Vice presidential debates don't matter, we have been assured over and over. No one votes for vice president or a presidential nominee for her or his choice of running mate. You can go back and look at snap polls taken after past vice presidential debates and find basically zero correlation with the final election results.
All that said, the debate between Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) may turn out to matter. There's no question, certainly, about who came out ahead. As Joe Klein, a heartfelt opponent of former President Donald Trump, led off, "Well, we saw the high school studies teacher destroyed by a professional politician last night. This wasn't as bad as Biden's debilitated performance in June, but it was close."
Actually, Vance has been a professional politician for just two years, and Walz for just short of two decades. But the point stands. Vance was disciplined, returning again and again to charge that Vice President Kamala Harris, as an incumbent, is responsible for high inflation and record illegal immigration.
Interestingly, he scarcely mentioned President Joe Biden, perhaps wary of the rise in job rating accorded retiring presidents or to avoid divisiveness at a time of military action in the Middle East. And he took care to show respect to his opponent and those who disagree on issues such as abortion. So much for Democrats' charge that he is "weird."
In contrast, Walz seemed nervous, failed to make his arguments convincingly, and evidently misspoke when he said, puzzlingly, "I've become friends with school shooters."
Will Vance's debate victory move the numbers? Currently, the RealClearPolitics average shows Harris leading Trump nationally by 2 points, with Trump leading in states with 262 electoral votes and Harris in states with 257, with an exact tie for Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes.
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It will take about 10 days for post-debate poll results to come in and more than a month for the final election results, which can differ, in either party's direction, from preelection polls. But I can see two reasons why this debate may have some significant effect.
One is that it may damage the morale of Democratic voters. Since the issues voters consider most important, inflation and immigration, favor Republicans, Harris' national lead and her equal standing in target states owe much to "vibes," the relief of the Democratic Party's core group of upscale college graduates that Harris' sudden elevation prevented the party's certain defeat if Biden had stayed in.
This upscale base takes pride in the party's historic role as champion of the deprived but is even prouder, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likes to boast, of representing the most affluent, most educated and, in its view, most enlightened parts of the country.
But it gets harder to believe your side is the cognitive elite entitled to rule when your vice presidential candidate, like Walz at the debate, seems plainly far less smart than his opponent. Or, come to think about it, when your presidential nominee is phobic about taking questions in public.
Indeed, Democrats' pride that their candidates are smarter than Republicans goes back to the 1950s, when they imagined that Adlai Stevenson II, an intelligent man with an elegant prose style, was smarter than Dwight Eisenhower, who had faced and mastered far more daunting cognitive challenges.
More recently, Democrats liked to portray former President George W. Bush as a moron. But iconoclastic blogger Steve Sailer found that Bush and his 2004 opponent, then-Sen. John Kerry, had high scores on their officer qualification exams in the armed forces, with Bush's score slightly higher.
Walz's performance, as well as Harris' choice in selecting him over more obvious alternatives from electorally more marginal states, makes it harder for Democrats to think of themselves as part of the smart people's party. Will that depress what was, in 2020, a robust Democratic turnout in early voting, which is already beginning in some states?
The second possible upshot of the vice presidential debate was the elevation of the censorship matter -- "big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens," as Vance said near the close of the debate. He was referring to Team Biden's pressures successfully exerted on social media companies to suppress "misinformation," at least some of which, such as the New York Post stories on Hunter Biden's laptop, turned out to be true.
"You guys wanted to kick people off Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks," Vance said, and he referred to Walz's 2022 statement that "there's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."
Walz replied that the "Supreme Court test" was "you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater." But that "test" was dictum, noncontrolling language, in a 1919 case upholding a conviction for speech criticizing the military draft. The Supreme Court overruled that decision in 1969 and ruled unanimously in 2017 that it was unconstitutional to ban "racially offensive" speech.
Walz was on stronger ground when he condemned Trump's conduct on Jan. 6 and called Vance's refusal to admit Trump lost the election a "damning nonanswer." But he did not address Vance's point that Democrats had challenged the 2016 result as "stolen by Vladimir Putin," a lesser but still significant departure from historic norm.
Is it too much to hope that both vice presidential candidates' undertakings to respect the outcome this time will prevail? And that Democrats like Walz catch up with the last half-century of constitutional law and admit that the First Amendment blocks the government from suppressing politically inconvenient speech?
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