Democrats Bitten Once More by Debate Overconfidence

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 06, 2024

 

After first talking up Biden’s abilities and then smearing Vance as an incoherent weirdo, they watched the debates unravel all of their spin.

 

Democrats suffered another self-inflicted wound this past week when Tim Walz faced off with J. D. Vance in the vice-presidential debate.

 

As Joe Biden foolishly thought he had the stuff to debate Donald Trump on national television last July, the Harris campaign was hurt by a bad case of overconfidence.

 

For Democrats, the worst of the October 1 debate wasn’t Walz’s performance, from his incoherent rambling and nonanswers to his near-constant look of bug-eyed bewilderment. It wasn’t the governor’s confused thinking, leading to notable head-scratchers such as, “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400, town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service,” or his verbal stumbles, as when he said, “I’ve become friends with school shooters.”

 

What hurt the Democrats the most was Vance’s showing. He surpassed all expectations set by the Harris campaign and its allies in the news media, destroyed the monthslong effort to box him in as a creepy theocrat, and did all this as the other guy imploded on stage.

 

In short, it was the worst debate for this current crop of Democrats since Biden’s career-ending performance in July.

 

For months, the Harris campaign has tried to paint the Ohio senator as off-putting, incoherent, unrelatable, and “weird,” the latter characterization being a creation of Walz himself. They’ve happily shared out-of-context videos clipped by their fans, painting a portrait of a profoundly awkward individual who struggles to speak aloud, let alone connect with voters.

 

In the debate, Vance was anything but those things. He was quick-witted, polite, eloquent, coherent, and decisive. He didn’t seem weird at all. He seemed perfectly normal, comfortable even. In contrast with Vance’s apparent cool, Walz’s discomfort was pronounced. It was hard for him to string words together, and he frequently looked panicked.

 

Vance was calm and confident; Walz was a deer in the headlights.

 

This is the stuff that wins debates. And winning debates wins over voters.

 

Time for an unpopular opinion: Vance “won” not because of what he said but how he said it. That’s how an American politician rises. Forget the content of Vance’s performance. Put aside questions about whether he was truthful or honest. If you believe Vance “lost” because his characterization of policy was lacking, you don’t understand the purpose of these debates. You are also not Vance’s target audience. He wasn’t making a play for hard-core Democrats. He wasn’t trying to impress the pundit class or social-media influencers. He wasn’t trying to win over Reagan- or Bush-era Republican immigration doves or conservative policy wonks.

 

Vance’s audience was the middle, the true undecideds. These are the people who have a general idea of what’s happening at home and abroad, but they only ever catch a few minutes of news in the evening. They are the 9–5 set. They have jobs. They have families. They are not chronically online or obsessively locked into policy debates or the latest social-media brawl. They likely caught only the first 20 or 30 minutes of the VP debate.

 

Most importantly, these are the people who can be convinced to vote for their non-preferred party, provided the pitch comes from a compelling and relatable salesman. These are the “gettable” voters. Vance’s mission was to win over these viewers, this sliver that can be called the “swing vote.” You do this by putting in a performance like the one Vance gave.

 

You may hate that appearances count for more than content in political debate. You may think it reflects poorly on the electorate that voters choose candidates who don’t make them uncomfortable. Take it up with Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. It has been this way since the first televised debate. This is the nature of American politics in the post–World War II era.

 

In his 2012 vice-presidential showdown with Paul Ryan, Joe Biden unquestionably lied. Biden was light on content and heavy on style. He made things up. Yet only the most hard-core right-wing partisan would deny that Biden “won,” in that he came across as in command and confident, while Ryan could barely get a word in edgewise.

 

Likewise, it would be pure delusion to say that Vance didn’t “beat” Walz. Of course, some in the media business are making this exact case, from MSNBC’s stable of dangerously unbalanced anchors to Politico’s trotting out “body language experts” to accuse Vance of having facial hair that conveys “aggression and opposition to feminist ideals.” New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s assessment is art: “Walz won. You could tell he was a teacher, because he clearly did his homework. Anyone afraid that Vance would roll over him could breathe easily. . . . Vance’s performance was anemic.”

 

This is called “coping”; it’s what the losing team does.

 

In this election cycle, Democrats have allowed their overconfidence to steer them wrong, notwithstanding some last-minute resetting of expectations about Walz. As in July, it’s not just that the Democrat bombed in the debate but that his poor performance also destroyed a carefully crafted narrative, laying bare a series of deceptions and falsehoods that Democrats had, up until that moment, fooled many people into accepting.

 

Biden is not “sharp as a tack,” and Vance is not a creepy “weirdo.” The country knows better now, thanks to debates that Democrats were eager to accept. With only four weeks left until Election Day, Democrats can’t afford to lose their election-cycle talking points. A little humility, then, seems in order.