The V.P. Debate Came Down to One Moment
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From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. Vice presidential debates are strange. They're this contest between two people who, even if they win, they're not going to have decision-making power. So they're there trying to convince a country to vote for their ticket by arguing the other person on their ticket, who is not there debating tonight, is going to be good at making decisions.

So it's always hard for me, at least, to know what I'm looking for in these debates. Is it which candidate is the better debater who won? Is it which candidate did more to help and defend and make the case for their running mate? Is it which candidate did the least to hurt their running mate? Does any of this matter at all? Is anybody watching but those of us who professionally have to do it?

If you're scoring it as a debate, technically, J.D. Vance is the better debater. He won that debate over Tim Walls. He's quicker on his feet. He lies more smoothly. And Lord, did he lie a lot last night. It's much better at seeming like he's answering a question when he's doing anything but answering the question.

But that's debating. Those are relevant skills. You can't take it away from him. Walls was often nervous and fumbling. But I didn't think Walls did a bad job. He made his arguments. He seemed like a decent, genuine person up there. He did nothing to hurt the ticket. And it was Vance in the final minutes of the debate who might have caused himself and Donald Trump real damage.

The vice president doesn't have many official jobs. John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first running mate, he famously said the vice presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss. But one job the vice president does have is certifying election results. This hasn't, for most of American history, been consequential or notable.

But in 2020, it became both. Donald Trump lost the election but insisted that he won it. He demanded that Vice President Mike Pence refuse to certify the results. He demanded he throw it into chaos by rejecting the state electors, declaring the results illegitimate. Pence refused Trump's demands. That's why the crowd that stormed the Capitol was chanting that Mike Pence should be hung. That's why Donald Trump ended up looking for a new vice president when he ran again in 2024.

There's been no end of commentary and speculation on how J.D. Vance ended up as Donald Trump's running mate. Many Republicans want to see Donald Trump's movement turned into something ideological and intellectual and reproducible. And they hoped that Trump picked Vance for that job. I've always thought that was a little absurd. What matters to Donald Trump is loyalty. And Vance has long been willing to say something that other top Republicans don't quite want to say.

He has said he would have done what Mike Pence did not do. He has said he would not have certified the 2020 election. He would have thrown it back to the states. And then towards the end of last night's debate, Vance was asked about that position again. Let's talk about the state of democracy, the top issue for Americans after the economy and inflation. After the 2020 election, President Trump's campaign and others filed 62 lawsuits contesting the results.

Judges, including those appointed by President Trump and other Republican presidents, looked at the evidence and said there was no widespread fraud. The governors of every state in the nation, Republicans and Democrats, certified the 2020 election results and sent a legal slate of electors to Congress for January 6th.

Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last presidential election and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. Would you again seek to challenge this year's election results, even if every governor certifies the results? I'll give you two minutes.

Well, Nora, first of all, I think that we're focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris's policies, make housing affordable, make groceries affordable. And that's what we're focused on. But I want to answer your question because you did ask it. Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues and

peacefully in the public square. And that's all I've said. And that's all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, 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. And now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration.

I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country, but unfortunately, it's not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship. - It is the threat of censorship. Are you kidding me? Walz, for his part, saw the opportunity. - This is one that we are miles apart on.

This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just say that. Did he lose the 2020 election? Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation? That is a damning non-answer. It's a damning non-answer for you to not talk about censorship.

I'll admit, as grim as it is, I laughed when I heard that. This is what you get when you combine excellent debate skills with a completely indefensible position. You get absurdity. J.D. Vance cannot say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, though he knows it to be true.

GD Vance cannot say Donald Trump won the 2020 election, though he knows that is what Donald Trump wants him to say. So he dissembles and he dodges and he reminds people that if he is ever called upon by Trump to commit an act of loyalty to his boss and disloyalty to his country, he will do what Donald Trump wants him to do. He will cause a constitutional and electoral crisis.

Most of the time, the vice president doesn't matter. The vice president matters when the circumstances turn extreme. We think about that in terms of the death or disability or resignation or removal of the president. But there are other moments, moments that Donald Trump has shown in the past he triggers. And Vance has shown that he cannot be trusted in those moments. I'm not going to tell you Vance lost the debate on points, but for me, at least, that was the moment of the debate.

