Vance Performed Well In VP Debate. Will It Matter?
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Someone just sent me a Venn diagram that says people interested enough in politics to watch the VP debate undecided voters. And that is the true. And it's just two circles. Two completely separate circles.

Hello and welcome to this late night VP debate reaction edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's about a quarter past 11 p.m. on the East Coast, and I'm actually sitting two blocks away from where the vice presidential debate just took place. Yes, I live next to CBS Studios. I didn't know that. I do. I know. Why don't you work there? The commute would be so much shorter.

I mean, you know, if I did that, I wouldn't get to work with you. And then we wouldn't be here right now having this conversation about the debate that just took place. So, Nathaniel, it's all for you.

I'm flattered. Anyway, you've already heard Nathaniel's voice. Senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich is here with me tonight. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel. Hey, howdy, hey. Also here with us is polling editor at The New York Times, Ruth Agelnik. Welcome back to the podcast, Ruth. It's so good to have you. Hello, hello. Good to be back. So this is a podcast.

The debate was, I think it was pretty cordial for the most part. We heard the two nominees agree with each other multiple times on stage. They covered a decent amount of ground. They started with the war in the Middle East. They moved on to Hurricane Helene and immigration.

the economy, then some past comments from both Vance and Walls, Walls on sort of Hong Kong and where he was during the Tiananmen Square protests and Vance previously comparing Trump to Hitler. They also then moved on and talked about abortion, gun violence, housing, health care, child care, and then democracy.

We did some word counting this time as well that we will get into. But before we get to anything else, I want to get your thoughts, Ruth and Nathaniel, on I guess who won the debate if we want to just be really blunt about it. Ruth?

Who won? I think it was telling about 10 minutes into the debate and through the first half. I was getting a lot of text messages from friends who are Democrats feeling really frustrated and angry and saying that they were turning off the debate and friends who are Republicans saying this is going better than expected. So based on audience reaction, I think always true. The data roof.

- Always true to the data. - One could say that you conducted an opt-in SMS survey. - That's right. Very opt-in, completely skewed, not at all representative survey of people I happen to know felt like on the whole, Vance won the debate with the giant caveat that we can discuss later, which is that these debates have very little meaning or impact on the actual outcome of the race.

I'll offer the same caveat that I applied to all of our debate, post-debate podcasts and pre-poll podcasts, which is that we're basically just a smarter version of the cable news panel right now because we aren't operating on any real data. But my subjective read was that J.D. Vance turned in a better performance for reasons that we can talk about.

Yeah, and we were debating this a little bit before we started rolling. We were debating it on Slack while the debate was happening.

My takeaway was that Waltz gave a pretty bad performance. It wasn't just that J.D. Vance was a good debater, but also that Waltz was not a good debater. He was clearly nervous. He started oftentimes his sentences in the middle of a thought or an idea, and you kind of had to be clued into the news or the topic that he was talking about in order to understand. This was particularly the case when he was talking about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example. There were some pretty bad gaffes, I think,

the one that I just have written in all capital letters in my notes is I've become friends with school shooters. Obviously, he didn't mean that he has become friends with school shooters, and that's the kind of gaffe where I don't know that you need to make that much more of it than that he was nervous and not

maybe thinking before he was speaking or speaking slowly enough to be careful to avoid gaffes. He said going into this that he was a bad debater, and I think he turned himself into an honest man. Everyone says that, though, to set expectations in fairness. And J.D. Vance was pretty good. I mean, he seemed calm, and he managed to make arguments that the top of his ticket has not been able to make. And so in some ways, you got to see...

from Vance what the Republican Party could have if they had a top of the ticket who would stay on message.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, J.D. Vance sort of dispelled a lot of thoughts about him. You know, there's this idea that he's weird and he can't really talk to people. I think he was very coherent and, in fact, strong in the debate tonight. I think a lot of Republicans were really happy with how it turned out. In many ways, he was actually trying to be bipartisan, and that really showed in the debate. Like, he was complimenting Waltz. There were many, like, sort of bromance moments, almost,

They're sort of trying to reach out to undecided or swing voters who might look sort of fondly on those moments. Yeah, he was really trying to be likable and bipartisan and moderate. I think some of the many moments that stuck out to me, you know, he like reacted in what seemed like a genuine way to when Tim Wallace talked about how his son witnessed a shooting.

