to scoot home and watch the debate on TV. That seemed to be the sensible choice. All of the bars and restaurants around Hell’s Kitchen were showing the baseball as the clock rolled past 8pm.
A quick phone around a few establishment hotels yielded few plans to show the broadcast for their customers. (“Showing the debate?” repeated the front desk lady at the Algonquin in horror. “We don’t even have a television in the bar,” she said, and hung up).
So, it was too much to expect that Vance and Walz could bring Gotham to a standstill. In truth, there was a bigger buzz outside the Colbert studio, where the live audience stood in line for entry. But this debate exchange was not really being delivered to New Yorkers.
Instead, the vice-presidential nominees were betting on their words travelling into the livingrooms of the midwest and battleground states and most importantly into the minds of the small percentage of undecided voters which both campaigns are desperate to woo and convince.
So, when moderator Norah O’Donnell opened the evening by asking the two men what they would do if they found themselves in the situation room dealing with the Israel-Iran crisis, Walz made his case by emphasising the threat of the Republican presidential nominee.
“The person closest to Donald Trump has said he was unfit for highest office – that was senator Vance. What we have seen out of vice-president Harris is steady leadership.”
It was a steady, unadventurous opening. But when Vance’s turn came, he took a vital few seconds to say hello.
“I recognise a lot of Americans don’t know who either one of us are. I was raised in a working class family. My mother required food assistance for periods of her life; my grandmother required social security help to raise me and she raised me in part because my mother struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my life.
“I went to college on the GI Bill after I enlisted in the marine corps and served in Iraq, and so I stand here asking to be your vice-president with extraordinary gratitude for this country and for the American dream that made it possible. And most importantly, I know that a lot of you are worried about the chaos in the world and the feeling that the American dream is unattainable. I want to try and convince you tonight that if we get the right leadership, if we get Donald Trump back in the White House, the American dream becomes attainable again.”
It was, in short, a synopsis of his Hillbilly Elegy yarn, enough to draw eye-rolls from the commentariat but a crucial bit of advertising at the outset as Vance set out to present a more likable and reasonable version of himself.
For if the Republicans learned anything from the presidential debate, it is that optics are everything. Kamala Harris won hands down on facial gestures alone. Here, as Vance explained his startling about-turn on Trump over the course of eight years, when he moved from describing him as America’s Hitler to becoming his running mate, he spoke quickly and plausibly while on the split screen, Walz looked wide-eyed with worry.
Walz frequently bowed his head to scribble notes on an unseen pad, as though this was Coach Walz in the fourth quarter watching his defence fall apart against a no-huddle offence, or a teacher marking midterm papers on the hoof. As the evening wore on, one obvious aspect of this election became telling. Of the four leading players, Vance has been by far and away the most active and eager media interviewee, popping up on midweek and Sunday morning television shows almost as often as some of the hosts while Harris and Walz have rationed and curated their media appearances.
Now, all of that practise told. Beyond the substance of his answers, Vance had one main task: to present himself as a more likable figure. He played a smart game here, constantly referring to his rival as “Tim” and sounding sincere when, for instance, he sympathised with Walz after learning that his son had witnessed a school shooting.
After a month when Vance made global headlines for demonising a very specific demographic – the Haitian community of the Ohioan city of Springfield – he needed to use Tuesday night to present himself in a more appealing light.
And it worked.
Because it was left to the candidates to fact-check one another, it was only after the event it became clear that Vance had spent the 90 minutes engaging in what Van Jones, the CNN commentator, would describe afterwards as “sane-washing”, arguing that Vance had claimed that American energy production was down when it has increased, that there had been a peaceful transfer of power after Trump lost the 2020 election.
“This is a very, very deceptive guy who is trained to do what he did … and don’t fall for it.”
That warning was music to Republican ears. Prominent in the spin room afterwards was Donald Trump jnr, who had pushed hardest for his father to select Vance and who was happy to tell the gathered media that his man had given a “masterclass” so convincing that even Walz was nodding in agreement when he spoke.
And it definitely took Walz a full hour to become comfortable with the stop-start, formally moderated nature of the exchange, when for too long he looked rattled and flushed against Vance’s well-oiled and fast-talking articulacy.
He made an outright mess of his explanation of a misleading story about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and later confessed he could be a “knucklehead” (a phrase rarely spoken in contemporary Manhattan) when it came to misspeaking.
But as the debate wore on, the Minnesotan’s irrepressible decency came to the fore. And it was hard to escape the suspicion that Walz’s lack of snark and vitriol somehow brought Vance to a place where cordiality and civility marked the debate in a way that was a shocking reminder of how it used to be. Both candidates listened to one another. They never resorted to insults.
And Walz had his moments. He was excellent and passionate in advocating women’s reproductive rights – even if he failed to prosecute Vance for his draconian views, which he was permitted to cast in a softer light here. And Walz landed his best blow in the final minutes when he retorted to Vance’s evasion about January 6th when he said, “That is a damning non-answer.”
But Walz will regret that it took him so long to find his feet and to feel comfortable under the bright lights. It was an underwhelming performance that must have made many Democrats wonder, nervily, if the acerbic and polished intellectual heft of Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg might not have been better placed to handle this evening.
The impact may be ephemeral but Vance and the Republicans will claim the night. Perhaps the most vivid proof of this came from his boss who had promised to treat his social media followers to live posts of the debate.
Around an hour in, the Donald’s thoughts were suddenly pulled away from the debate and to the national pastime, as he sent out to the nation a post on X arguing that Pete Rose, the former baseball star who died on Monday, should be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Maybe it was just a sign of the would-be president’s distractable mind. Or maybe it was a reflex attempt to pull attention away from his running mate, who was clearly having a fine old time on his debut in New York – even if it was for one-night-only and off Broadway.