The moment when Vance showed that he can't be trusted with the job he seeks. After the debate, snap polls showed viewers pretty evenly split on who won. But CNN had a panel of undecided voters it was looking to for reactions. Almost all of them said they were still undecided after watching. Only one had made up their mind. And Vance's answer about the 2020 election was why.

To talk about the rest of the debate, I'm joined now by our senior editor, Claire Gordon. Claire. Morning, Ezra. Good morning. I wanted to just start by staying on that exchange. You have made the point a couple times on the show that you think that J.D. Vance, people see him or accuse him of being this like craven political opportunist for how he's just completely flipped on Trump. And you've argued that he's really gone through a serious ideological conversion and that's how to understand him.

It was hard for me watching that moment not to see that as just Craven political opportunism. Is that the wrong read of that answer? I would feel better if I thought it was Craven political opportunism because I think somebody who was a Craven political opportunist in that key moment might not go along with it. Because in terms of the future of your career, throwing the election back to the states is

Then having that election decided by the courts and being humiliated in the moment and in history, if and when it goes against you, is bad for your future political prospects. Or at least I hope it is bad for your future political prospects. There are different kinds of extremists. I've often thought that we talk about ideology wrong.

And I've had in my head for a very long time this piece I want to write that I never did. Sorry, I'm going to describe a chart in my head on a podcast, never a good thing to do. But on one axis, you might have what we think of as ideology. Progressive, conservative, moderate. Beyond progressive, it might be socialist. Beyond conservative, it might be libertarian.

But on another axis is this thing I think we miss, right? Temperament or orientation towards change, right? They're moderates who, whatever their ideology, they just don't like to see things change very much. Paul Ryan was conservative in his ideology, but he actually wanted to change quite a lot. You keep going down the right of that and you get reactionaries and you get counter-revolutionaries. And I think the way to understand what J.D. Vance is is

He's a counter-revolutionary, right? He believes, and he's said this many, many times, and he's part of a coterie of post-liberal intellectuals who believe this, that the institutions of American life have been captured by godless, liberal, woke, Marxist enemies of the people.

And at different times, he's described this in different ways. He's talked about debathification, which is a reference to Iraq after the invasion. By the way, debathification was a huge disaster and is widely acknowledged to be such. It's sort of wild to me that J.D. Vance chooses that as his analogy. But he has talked in many different ways about the way he would like to use the power of the state to take the state over and then use the state to take over other institutions and return them back.

to serving the common people through the person of J.D. Vance, right? Or Donald Trump or one of these people in his ideological milieu. And that is what I think he is describing here. I think he believes himself to be engaged in a counter-revolutionary project. He's trying to win power and then use the power he wins to get more power. And if that's done democratically, great. If it is done anti-democratically, also fine.

But he's been consistent enough about it, and he's fallen in with a group of people who are serious enough about it that I take him at his word. I would feel better if I didn't. So just to clarify, you think that J.D. Vance, if he had the opportunity, would say, yes, let's make Donald Trump king? I don't know that he would call it king, but if presented with a situation like 2020 where

where right-wing media is saying there are too many irregularities, quote-unquote, to certify this election, and it should be thrown back to the states, which is the hoped-for endgame there. I think J.D. Vance has said very clearly he would have done that, and I believe him.

All right. Taking a breath. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you from that. Rewinding back to early in the debate in the segment on climate change. And this was a particularly interesting answer from J.D. Vance because obviously he has to sort of represent a ticket where the top of that ticket says climate change is a hoax.

And seemed to make this bold step of not acknowledging that man-made climate change was real, but being willing to engage in the thought experiment that it was.

was real. Now, Nora, you asked about climate change. I think this is a very important issue. Look, a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns. I think it's important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer. But one of the things that I've noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions, this idea that carbon emissions drives all of the climate change.

Well, let's just say that's true just for the sake of argument. So we're not arguing about weird science. Let's just say that's true. Well, if you believe that, what would you what would you want to do? The answer is that you'd want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible. And you'd want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we're the cleanest economy in the entire world.

what have Kamala Harris's policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world. And when I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they're doing per unit of economic output. So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people. And unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.

So basically the argument is that reshoring manufacturing is the solution to climate change. China's dirty. The U.S. economy is cleaner. Has some funny echoes of the environmentalist argument of buy local. What did you make of that argument? So this is a place where when I say J.D. Vance is a better debater than Tim Walz, I mean that if he was in a high school debate competition, he would beat Tim Walz.

