Vance v Walz: the stakes
The veep nominees' debate could, for once, matter. Also, why Vance's obnoxiousness was (probably) always priced in
Hello! There are 35 days till election day.
š§ļø The storm
The catastrophic Hurricane Helene is now known to have killed at least 120 people across the southeastern US. The government has dispatched hundreds of thousands of meals and more than 1 million litres of water to people whose homes have been left underwater or entirely destroyed by flooding and mudslides. Donald Trump naturally seized an opportunity to politicise it, giving a press conference in which he explicitly lied about the Biden administrationās response. Joe Biden himself hit back hard:
I don't know why he does this, and the reason I get so angry about it ā I don't care about what he says about me, I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we're not doing everything possible. We are.
Kamala Harris had this to say:
I have shared with them that we will do everything in our power to help communities respond and recover, and I have shared with them that I plan to be on the ground as soon as possible. But as soon as possible without disrupting any emergency response operations, because that must be the highest priority, and the first order of business.
Nasty v Nice
Vice presidential TV debates very rarely matter. Harris v Pence, Kaine v Pence and Biden v Ryan ā hardly moved the needle as far as the last three elections were concerned. Biden v Palin in 2008 did something to rehabilitate John McCainās running mate, who had crashed and burned during her first weeks on the campaign but managed to turn in a reasonably sharp performance ā albeit by mostly answering the questions she wanted to be asked rather than those which actually came up. (She and McCain still lost badly, of course.)
The stakes tonight are higher, for multiple reasons:
Tim Walz, who has proven highly popular since being added to the Harris ticket, has been surprisingly under-exposed to the media in the last two weeks, instead assigned to in-person rallies and debate prep. Many voters either donāt know who he is or have been falsely told he is an effeminate communist radical. This is his best chance yet to define himself in person, though videos of him rhapsodising about gutter maintenance and tinkering with his aged car will be helping too.
J.D. Vance also needs to define himself, but not because people donāt know who he is. His problem, to the extent he realises it, is his consistent and continuing embrace of staggeringly unpopular social extremism, particularly when it comes to enforcing pregnancy and marriage at the expense of womenās freedom while condemning adults who donāt have children as devoid of personal morality. Perhaps he will try and minimise his positions, or nuance them, but Walz can be expected to go in hard.
Thereās another elephant in the room in the form of Trump himself, who has lately turned in a series of rally appearances that were unhinged even by his own standards ā not just rambling and bitter, but filled with violent imagery about Hatians and immigrants that could well reinforce a permission structure for racist vigilantism against them. If the moderators do their job, they will force Vance to address this ā not least it is he, even more than Trump, who has disseminated the lie about Hatians in Springfield, Ohio eating peopleās pets.
The Vance vetting ādisasterā that isnāt
Political insiders have been poring over a leaked document that seems to be the Trump campaignās vetting dossier looking into J.D. Vanceās past. It focuses largely on his long history of anti-Trump vitriol ā he notoriously described the ex-president as ācultural heroinā and warned he could become a dictator ā but largely overlooks his more recent catalogue of remarks about women and their supposed reproductive and domestic obligations, among myriad other things.
Clips of these statements continue to provide bread and butter for the Harris campaignās social media channels, and outside the right-wing media bubble, Vance receives little coverage for anything else. This means the dossier is being written up by many journalists as evidence the Trump team were blindsided by the abundant evidence of Vanceās extremism.
Writing in Public Notice, which Iād say is required reading, David Lurie puts it this way:
Had a research team for a remotely normal presidential candidate failed to perform such elemental due diligence, their deficient work would have been viewed a disaster. In such a scenario, Vance would have been forced to walk back his extremist rhetoric and might even have been forced from the ticket, particularly given his unpopularityā¦
ā¦while the strikingly incomplete and otherwise deficient Vance dossier calls into question the competence of Trumpās purportedly highly skilled 2024 campaign, the weeks since Trump chose Vance as his running mate have confirmed how ultimately irrelevant the skills of the campaignās professionals may turn out to be.
Itās true that Vanceās poll numbers indicate a major electoral miscalculation. But Iād argue that the dossierās omissions arenāt evidence of negligence, but instead an indication that many of the core Trump team agree with Vance, donāt care what heās said, and/or donāt realise how unpopular it is.
Iāve argued this before and Iāll say it again: Vance simply is not on the ticket to grow Trumpās electoral coalition or offset the former presidentās glaring character flaws. He is there because his backers inside and outside the Trump camp want someone like him installed as high up in the federal power structure as possible; Trump is just a vessel in which he can ride to the White House, where he will be able to help refashion the US into the bare-bones authoritarian white Christian ethnostate envisaged by the authors of Project 2025 and others with whom Vance has long publicly associated.
For a demonstration of his enthusiasm for those goals, hereās a solid bit of in-depth reporting from MSNBCās Rachel Maddow.
Many of the worst Vance moments now being āresurfacedā were fully public and well-covered when they happened. There is no reasonable chance that anyone senior enough in the Trump orbit to have influenced the choice of running mate can have been unaware of his ideological tilt, or his embrace of ideas that many Americans find not just weird, but loathsome.
The Trump teamās assessment will have been that Biden was such a weak candidate that the obvious risk Vance would turn certain voters off would be trivialised by depressed Democratic turnout. The ascent of Kamala Harris has wrecked that fragile calculation, and now the contrast with Walz is about to make Vanceās noxiousness all the more salient.
š And finally
Today is Jimmy Carterās 100th birthday, a milestone many thought the 39th president would never reach after entering end-of-life hospice care in February 2023.
Carterās transformation from icon of Democratic hopelessness to humanitarian hero is well-recorded, but thereās plenty of great new writing around today to sink your teeth into.
My top recommendation would be this Substack post from James Fallows, who worked as a speechwriter on Carterās first campaign and in his administration.
Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligentāand aware of itāpolitically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.
Jimmy Carter didnāt change. Luck and circumstances did.
Read the full post below.
And if you want to read up on the science of his remarkable longevity while under palliative care, hereās a good explainer from Northeastern University.