As I think we've talked about on the podcast before, J.D. Vance is not popular according to 538's favorability averages. He is at a negative 11 point net favorability rating. And it was a performance that certainly seemed geared toward improving that number. And I think very well could improve that number. We'll see, obviously. And Walls is at net positive four. So we'll also see if that changes at all. Right. Making him the most popular member of the ticket or of either ticket.

I think a couple of the moments that really struck me on Vance were like he was really, really cautious and really did not say anything extreme or like red meaty and...

I thought it was interesting that obviously the like Springfield like eating pets thing started with J.D. Vance, but the person who brought it up in their debate was Donald Trump. And J.D. Vance had an opportunity. They talked about this and J.D. Vance didn't mention the eating pets thing and he instead kind of pivoted and he was like, you know, my concern is for the Americans in Springfield, Ohio, who are being harassed.

hurt by the impacts of illegal immigration and stuff, you know, is a kind of much more polished answer. And then also on abortion, I think I thought he gave like a really like remarkable answer, which was like basically throwing the entire Republican Party under the bus being like, we need to do better as a party. These cases of women suffering due to these abortion laws are really tragic.

He said, we're not trusted. Americans don't trust us on this issue, was what he said. Which is absolutely true, as we've discussed on this podcast and in polling. And so that's a really remarkable answer from a guy who has previously supported a national abortion ban. So he was really pivoting hardcore to the center, and obviously that's smart politics.

And just to be clear, with the exception of what is arguably Walz's strongest moment in the debate, talking about January 6th, where he pressed Vance directly about Trump's denial of the vote count in 2020. And I think there...

Walsh was very strong, and also you saw Vance be fairly weak and not able to come back with a strong response when pressed multiple times about this. So he really did try to pivot to be moderate, but that was one place where he was really kind of cornered and wasn't able to give articulate, strong response. Right. He was cornered, but he still didn't retreat into, like,

straight out unpopularity, right? There was no good, like, yeah, he was cornered. There was no good answer for him there because on one hand, like the kind of correct answer is to say, no, the election was fair, but he can't say that because Donald Trump would, you know, be extremely mad with him about that. But he also can't

say that, oh yeah, the election was stolen and kind of say the answer that Trump would have given in that situation because he had been trying so hard to cultivate this moderate image throughout the debate. So instead he really kind of contorted and gave this answer about like tech censorship and like went back to like housing and inflation and things like that. And it was, yeah, it was definitely like awkward, but also I think it like simultaneously was not a good answer for him, but also illustrated his kind of strengths as a politician.

It kind of reminded me in a way, and obviously it's a very different topic, but of Kamala Harris's answer in the presidential debate, you know, some of her changing views over time. And like, you know, when she was like, oh, my values haven't changed, but it's like, oh, well, your positions have changed. And the obvious answer is that like, well, I was running in Democratic primary and now I'm running in a general election, but you can't like say that. So she kind of like had to have a mealy mouthed answer about it. And it's like, it's just kind of the answer you have to give when you're a politician trying to get out of that situation. And it was like, the

the least bad answer he could have given, probably. But yeah, that was definitely a point for Waltz in that exchange. I thought a really striking moment during the debate was on healthcare. And it was uncharacteristic, maybe, of Waltz's performances in that he had a really strong answer on healthcare. But it was also characteristic of what we've been saying about Vance, which is that he was pivoting towards the center. The

Vance literally positioned Trump's administration as saving the Affordable Care Act, at which point I slashed the producers being like, have I really lived long enough to see the Republican Party taking responsibility for Obamacare? And, you know, Waltz didn't.

pause and say, hey, hold on for a second. This is wild. Republicans are saying that they're responsible for the survival of the Affordable Care Act after trying to repeal it basically every day for, you know, an entire presidential administration. But he did come back and say, like, do you want to go back to being kicked off your insurance if you have cancer or if your kids get sick or if you're older or whatever? So that was one of his more forceful playing sort of offense moments.