Everybody's mileage might be different. I heard this and it completely sounded like what it actually is to me, which is bullshit. We are at record levels of oil and gas production in the United States right now. You would think from that answer that the Biden-Harris administration has cut domestic oil and gas production. It is higher than it was under Donald Trump.

You would also possibly think from that that we have been losing manufacturing, either jobs or output in the U.S. during the Biden-Henry administration, but it is significantly up from where it was under Donald Trump. So even if it were true that the way to manage climate change is to maximize U.S. production of fossil fuels and maximize U.S. manufacturing, I

We're doing those things. But it's also just not true. And J.D. Vance is just dodging and weaving here to ignore the actual policies that are under consideration.

We have to put down regulations, both here and through cooperative processes like the Paris Climate Accords in other countries that push utility electricity generation to become cleaner. The world has been trying to do that. Donald Trump has been trying to stop the world from doing that and stop America from doing that. That is bad for climate change, no matter what you do with manufacturing. You have to build enough clean energy that we can run the global economy cleanly.

We have to radically increase the amount of solar and wind and do a huge amount of innovation, right? We need green cement. We do not currently have a scalable, affordable solution for cement. We are working on it. These are the kinds of things you might think about in the thought experiment of if climate change is real.

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So Vance returned to the idea of reshoring manufacturing many times through the debate. It seemed to be for him sort of like the pet issue and the way the border is for Trump, the solution to all problems. And in the segment on the economy, Walls responds to Vance, you know, making that case. Look, I'm a union guy on this. I'm not a guy who wanted to ship things overseas, but I understand that, look,

We produce soybeans and corn. We need to have fair trading partners. That's something that we believe in. I think the thing that most concerns me on this is Donald Trump was the guy who created the largest trade deficit in American history with China. So the rhetoric is good. Much of what the senator said right there, I'm in agreement with him on this. I watched it happen too. I watched it to my communities, and we talked about that. But we had

People undercutting the right to collectively bargain. We had right-to-work states made it more difficult. We had companies that were willing to ship it over. And we saw people profit, folks that are venture capital in some cases, putting money into companies that were overseas. We're in agreement that we bring those home. The issue is Donald Trump is talking about it. Kamala Harris has a record 250,000 more manufacturing jobs just out of the IRA.

So Walls said a lot of stuff in that answer, that we need fair trading partners, but also that he agrees with Vance on China, but also that Trump was weak on China. But also maybe the bigger issue is the decline of unions and a dig at Vance, maybe on venture capital. What did you make of all of that as an answer together, but also specifically him saying that he agreed with a lot of Vance's rhetoric there?

I always think it's interesting to watch in any political moment where there is convergence. And there's convergence on a bunch of these issues. There's convergence on prioritizing bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. If you look at the money going into new factories right now,

It is astonishingly high. The Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of what it is doing is creating grants and tax credits to locate new manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and hire people here. If you look at the Chips and Science Act...

which is giving some 30 plus billion dollars to semiconductor firms to bring semiconductor plants back to America or at least build more of them in America and it's actually been giving out that money it seems like it's working right we're starting to get some of these factories back and it takes time to build a factory it takes time to hire for a factory but my read of the data is

is that this is going to be a very profound part of Joe Biden's legacy. On China, Donald Trump changed American politics attitudes towards China.

He ran, he said the bipartisan consensus on bringing China into the liberalized trade world had been wrong. We had been too soft on China. We let them do too much currency manipulation. We needed to treat them as more of a competitor. We needed to slap more tariffs on them. We needed to be more skeptical of sharing information and technology with them. And Joe Biden and his administration took office and they said Donald Trump is right about all that. I mean, they didn't say that, but anyway.

As a policy matter, they did not remove the Trump tariffs, and they went further than Donald Trump ever had. There are policy differences between the two campaigns, many of them, but in terms of some of the aims on this set of issues, they're not that different. And by the way, they both have their own internal contradictions. So Trump talks tough on China, but did have the largest ever trade deficit with China, right? That is a true fact.

