JD Vance’s most telling debate answer was the one he wouldn’t give

The first 90 minutes of the vice presidential debate on Tuesday were much more subdued than last month’s presidential one, largely because neither participant spent their allotted time yelling demented conspiracy theories about Haitian people eating pets in Ohio. More than once, both men—Democratic nominee Tim Walz and Republican nominee JD Vance—professed to believe that they shared a desire to address a given problem, and simply had a difference of opinion about the best method for solving it. In light of Vance’s ongoing struggles to present as a normal person—on the campaign trail, his attempts at casual conversation sometimes evoke the farmer who gets possessed by aliens in the first few minutes of Men In Black—his team has to consider the debate at least a partial success, insofar as he did not introduce himself to a national TV audience with his trademark deeply creepy insinuations that only people with biological children deserve to participate fully in democracy. 

Anyone who found the proceedings too boring to finish, though, missed the most alarming exchange of the night. Previously, Vance has said that if he’d been vice president on January 6, he would not have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election, thus opening the door for fraudulent Republican-appointed electors to cast their ballots for Donald Trump. On Tuesday, moderator Norah O’Donnell asked Vance if he’d seek to challenge this year’s results, even if every governor certifies their state’s results first—a polite way of asking whether the current Republican vice presidential nominee would work to ensure that Trump’s second coup attempt would be more successful than his first.

After Vance dodged, offering a bizarre non-answer that at one point accused Kamala Harris of being “engaged in censorship at an industrial scale,” Walz cut in. “I think there’s a lot of agreement, but this is one that we are miles apart on,” he said, noting that Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. Walz then turned and addressed Vance directly. “I would just ask that,” he continued. “Did he lose the 2020 election?” For a second time, Vance dissembled, stating that he was “focused on the future,” and again pivoted to whether Harris had “censor[ed] Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation,” a slurry of buzzwords intelligible only to people deep in the right-wing media ecosystem.

Walz appeared genuinely alarmed by this turn of events. “That is a damning non-answer,” he said. “I’m pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”

The moment was a tidy encapsulation of the entire evening: Vance spent most of the evening using a smooth, even cadence to deliver some of the most authoritarian-curious rhetoric I’ve ever heard from an American politician not named Donald Trump. Many of his putative answers to policy questions were in fact repackaged endorsements of his running mate’s vile pledge to use the military to deport some 20 million immigrants. When Vance didn’t feel like getting so specific, he instead offered generic affirmations of the rank xenophobia to which Trump appeals whenever he, too, cannot think of anything else to say. 

By wrapping with a mealy-mouthed refusal to disavow the election denialism that promoted a pro-Trump mob to threaten to hang his predecessor, Mike Pence, from the rafters of the Capitol on January 6, Vance demonstrated that he is as dangerous a demagogue as Donald Trump. He just speaks in complete sentences a little more consistently.

For Vance, every discussion on Tuesday was another opportunity to tout the Republican ticket’s mass deportation agenda. When asked how he’d address the country’s limited housing supply, Vance argued for “kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes,” and “building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be there.” When asked about rising housing costs, he bemoaned the “massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal alien populations.” When asked about gun violence, he pointed the finger at a “massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel.” The fact that these are lazy, racist falsehoods is immaterial to Vance, for whom there is no problem in America that a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing can’t fix.

Walz responded fairly well under the circumstances, touting Harris’s proposals to jump-start development and provide down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers. He warned that Americans “can’t blame immigrants” for the housing crisis, and scolded Vance for “blaming and not trying to find the solution.” Walz, a former public school teacher who doesn’t own stock and sold his Mankato home for around $300,000 when he moved into the governor’s mansion, also linked stable housing to stable employment outcomes for parents and stable educational outcomes for children, and highlighted the role of “Wall Street speculators buying up housing”—also a target of Harris’s plan—in making homes less affordable for working people.

Walz’s challenge was the same one that always bedevils Democratic politicians in forums like this one: He thought the two were having a good-faith, substantive debate, which Vance correctly understood as an opportunity to say more or less whatever he wanted. On one of the rare occasions that CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell conducted a polite fact-check of Vance, informing viewers that, contrary to his earlier assertions, Haitian people in Springfield, Ohio are not “illegal,” Vance got visibly annoyed by the notion that he might be held accountable for the words coming out of his mouth. “The rules were, you guys weren’t going to fact check!” he protested; in the moments that followed, he continued to argue so vociferously that, in the night’s most satisfying moment, the moderators briefly, blissfully cut the mics.

On the whole, debates are less relevant to election outcomes than the surrounding media attention might lead you to believe. This is especially true of vice presidential debates, and especially after voters endured two grueling presidential debates already. But last night did provide some insight into what the nominees value in a running mate. Walz came off as earnest, neighborly, and more than a little wonky. Vance came off as a wealthy reactionary who is uncannily comfortable with lying. If he has to tell one more big one in order to gain the office he seeks, there is no reason to think he won’t happily do it.