But it was one moment amongst many where they said, oh, you know, he said something that I agree with. He said something that I agree with. And Kim, one of our producers, messaged me, you know, this might just be a debate tactic, but I feel like we're seeing how some of the policy is coalescing. And there is this sort of interesting dynamic where.

Walls and Vance were both just saying, we want to spend money on things. There wasn't much of that dynamic anymore where somebody's saying, they're the tax and spend liberals and they just want to make the government bigger. But I'm here to say that we need to shrink the debt and deficit and be responsible stewards of American taxpayers' dollars or anything like that. You saw Midwestern populism writ large on the CBS debate stage. And I think that is...

finally a correct usage of the word writ large on this podcast. Yeah, I was gonna say. We get criticized all the time for not actually using writ large correctly. But it was interesting. Maybe this is just media inverter politics. And maybe it also says something about the direction of our politics over the past 10 years.

I think it is partly J.D. Vance and Trump, for that matter, right? Is that, you know, taking the Republican Party in a more populist direction, which is, you know, we're okay with spending money, we're okay with bigger government and the pursuit of the things that we want to pursue. And I think that's similar with like, you know, Vance's answer on abortion would be unthinkable for a Republican before, you know, 2016. Yeah.

Well, and it's interesting, one of my colleagues, Jonathan Swan, reported that that was a strategy on Vance's part in debate prep to kind of throw walls off his game. That, you know, they came in with these kind of bipartisan, getting closer to you, cool, calm, and collected vibes, and that kind of threw walls off his game because he didn't realize he needed to be on defense about those things.

So, according to our reporting, that is a strategy that they used. But I think it was really interesting. I mean, it is it does speak to also like the Trump and now Vance Republican Party that isn't really focused on smaller government and reducing spending. It's really a different Republican Party that they're dealing with.

Well, the cultural conflicts are more what have come to the fore. And on immigration, I would say J.D. Vance didn't pivot. And it's because he doesn't need to, because his ticket has the popular position on immigration, not on every aspect of immigration. Of course, when you poll folks and ask, you know, who do you think would deal with the people who are in the country already in a humane and orderly way?

Americans tend to prefer Democrats on that question. But on the immediate question of the border, they have the popular position and he was going on offense more there, Ruth.

I mean, yes, when you talk about dealing with people who are in the country, but on immigration broadly, right, whether it's the wall or asylum, the Republican positions on this are fairly popular and Republicans have a fairly wide lead on immigration and on these specific topics. So it was fairly wise of him to stick to those positions.

Yeah, I agree that the Republicans have the advantage on most immigration issues, but I actually do think they still did some softening on immigration, right? They asked him, like, would you separate families? And he, like, you know, kind of...

put that part aside and talked about things. He's like, first, we're going to start with like deporting all the criminals, which is obviously more popular than the concept of separating families. And like I said before, he didn't mention the pet eating stuff, right? Which Trump did in the first debate. Obviously, like the culture wars have become like a defining feature of our politics and the divide between the parties. And this was not a very culture war-y debate. Like they kept that stuff out of it.

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Another thing that happened during the debate was that we started with issues that haven't been given as much airtime in the election, but it's because they are high salience issues, maybe not necessarily for voters, but just in the world right now. So the war in the Middle East, obviously, Iran issues.

firing missiles at Israel today. They talked about Hurricane Helene and made the question specifically about climate change. And I should say this, the question they asked specifically about the conflict in the Middle East was, would they give Israel basically the go ahead to strike Iran preemptively if they were to pursue a nuclear weapon, saying that they're closer than they've ever been to having a nuclear weapon?