He talks tough on China, but it does seem that over time she was pretty good at flattering Donald Trump. And now she is one of those strongmen around the world that Donald Trump always makes really clear to say that he likes and they have a great relationship and they love spending time together and she respects me. And, you know, it's the sort of normal Donald Trump thing. He has his views about countries and then his views about the amount of fealty other leaders have.

pay him and whether or not they mentioned how big his electoral college victory in 2016 is. And that drives a lot of his policy. I thought it was effective for both of them last night, Walz and Vance, that they did something that neither Harris nor Trump did. And if people go back and listen to my

podcast about that debate, I say in that show that I think Harris should have said that they thought Trump had some good ideas on China and they've built on those ideas. Walls basically does say that here. And when you look at the post-debate polling, right, the snap polls, it's really like 50-50, 49-51 in the kind of CNN and political polls that I saw over who won. But both candidates end with significantly improved favorability ratings. Right.

from people who watched. And that's because people like to see agreement. They like to see you say, you know what? My opponent over here, not a bad man and has some good ideas, right? We disagree on these things, but we do have points of commonality. Okay, but Vance turned around and really jumped on him for that point of agreement, said that he was in a position of whack-a-mole or something like that.

So if you notice what governor waltz just did is he said first of all donald trump has to listen to the experts And then when he acknowledged that the experts screwed up He said well donald trump didn't do nearly as good of a job as this No, that's a gross generalization. So what tim waltz is doing and I and I honestly tim I

I think you got a tough job here, 'cause you've gotta play whack-a-mole. You've gotta pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver rising take-home pay, which of course he did. You've gotta pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver lower inflation, which of course he did. And then you simultaneously gotta defend Kamala Harris' atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries, and housing unaffordable for American citizens.

So do you stand by that advice being good? Walls throwing some credit Vance's way? You got to do both. I heard Vance often do the thing of a little bit falsely saying he thought half of what Tim Walls was saying or a third of what Tim Walls was saying was good. Yeah, he'd butter him up, just smack him down. That's why Vance was a better debater because he knew how to deliver the punch after it. I have a theory of why Tim Walls did not have a great debate. And I don't think he had a great debate.

And it's not that Tim Walz is terrible at the debates, though he actually did say during the vetting process, this was reported back then, that he does not think he's a very good debater. But I've interviewed Walz, and he was a great interview and very good on his feet. And I've watched him in a lot of other interviews. In fact, being good at interviews, including, by the way, on Fox News, which is a place he used to go do a lot of interviews, is how Tim Walz ended up on the ticket. Since ending up on the ticket...

They have taken this guy who showed himself to be an incredibly effective communicator when unleashed, and the Harris campaign has leashed him. Harris does almost no interviews and no tough interviews, and they have put Tim Walz on the same diet.

And so unlike J.D. Vance, who's out there doing all these tough interviews and getting into fights constantly with the media and sharpening his rhetorical blades and realizing how he can answer these questions and testing and testing and testing his lines, not only is Harris not doing that, Walls, who's really good at it, that's why they picked him on some level, or at least how he came to their attention to be on the shortlist, he's not doing it either. And I'm not just talking here about Fox News. Put him on sports talk radio podcasts.

Put him on Lex Friedman. Try to get him on Joe Rogan, right? Try to get him where these young men you need to win over are, where he can half talk about sports and half talk about how Democrats aren't, you know, the cultural Marxist monsters of your dreams. But they're not doing that, and they're holding him back.

And I just don't think this has been a smart strategy for the campaign. I think they're being too careful with both of their candidates. And this is not special pleading that they should both come on the Ezra Klein show, although the door is certainly open. It is that they should be out there. Yes, possibly sometimes answering a question wrong, but getting enough reps in that they're giving really strong interviews and creating media moments that reach in places that rallies are never going to reach for them.

The fact that J.D. Vance is out there doing that, it was evident on that stage. The fact that Tim Walz has not been out there doing that, it was evident on that stage. Is it a bad look if Walz is out there doing tons of interviews, but Harris isn't because Harris is weaker in those settings? I think Harris would be stronger in those settings if she was out there doing tons of interviews. You just get better at things by doing them. I mean, that's how it always goes.

But I also don't think it'd be a bad look, right? If the idea was that Harris is the presidential candidate and is doing rallies that have 10, 15, 20,000 people packing arenas and is out there also being vice president. And so we've sent the guy who doesn't have as intense a job to go talk to comedians on podcasts. I think people would sort of understand the division of labor there.

So let's talk about immigration, because Vance gave us the most detail that we've seen yet from that ticket about what Trump's largest deportation operation in American history would actually look like.

And listening to him talk about it, what was striking was that it just didn't seem that dramatic at all. So we've got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. What do we do with them? I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally. I think you start with deportations on those folks.

And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country. And by the way, that'll be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day's work. And the final point, Margaret, is you ask about family separation. Right now in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.

