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"I am a knucklehead at times," Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sheepishly admitted last night, in what will almost certainly be the final debate of this year's national election cycle.
The Minnesota governor was responding to CBS News co-moderator Margaret Brennan, who asked him why he lied about having been in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, an event that Walz claims inspired his life in public service. Instead of simply admitting he had misspoken about this supposedly formative international experience, Walz took the question as an invitation to expatiate at unnecessary length on his small-town Nebraska roots and path to elected office. In a rare follow-up question, Brennan pressed for a definitive answer that she did not receive.
That was not the only Bidenesque gaffe in Walz's underwhelming performance against Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Virtually every available poll and analysis—including from multiple media outlets that skew Left and, in their post-debate polling, often oversample Democratic or likely Democratic voters—has declared Vance the debate's winner. In the same week in which the addled incumbent president confused Houthi militants in Yemen with American dockworkers preparing for a major strike, Walz mixed up Israel with Iran and its militant proxies, consistently mispronounced both "nuclear" and "Washington," and, most bizarrely of all, claimed that he has "become friends with school shooters," a remark that caused Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was killed in the 2018 Parkland school shooting, to denounce Walz's statement on X as "abhorrent" and "disqualifying."
ABC News' Linsey Davis, who co-moderated the September 10 debate between Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris, compared Walz's awkward responses not to anything in that contest, but to Biden's disastrous performance against Trump on June 27, an event that eventually led Biden to withdraw from his own reelection campaign.
Vance, by contrast, gave thoughtful, tactful, and generally polite answers, using his time less to attack Walz than to land blows against Harris, whom he tried to portray as a representative of the incumbent administration. He generally succeeded—for the good reason that she is, in fact, its second-in-command, but also because Walz had little to say other than to parrot Harris' empty "joy" and "opportunity economy" rhetoric. The tactic resonated so well and met with such weak resistance that one wonders why the Republicans have not done more to emphasize the connection from day one. Walz's attempts to equate Vance with Trump, on the other hand, generally sputtered into unpracticed rambling. He only came close to sincerity toward the end, when discussion turned to January 6, a topic Vance tried to deflect by warning about leftist censorship and dredging up Democratic election denial in years past.
The visual contrast was striking. While Vance—who gives frequent interviews and unscripted speeches—was poised and articulate, Walz—who shares Harris' aversion to any significant media challenge—looked nervous, oleaginous, and perturbed. For much of the evening, he wore a frightened wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look that caused him to come off as a comparative nonentity.
Even on abortion, one of the very few issues on which voters say they trust Harris more than Trump, Walz came up short. When discussing late-term abortion, which an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose, he was circuitous and got too bogged down in technicalities to land any blow on Vance, who calmly advanced his campaign's argument that the general issue should be left to the states and reiterated that a new Trump administration will not seek a national abortion ban (Trump confirmed this during the debate and posted that he would veto any such legislation).
Vance's performance was a model of self-assurance that could go a long way toward dispelling doubt among the few remaining undecided voters who might otherwise have been willing to give Harris the benefit of the doubt. According to a CNN snap poll released shortly after the debate, Vance's favorability rating, which has languished since he was named to the ticket in July, increased by 19 points.
As was the case in last month's Trump-Harris debate, Brennan and co-moderator Norah O'Donnell exhibited clear bias in favor of the Democrat. Despite CBS News having announced that the moderators would not fact-check either candidate, they broke that pledge to fact-check Vance, who politely objected and reminded them of the agreement before his microphone was abruptly cut off. The moment was far more embarrassing to Brennan and O'Donnell than to him, and it may well have helped public perceptions of his performance.
The questioning also veered away from migration, cultural issues, and other topics where Harris' campaign is weak and instead focused on abortion, climate change, and other relatively marginal issues where she is stronger. Therein, however, may lie the strongest indicator that Vance won—despite overt bias on the part of the moderators, he remained gracious and was able to speak through the smokescreen to engage directly with the American people. That is how elections are won.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
