Photograph by Caroline Yang / NYT / Redux
Tim Walz, the onetime defensive coördinator of the Mankato West High School Scarlets, knows that you never want to say anything that the other team can pin to its bulletin board before the big game. It’s best to appear humble—golly, we’re just honored to be sharing the same field with these guys. Lowering expectations is a time-honored feint, and just maybe your opponent will start thinking you’re soft. That’s perhaps one reason that we heard Walz say, ahead of tonight’s debate with J. D. Vance, “Look, he’s Yale Law guy. I’m public-school teacher.”
Walz’s statement also aims to reinforce the narrative that these are two very different Vice-Presidential candidates. Walz is keen to portray himself as the relatable guy from the Plains, comfortable in T-shirts and camo hats, familiar with shotguns and carburetors, funny and welcoming when speaking with voters. Vance, meanwhile, is the stilted right-winger who went to an Ivy League school, spent six years as a venture capitalist, and likes to spread conspiracy theories. In other words, a Republican who is, in the dig that made Walz famous, “weird.”
If the polls are delivering accurate snapshots, the race could hardly be tighter in the seven battleground states that will decide the election. Vice-Presidential debates are not famous for making a difference. Yet this year, with polling averages all well within the margin of error in those states, the campaigns recognize that a hundred different things could provide the winning—or losing—margin come November. Plus, there’s the fact that one candidate is seventy-eight years old, making him the oldest major-party nominee in history, and that he has been targeted twice by would-be assassins. If Donald Trump wins and fails to finish a second term, the United States would have President Vance.
Polls suggest that Walz, whose upbeat social-media posts helped him rise through the pack of Democratic hopefuls, is pushing on an open door when it comes to likability. A recent survey by the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago found that forty-two per cent of registered voters have a favorable opinion of the Minnesota governor, compared with twenty-seven per cent for Vance, whose unfavorables are nearly twenty points higher than Walz’s. Vance, since his election to the Senate in 2022, hasn’t helped himself with his dark portrait of a country beset by a “migrant flood” or his comments about the misguided influence of “childless cat ladies.”
Tonight, Walz may hope to tag Vance with a long menu of Donald Trump’s unbounded verbal eruptions, from the former President’s assertions this past weekend that Kamala Harris was born “mentally impaired” and is a “stupid person” to his charge that illegal immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country.” He will insist that Harris does, in fact, have plenty of policy proposals, and he will look for an opening on abortion, perhaps the Democrats’ strongest issue, to argue that women should be trusted to make their own decisions, free from government interference. And he may wonder aloud whether the Republican ticket has plans, apart from limiting immigration and deporting millions of migrants, to help the middle-class voters that they claim to represent.
For his part, Vance has already sought to undermine Walz’s good-guy “dad in plaid” image, calling him out for once referring to the “weapons of war that I carried in war,” when he was never in combat, and describing him, outlandishly, as “one of the most far-left radicals in the entire United States government.” He accused Walz of failing to act more quickly to curb violence in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, and he routinely attacks Harris for the Biden Administration’s failure to toughen its border policy, despite Trump leading an attack that killed a bipartisan bill designed to do just that. On Monday, the Trump adviser Jason Miller told reporters that Walz on the campaign trail is a “wildly gesticulating effeminate caricature.”
Is it style or is it substance that will carry the night? One evening last month in Wilson, North Carolina, one of those battleground states, Mary Jo Larkin, a Harris supporter, was talking about what it takes as a canvasser to win someone to a candidate’s side. She said, “You don’t convince people to vote by telling them the platform or telling them they’re wrong. You convince people to vote because when you walk away from them they like the way they feel.” In a political season so tightly tethered to emotions, Vance and Walz know what they need to do.