Some of them have been sex trafficked. Some of them hopefully are at homes with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules. The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris's wide open southern border. So prioritizing deporting undocumented immigrants who have criminal records is

Something that sounds like cracking down on employers for hiring undocumented immigrants. Both seem like pretty standard fare, even in the past bipartisan fare. The one point that seemed a little striking was that he dodged the question about separating parents and children and then dodged that a second time in a follow-up. Senator, the—

question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have one minute. Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris's open border. I didn't accuse Kamala Harris. So what's your read of that? What will this biggest deportation operation in American history look like? There's a lot to say about this. First is that the 25 million illegal aliens number Vance was using all night is just garbage.

This has been looked at, fact-checked. If you look at Department of Homeland Security numbers, they estimate around 11 million. I think the highest anybody could find of a credible estimate was 16 million, but that's an aberrant estimate. This dynamic of J.D. Vance soft-pedaling policies that either he or his running mate has supported was sort of present all night.

Right. It was present on abortion. It was present on Obamacare and it was present here. And it's true that if the giant mass deportation project that Donald Trump is talking about is trying to deport Americans.

immigrants who have felonies on their records, which is already a priority within the immigration system, that is not a huge change. If it's passing a proposal that has E-Verify in it,

such that you tighten the work verification and people can't get jobs if they don't have good papers, that's getting to self-deportation, right? The old Mitt Romney idea, you make it harder for undocumented immigrants to be here and make a living here, and then they'll leave. That's also not like this giant mass deportation operation. On the other hand, the dodging and weaving that JD Vance did on family separation, I think gets at why I don't take his answer here very seriously.

Because what is true about a Donald Trump administration, we saw it in the first administration and we have every reason to believe it'll be true in a second administration, is that his administration is filled with people like him, like Stephen Miller, who wake up in the morning and want to eject immigrants from this country.

and make their lives miserable enough here or miserable enough if they come here that they will leave and that the people behind them will not come in the future. And when given the opportunity to inflict tremendous harm to do that, like with family separation, they did it. The people around Donald Trump, the people who've been attracted to him, they have no serious interest in replacing the Affordable Care Act.

They're not concepts of a plan. There's not, in my estimation, going to be an effort to do this, right? They do not get out of bed in the morning and think about doing that. They do get out of bed thinking about how to make the lives of immigrants harder. They do get out of bed thinking about how to punish people for coming here.

And there are many, many, many people who want to serve with Donald Trump who have real animus towards immigrants. And as much as J.D. Vance was trying to put a nice face on it last night, he has been going around in recent weeks lying about Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Because among the things he tries to do is whip up anti-immigrant anger among other people. And so Vance was effective, right?

at putting a nicer face on things that they have talked about before, but the other things are caught on tape too. And the coalition is knowable and evident, and there's a track record here. And I think all the signs on that point in the same direction, whether it is actually a mass deportation project, I don't know, because that's a pretty hard thing to organize, and you need to get a fair amount of cooperation from different parts of the government, and there'd be legality questions. But in terms of whether directionally,

You should expect a lot of cruelty in Donald Trump's immigration policy. I think you should.

Yeah, I was also curious how you squared this more moderate sounding immigration policy with Vance's story about how immigrants are the reason we're in a housing crisis and that deporting immigrants could help solve it. Senator, on that point, I'd like for you to clarify, there are many contributing factors to high housing costs. What evidence do you have that migrants are

are part of this problem? - Well, there's a Federal Reserve study that we're happy to share after the debate. We'll put it up on social media actually that really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration and higher housing prices. Now, of course, Margaret, that's not the entire driver of higher housing prices. It's also the regulatory regime of Kamala Harris.

Look, we are a country of builders. We're a country of doers. We're a country of explorers. But we increasingly have a federal administration that makes it harder to develop our resources, makes it harder to build things, and wants to throw people in jail for not doing everything exactly as Kamala Harris says they have to do. And what that means is that you have a lot of people who would love to build homes who aren't able to build homes.

So naturally, of course, the first thing that you did was look up the Federal Reserve study that he shared. And so are you willing now to admit that you were wrong? And there is, in fact, a reputable analysis that explains that immigration is the cause of the housing crisis. It's all so unbelievably tiresome. Okay. J.D. Vance did tweet out the study. Air quotes around the study. What he tweeted out that he was referencing, at the very least, was not a study.