So we heard the candidates talk about some issues that haven't gotten a lot of airtime, as we discussed on Monday's podcast. What did we make of that? Do we feel like in the final stretch of the campaign that national security and security

the conflict in the Middle East is going to rise or will rise in salience for American voters, or that climate change will? I see Bruce shaking her head very emphatically. I mean, just to be clear, climate change is one of those things that we pull about over and over and over. And everybody says that they care about climate change, and everybody says that climate change is important to them. And when you rank it compared with other issues, it ranks at the bottom consistently. It is

almost nobody's number one issue across pretty much every demographic. And the truth is right now, when we poll about the most important issue, foreign policy and specifically the Middle East is also very low on people's ranking of issues. It's higher than climate change, but it's very low. And I do not expect that to change. It was very much both of those things were in the news of the day with Hurricane Helene and what happened today in the Middle East. But

They aren't issues that are high salience for voters, and there's absolutely no reason to expect that that would change, especially when you look at foreign policy over the course of this campaign as we've gone in and out of, you know, foreign policy being the top of the news. It hasn't really changed the ranking in terms of the most important issue for people.

Specifically with regard to the debate, I thought the questions weren't great. I thought particularly the first question, it was basically a question of like, you're the person in the situation room making this decision, except they're asking the vice presidential candidates, which like, they are not going to be the people in the room making the decisions. They are not running for commander in chief. Like if they are the people in the room making the decision, other bad things have happened that are probably more important.

It's also it's a VP debate. People know who Trump is. People know who Harris is. A lot of people don't really know who Tim Walz and J.D. Vance are. There should probably be opening statements. And like J.D. Vance was basically like, I'm going to answer your question. But first, I'm going to talk and be like, hey, hey, America, this is who I am, J.D. Vance. And I thought that made a lot of sense.

Yeah, they had agreed that they weren't going to have opening statements. I mean, after the first 15, 20 minutes, I thought that the story about the debate was going to be a story about the debate moderation. That period sort of moved on, and then I remembered, oh, actually, the story is just going to be not about this debate at all. So whether it's the moderation, whether it's Walt putting his foot in his mouth, whether it's Vance giving a pretty good performance...

Maybe it doesn't matter at all, but I do actually have a question nonetheless about Minnesota. So our producers very diligently tracked mentions of topics throughout the debate and found that, you know, democracy was mentioned 12 times. Jobs was mentioned 10 times. The border was mentioned 14 times. Freedom, seven. Inflation, five.

Minnesota was mentioned 25 times and 25 times by just one person. And that was Tim Walls. Yeah. Golden age for the gopher state. You know, I don't know that this requires rigorous analysis, but what was going on there?

I think that, again, this is just my opinion. We don't have any data to back this up, but I will say, as I was watching, there were times when he talked about Minnesota that I thought were really valuable because he could talk about things that he'd done as a demonstration of what he's capable of. There were other times where he talked about Minnesota as sort of examples.

And there it was clear that he was sort of going to safe ground for himself, but it didn't really work. Like, you know, he was talking about January 6th and he was talking about what happened at the Capitol. And then he said there were also protests in Minnesota. And that's absolutely true and also horrible. But at the same time, I think keeping the focus on the protests at the Capitol may have been a sort of smarter strategy. So there were times when he kind of retreated back to Minnesota when I thought that might not have been necessary to make your point.

We've mentioned here that probably this debate has limited impact, that maybe a lot of people weren't watching or that even people who were watching turned it off at a certain point. But the people who are watching are people who are involved in politics and maybe people who are thinking about the future of the Democratic or Republican Party themselves.

depending on what happens in November, but maybe not even depending on what happens in November. And there's been plenty of talk about what happens post-Trump in the Republican Party. Even if he wins, he will only be serving for one term. Did Vance enhance his career prospects tonight after a pretty difficult rollout of his VP nomination?

So in the article I wrote in advance of this debate, which was basically, I believe the headline was something like, "VP Debates Aren't That Important," in which I found that historically they have not moved the polls very much. I think the last time with a significant polling movement after the VP debate was 2000. And of course, we don't know if that was because of the VP debate or it was just a coincidence.

I did find that the VP candidates favorability numbers specifically did move sometimes like, you know, not like by huge amounts, but, you know, two, three, four points. And I would not be surprised to see J.D. Vance, who, as I mentioned earlier, is quite unpopular at negative 11 points. If he gets a little more popular after this debate, maybe, you know, goes to like

negative eight points instead. That would, I think, be very in line with my expectations and what I saw. And, you know, this will give him a little bit of a boost. That said, I think that this is going to be forgotten fairly quickly. And the outcome of the election is going to be much, much, much more important to J.D. Vance's political future than anything he did to change his net favorability rating by three points on a random night in October.

We also say often that VPs matter because we judge the top of the ticket's decision-making ability in terms of whether they chose a good running mate. In that, you know, if you don't like Vance or you don't like Waltz, it doesn't matter all that much because you're not actually voting for them for president in the end, but it will shape how you view VPs.

Trump or Harris and whether or not you thought they made good decisions. Was Vance's performance good enough or Waltz's performance bad enough that it sort of goes the extra mile to shape how you end up viewing Trump or Harris as a result after tonight? I don't think so. I mean, again, we have to wait for data to see how their favorability ratings shift. And also, I guess whether the top line horse race polls shift.

I don't think I saw anything significant. I don't think JD Vance is suddenly going to become popular. I don't think he's going to go from negative 11 to even positive 2. That would be a really major shift. Tim Walls could become maybe a little less popular, but again, nothing fundamentally different. I don't think he turned in a career-ending performance or anything. So yeah, I would say no.

Yeah, I would expect it to have almost no impact. At best, you have some people who were questioning Trump's decision on Vance, and this may have calmed them a little bit. But like Nathaniel said, this will have almost no long-term impact on either of their careers. And I think in terms of sort of how you think about the top of the ticket and their choices, I don't expect this to have any kind of major impact either. Yeah.

Yeah, it did strike me as, you know, this is not probably how voters are thinking necessarily, but the opportunity cost for Harris of choosing Walz. You know, I think there was this love affair for Democrats with Walz in the early stages of his selection, and people thought he was a really fun, jovial guy. But also in choosing Walz, she didn't pick Josh Shapiro, the very popular governor of probably the most important state in the country for winning the election.

And in particular, seeing a bad debate performance and a performance that probably doesn't make you think like, oh, I can imagine this guy at the Resolute desk or I can imagine this guy in the Situation Room, you know, handling a crisis in the Middle East or something like that, that ultimately choosing Waltz did cost something in terms of potential upside for the ticket in the

and Pennsylvania. I see nodding your heads in disagreement. In Pennsylvania, sure, but like, she could have chosen Josh Shapiro. He could have given the world's best debate performance. I still would have been very skeptical that the VP debate would have made a difference.

That that's a question separate and apart from the debate performance. Right. I think Josh Shapiro's value of providing an extra point or whatever it would have been in Pennsylvania is probably real. But as I've also said on the podcast, I think it's fine if Kamala Harris felt like Tim Walz was just going to be a better governing partner and felt like she could win Pennsylvania without Shapiro. Well, maybe it's fine. Maybe it's not.

She won't win Pennsylvania. But like, it's a very narrow circumstance where like, you know, the election comes down to Pennsylvania and it's within one point and Josh Shapiro would have made a difference. So I think it's a defensible choice either way. But like, if you're wringing your hands over the VP choice, like,

today on either side. I just think you're way overrating the importance of the VP debate. Yes, I think that's true. Though I will say I would have enjoyed watching a Vance Shapiro debate. I think it would have been very spirited. I think it would have been so different.

and kind of fun. But I don't think that it would have made any difference. Because as you point out in your article, even the most spirited debates that we've seen in the past didn't really make a difference in the overall state of the race. So it's hard to feel like anything could happen with any of these people in this debate that would have actually changed the trajectory of the race. And for once, my friends, the betting markets are

I rarely think they're right, but I think they're right here.

All right. Well, with that, cheers to the Scottish teens. And we will leave it there for this evening. Thank you so much, Rafe and Nathaniel. Thank you. Thanks, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast.538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.