It was prepared remarks by a single Federal Reserve governor. Those remarks, which are not primarily about housing, say at a certain point,

Finally, there is a risk that strong consumer demand for services, increased immigration, and continued labor market tightness could lead to persistently high core services inflation. Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents as additional housing supply may take time to materialize. So...

What I would say reading that is it is an argument that in a tight labor market and a strong economy, if you are not building more homes and you have more people, prices will rise. This is the canonical insight of all supply and demand analysis. But the problem is not the people. The problem is the not building houses problem.

We do not lack the capacity, the technology to create apartment buildings. J.D. Vance has not gone around saying, you know, Springfield, Ohio has developed a really strong economy in recent years. And that really strong economy has led to a need for more workers.

And to Springfield's credit, as has happened in previous times in even that city's history, but as was also true for J.D. Vance's own ancestors who moved from Kentucky to Ohio because the Ohio economy was better. They were immigrants, Appalachian immigrants. He talks about this at length in his book.

They moved to Ohio to take jobs and in doing by his own analysis would have increased home prices if there was a housing scarcity, which I assume at that point there probably wasn't. But that is happening now again in Springfield, in this case with Haitian immigrants. And what we need to do is build a lot of homes. Right. We need to make sure everybody's a great place to live. Right. And if there are regulations standing in the way of that, let's ease them.

If there is some reason we are not getting enough physical materials and construction workers to Springfield, let's do something about it. That's not what he's saying. Project 2025, which he has been a big fan of at many times, has been very clear that it does not believe in radically increasing housing supply and instead wants to return all the control here to localities and let them put down more rules to make sure people you don't want to live next to can't move next to you.

Something J.D. Vance could have done on that stage is say – and this would have been an excellent and devastating argument for a public debate – is to say that Kamala Harris is from California. And California, where Kamala Harris was a senator, has been an absolute failure on housing. And for all that she is talking about 3 million new homes, if you look at how many homes they're building in California, even after years of politicians like her talking about building more homes –

They are not building more homes in California. Housing struts have barely budged. But if you go look at Texas, where Republicans like me, J.D. Vance, run things, they're building tons of new homes, orders of magnitude more homes than California is building. And that is why people are leaving California to live in Texas, leaving Los Angeles to live in Austin, leaving San Francisco to live in Houston.

And we're going to do that everywhere because we're Republicans. And we believe that in America, if you want to take some land that you own and build an apartment building or build four units of housing so people can pay you money for it and live there and have a better life, we're going to let you do that. But he doesn't say that. He says immigrants are bad and then pretends it's a Federal Reserve study telling you that

That the reason we have high housing costs is immigrants. And there isn't. And immigrants are not bad. And by the way, another thing, if J.D. Vance's obsession with rising fertility rates led all of a sudden to American families doubling the number of children they have, under his analysis, that would be an absolute disaster for the housing market.

Because in an era of constrained supply, we would not have enough homes for all these new people, either the bigger families or as they became adults. But if we built homes, we would. The issue with housing supply is how many homes we have. We know how to build homes for people. The people are not the problem.

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So you brought up Obamacare, so I want to make sure we get to that. One of the top problems facing Americans is the high cost of health care. Senator Vance, at the last presidential debate, former President Trump was asked about replacing the Affordable Care Act. In response, he said, I have concepts of a plan. Senator Vance,

Since then, Senator, you've talked about changing how chronically ill Americans get health insurance. Can you explain how that would work? And can you guarantee that Americans with pre-existing conditions won't pay more? I'll give you two minutes. In the last debate, in the Trump-Harris debate, Trump said that he had saved Obamacare. And Vance...

agreed and put some meat on the bones about why Trump was the savior of Obamacare. Look, Donald Trump has said that if we allow states to experiment a little bit on how to cover both the chronically ill but the non-chronically ill, it's not just a plan. He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was

President of the United States and I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare which was doing Disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump Of course, you don't have to agree with everything that President Trump has ever said or ever done but when Obamacare was

crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs. Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care. What is he talking about? He's, I don't know how to say it more gently. He's lying.

Yes, it is true that at certain points across Donald Trump's presidency, Congress made tweaks to Obamacare, some of them helpful, some of them harmful. In my view, none of them that meaningful whatsoever. And like I covered all this very closely. The number of words I have written on this is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. At no point did I have to write a big piece saying, wow, thank God for Donald Trump saving Obamacare.

I find it to be an interesting artifact of Obamacare's rising popularity and entrenchedness in American life that Trump and Vance have settled on this particular line, that Donald Trump is a heroic bipartisan president who worked tirelessly with Democrats to save the Affordable Care Act. This is just, this whole thing is just crazy.

I don't, it's just an up is down political argument. Donald Trump tried to gut the affordable character repeatedly. Like that was what his record on this was. He just failed to succeed.

Putting aside the sort of weird things Vance was saying in the debate last night, he has, in other appearances lately, begun to talk about what these concepts of a plan might be. And the concepts of a plan are an old and I would say quite discredited idea, which is you would, instead of having a regulation that says insurers cannot discriminate on people based on preexisting conditions, we're all in the same pool, whether we are healthy or whether we are sick.

what it would do is say, we're going to not discriminate on preexisting conditions. What we're going to do is create a separate kind of insurance for sick people. So we're going to, in the technical dictionary definition of the term discriminate, discriminate the market between healthy and sick, not on every person individually, but on people collectively. There's going to be this pool for the sick people, this pool for the healthy people.

Now, of course, the problem with that is that the pool for the sick people becomes very, very expensive. Many states have tried to do this. The thing that repeatedly happens is that unless you are giving that pool gigantic, gigantic subsidies, insurers do not want to cover it or it is not affordable.

So you're basically ending up in a version of the same problem. But what you're trying to do is create a political economy where it is easier to begin removing the subsidies, which is what has happened in a bunch of states, because there are fewer of these very sick people and they're not that politically powerful when you start to screw them over. Right. Whereas if you start trying to screw up all of Obamacare, a lot of people are on it and they begin to protest and you can't do it. So Vance's affirmation

The actual theory of this sort of plan that Donald Trump might have conceptually somewhere is to go back to discriminating between healthy and sick people, albeit in a slightly different way than the individual market did before, but not in a different way than many states tried to do and largely failed to do well, which is why we had to have something like the Affordable Care Act. Do you believe that if there was a second Trump administration that this is what we would see? No, because I don't think they're going to do health care.

I don't think they care enough. The politics of it are terrible for them. They don't have an idea that's any good. If they actually tried to propose this idea, one of two things is going to happen. It's going to go to the Congressional Budget Office and they're going to say, this is going to lead to 50 million people becoming uninsured and that's going to kill it. Or it's going to go to the Congressional Budget Office and they're going to say, in order to insure an equivalent number of people, you're going to have to spend a huge amount of money or you're going to have to degrade the quality of the insurance very sharply.

If what you're doing is moving the sick people over here, but you're still covering them, they still cost the same amount of money to cover, right? There's no magic trick here. So I wanted to end on paid family leave and childcare. When Waltz was talking about that in the debate, I remembered that when you interviewed him before he was picked for the ticket, he had told you that if he was in the White House, that would be his day one priority, a federal paid family leave program.

So I just wanted to play what he said on this. As far as childcare on this, you have to take it at both the supply and the demand side. You can't expect the most important people in our lives to take either our children or our parents to get paid the least amount of money. And we have to make it easier for folks to be able to get into that business and then to make sure that folks are able to pay for that. We were able to do it in Minnesota, and I'm still telling you this. We were listed as the best state. We're still in crisis on this. A

A federal program of paid family medical leave and help with this will enhance our workforce, enhance our families, and make it easier to have the children that you want. And I guess my main question, listening to that, is even though I know Waltz cares about that deeply, that he did do that in Minnesota, would that be a policy that a Harris administration would prioritize? I don't know. My great question about Kamala Harris as president is still what would she prioritize, particularly on the economy?

If you had asked me to guess, I would have said that a care agenda, given that was the unfinished work of Build Back Better or the Inflation Reduction Act later, and given that it has been an interest of Harris's throughout her career, I would have guessed that she would have made that pretty central.

So far, she hasn't. There's some gestures towards it in her policy booklet. I've seen a lot of people say things like Kamala Harris needs more policies or we need more policy detail. In my view, we don't actually need endless policy detail from any candidate. What I want to know are the three or four policies that really get them out of bed in the morning and that they would, that for them, explain what is wrong in the country centrally and that they would fight like hell to pass.

Restoring Roe, I think, is one of those. When she talks about that, you can feel the passion. And she's very, very clear. On the economy, there are just sort of a lot of policies floating around. She's talked about building 3 million homes. I've, you know, we'll talk about this more in a coming podcast, but I've read that plan. Don't think that would build 3 million homes. And she doesn't talk about the sort of detailed parts of it in a way that convinces me that she's really deeply committed to it.

There's the detailed child tax credit expansion idea. Maybe it would be that. They've not released a detailed child care plan or universal pre-K plan. Maybe they will. I don't think there's necessarily unanimity or consensus inside the Democratic coalition that that's what you should prioritize next. But I'm not sure there is unanimity on anything right now. So, yeah.

Yeah, I think it is plausible that they would turn to this, but I have not seen the signals that would make me confident in predicting that and why I was confident that Joe Biden was going to prioritize climate investments or, frankly, confident that Donald Trump was going to prioritize immigration. Right. This question of like, what are you really about?

is still a little bit unanswered for me on a policy level. But it's important because if Democrats do end up in a pretty good election and they get the House and the Senate back and Kamala Harris is president, in some ways the most important question is what to do in that first year. Where you spend your initial political capital really matters.

And she's been asked this question in a number of interviews, and it's not one that I think she's answered clearly. But a pro-family agenda, I think, would be a great answer to it. On this topic, there also definitely isn't consensus in the Republican coalition. And it was very striking during the debate seeing how Vance –

seem to be trying to pitch the Republican Party, pitch America on the Republican Party being a pro-family party and making the case for that in a way that you never hear from Trump. I mean, look, I speak from this very personally because I'm married to a beautiful woman who is an incredible mother to our three beautiful kids, but is also a very, very brilliant corporate litigator. And I'm so proud of her. But being a working mom, even for somebody with all of the advantages of my wife, is extraordinary.

extraordinarily difficult. And it's not just difficult from a policy perspective. She actually had access to paid family leave because she worked for a bigger company. But the cultural pressure on young families and especially young women, I think makes it really hard for people to choose the family model they want. A lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately. Some would like to spend a little time home with the kids. Some would like to spend longer at home with the kids. We should have a family care model that makes

choice possible. And I think this is a very important substantive difference between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris's approach. I mean, look, if you look at the federal programs that we have that support paid family leave right now, the Community Development Block Grant, and there's another block grant program that spends a lot of money from the federal government.

These programs only go to one kind of childcare model. Let's say you'd like your church maybe to help you out with childcare. Maybe you live in a rural area or an urban area and you'd like to get together with families in your neighborhood to provide childcare in the way that makes the most sense. You don't get access to any of these federal monies. We want to promote choice in how we deliver family care and how we promote childcare because look, it is unacceptable.

This idea of a family care model that makes choice possible. Is this Vance? It felt like Vance was advertising a future Vance administration. Does this seem like a direction that you think the Republican Party could go? Would folks pick up on this? I don't know if they could get...

support inside enough of the Republican Party to do this. But to say what is going on here, if you read the sort of work done by Oren Kass and American Compass and work that has, I think, influenced Vance quite a lot, they argue that the problem in the Democratic family agenda is about supporting two working parent families.

American Compass has done a fair amount of polling on this. And one thing they find that I think is interesting and worth taking seriously is that that is for higher income and higher education families, the ideal family structure. But down the income scale and down the education ladder, a lot of people would prefer to be able to have one parent working and one parent being at home with the kids. And a big universal child care program doesn't necessarily do anything for them.

You can easily imagine a situation where stay-at-home parents are compensated for what is a tremendous amount of labor. The problem is it's very expensive and they don't want to pay for it.

So you get things like expanding child tax credits because that is money that can be moved in different directions. But that is a problem of being sort of not enough in any particular direction. It would be interesting if the Republican Party eventually turns into a highly natalist pro-family party in which its opposition to abortion is met with huge, huge, huge investments in making it possible for, you know,

That seems to be what Vance was signaling, though. That's what-

But I do think Vance sometimes gets too much credit for rhetorical signaling that is not matched up by policy substance, right? Rhetorical signaling on unions, rhetorical signaling on childcare, rhetorical signaling on workers. And sometimes it's like a bit of a policy somewhere. Honestly, Marco Rubio has been much more bold in policy experimentation and proposal than J.D. Vance has. Now, look, if J.D. Vance is running for president on his own in 2028—

or in 2032, we might see something very different. I'll be fascinated to cover and analyze those white papers. Well, until then, thank you, Ezra. Thank you, Claire.

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by our senior editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Amin Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lynn. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrera.