VP Debate Night: Vance Sanitized Trumpism, Walz Called Himself a Knucklehead

Vice Presidential candidates governor Tim Walz and US senator JD Vance faced off last night in their first and only debate. Will Vance’s repackaging of Trump’s record on issues like abortion and January 6 land with independents and swing state voters? Where was the fiery Walz who won social media by calling Republicans “weird?” And will any of this really matter on election day? WIRED’s Tim Marchman and Makena Kelly join Leah to discuss.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:
No, Tim Walz Is Not Friends With School Shootersby David Gilbert
Get Your VP Debate Bingo Card Right Hereby Makena Kelly

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Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Laba show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance faced off last night in their first and only debate. Some of what the candidates talked about was pretty predictable. We hit several squares of our custom WIRED VP Debate Bingo: reproductive rights, climate change, border security, and January 6th. While JD Vance managed to cogently sanitize Trumpism, Tim Walz faltered. Will Vance’s pitch to independents and swing state voters work? What version of the debate is the algorithm going to serve you today, and does any of this really matter? Joining me to talk about it all is Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security. Hey, Tim.

Marchman Team: Hey, thanks for having me.

Leah Feiger: And WIRED senior reporter Makena Kelly. Hey, Makena, welcome back.

Makena Kelly: Hey, it’s good to be back.

Leah Feiger: Guys, we’re recording this right after the debate. What did we just see here? What were the highlights for you, Tim?

Marchman Team: My overwhelming impression of it was JD Vance doing a great job of appearing very reasonable. If I didn’t know anything but what I saw in this debate, I would think he has very different policy positions than he actually has. I wouldn’t know what he thinks about whether climate is a hoax, whether Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, family separation, whether he wants to impose a pregnancy registry on the country, whether he thinks Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, whether he would’ve certified the 2020 election, just wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t so much a moment, it was the kind of river of him being evasive in what I thought was a pretty successful fashion.

Leah Feiger: Whose fault is it that we don’t actually know the answers to any of those questions? Is it Walz? Is it the moderators?

Marchman Team: I think it’s on Walz. The rules of the debate seemed a little absurd to me. If you’re going to have moderators there, they should moderate, but they were the rules of the debate, and if he wasn’t willing to press the point, or get answers to questions, or clarify misstatements …

Leah Feiger: He didn’t.

Marchman Team: I don’t think Vance is supposed to be fact-checking himself, so …

Leah Feiger: No. He was, in fact, quite eager to not be.

JD Vance [archival audio]: The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.

Leah Feiger: Makena, how about you? What stood out to you?

Makena Kelly: Yeah, so like everyone else on this desk, I spent a lot of it watching the debate, seeing if it filled out our bingo card, and I was, I guess, surprised that we did not win a bingo, but I think that says a lot about what this debate actually was. On our bingo card, we had a lot of what the base was saying on both sides, especially online: Diet Mountain Dew jokes, all this kind of stuff, and it seems …

Leah Feiger: Weird jokes, et cetera.

Makena Kelly: Exactly.

Leah Feiger: Totally.

Makena Kelly: It seems like both teams had this idea to meet in the middle, and they weren’t even going to address so much of that when Kamala Harris first chose Tim Walz to be her VP, and I thought, OK, Tim Walz can really be a foil to JD Vance on issues like IVF, attacking him as like, “I’m actually from the Midwest. I didn’t go to Silicon Valley.” We didn’t hear any of that, any of the stuff that really resonated online. The fact that we didn’t get a bingo really says a lot about what that debate was.

Leah Feiger: I agree.

Marchman Team: From the Vance side, you can understand why his priority in the debate would be to come off as a reasonable, thoughtful young man. I really thought he was pitching himself, kind of pitching himself at grandma.

Leah Feiger: Well, he was pitching himself to independents.

Marchman Team: Yeah, a nice, thoughtful young fella. Why Walz would particularly want to come off as somebody who’s eager to work across the aisle with JD Vance, and thinks JD Vance is making a ton of good points on issues like abortion and gun control, I’m not really sure, but they’re the political professionals, right?

Makena Kelly: Over the last week, yeah, we’ve heard a lot about Tim Walz having some kind of connection to the CCP from the GOP side. We’ve heard so much stuff about him being this radical leftist that I imagine that might be why he wanted to step away from a lot of those things.

Leah Feiger: This was absolutely bananas. One of the slots that we had on our bingo card was Walz accidentally calls Vance “son,” which to be fair, I put on in jest, and really didn’t think it was going to happen. It basically happened, you guys. They were so agreeable up there, “Oh, I’m going to support you. Oh, this. Oh, I agree with him on all of these points,” and that to me led to what was probably the most crucial exchange of the evening, which was about January 6th.

Moderator [archival audio]: Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would’ve asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results? I’ll give you two minutes.

JD Vance [archival audio]: Well, Nora, first of all, I think that we’re focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.

Leah Feiger: What did you make of how Vance handled the question?

Makena Kelly: He’s playing into the whole amnesia around what the Trump presidency was, trying to play at this idea that we’ve kind of seen people talking about recently, that people forget how crazy things were from 2016 to 2020, and playing into the idea that inflation was lower during the Trump presidency, and even with January 6th, and saying that this was a peaceful transfer of power.

JD Vance [archival audio]: It’s really rich for democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.

Makena Kelly: He’s leaning into this idea that we are completely forgetting what actually happened just four years ago.

Leah Feiger: Also, the fact that obviously, this question came at what? Minute 90? This was late. This was a really important question about, not to go fully Resistance Twitter, but the future of democracy, and what does the actual exchange of power look like?

Marchman Team: I thought it was the one moment where the Vance mask really slipped, because not only couldn’t he answer the question of whether Trump lost the election—

Tim Walz [archival audio]: Did he lose the 2020 election?

JD Vance [archival audio]: Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?

Tim Walz [archival audio]: That is a damning non-answer.

Marchman Team: Not only was he doubling down in this belief that people don’t remember this period that wasn’t that long ago, he was pivoting to these incredibly online talking points about censorship that make absolutely no sense to any normal person. He seemed to get angry, and I thought he did a really good job throughout the whole night of not coming off as angry, which he usually does.

Makena Kelly: I want to touch on the censorship thing too.

Leah Feiger: Get into it. Get into it.

Marchman Team: Yeah, it was strange. He was talking about you get thrown out of the group chat just because of politics. What’s that about? It’s like, probably because you’re being a jackass.

Leah Feiger: Very Elon Musk. That was a direct personal appeal to Musk.

Makena Kelly: Speaking about Elon Musk, he’s talking about Kamala Harris and all of these censorship accusations, and then he also failed to acknowledge that Elon Musk, the owner of one of the most, it’s not as powerful as it used to be politically with Elon Musk taking over the company, but Twitter, X, Elon Musk, the CEO, endorsed the Trump campaign. A lot of those talking points that we had around censorship during 2020 and under the Trump administration have kind of fallen away with this kind of new sea change into how platforms are responding and reacting to misinformation and disinformation online.

Marchman Team: I also just want to say, in regards to whether the specific things that they’re talking about are censorship, you can have very different positions on what, if any, role the government has in content moderation on social media platforms, without overlooking the fact that in the middle of a pandemic, raising questions of how to regulate speech around people widely distributing potentially lethal medical misinformation is at least close to shouting fire in a crowded theater. That’s why it’s a debate, and that’s why there is reasonable discussion to be had about it.

Leah Feiger: Sure.

Marchman Team: The idea of dumbing it down to this very Musk-esque censorship talking point just sticks in my craw.

Leah Feiger: I want to bring it back a bit, though, to his January 6th answer, because I think I actually disagree with you a bit, Tim, in terms of the Vance mask slipping. It actually felt pretty consistent with the rest of his debate answers. There were so many different topics that, like you said at the top of this, if you didn’t know better, you would be like, “Yes, this seems good,” or, “He’s saying this even vaguely cogently and confidently, and basically winking to the camera as he did it.” He rewrote history in his answer. He fully, fully skipped that entire, not ju st month, but several months after the election. It felt to me like such a new sanitization of Trumpism with this new tone, done so much better than I’ve heard anyone else in the Trump camp do it. Is this sanitized tone what we should be expecting from this new era?

Marchman Team: It’s not Trump.

Leah Feiger: Not from Trump. It’s not Trump.

Marchman Team: It’s not Trump. Trump in the middle of this debate started tweeting about Pete Rose, a horrible person, really, really terrible person, to speak ill of the dead. All I was thinking was that seeing Vance be so polite and friendly and nice must really make him sick. I don’t think that’s what he wants out of his running mate. No, I don’t think that’s going to become the new face of Trumpism.

Makena Kelly: Listening to this debate too, I was telling the people that I was with that, it just didn’t even seem like Vance had really talked to Trump since the RNC. He’s like, “I’m going to protect my running mate,” or whatever, or, “Defend my running mate,” and it just felt like they don’t even speak to one another.

Leah Feiger: I will say that the Trump acolytes, they loved this. Laura Loomer was going on about how lovely it was that Vance was so nice. I think this is the way that they pivot to the independent voter that they’re already up with. It was not unintelligent for Vance to pivot from the January 6th question to go straight into, “We’ve reached across the aisle to RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.” That to me is a true signpost on the door, independents, you’re welcome here. Everything you’re hearing about us, not true.

Makena Kelly: Right, but still a signal. One of the biggest memes that we’ve seen circulating with the Republican Party this evening has been this image of JD Vance giving an insider-y smirk, this kind of wink and a nod to these people in the base, portraying himself as saying things that appeal to independents, but still looking at the base and being like, “But you know who I really am. You know what I really mean here.”

Marchman Team: It’s like the smirk a car salesman gives while he’s running down a really bad deal to some customers, and he’s looking at you to say, “I know you’re not a rube like these people, we’re going to do a separate deal.”

Leah Feiger: Yeah, you understand the code.

Makena Kelly: Yep.

Leah Feiger: You understand the code. Let’s take a quick break here, and when we’re back, I want to talk about Tim Walz and his debate performance.

[[Break]

Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. OK, let’s turn to Tim Walz. What was his strongest moment of the night? Makena, what do you think?

Makena Kelly: It was his last speech, unfortunately. It really felt all tonight that he was riding JD Vance’s coattails, trying to keep up with this man, and he just couldn’t quite do it. It wasn’t until the end when he gave his whatever final speech that it actually felt like he was having a moment to himself that wasn’t dominated by Vance.

Leah Feiger: Even though he quoted FDR?

Makena Kelly: Correct. Yep.

Leah Feiger: I struggled with that one. Tim, what do you think?

Marchman Team: I thought it was just when he asked Vance if he thought Trump won in 2020.

Leah Feiger: Honestly, I don’t think that he came heavy enough with either of those, to be totally frank. Where’s the guy who has been all over the Harris social media accounts? Who’s the one who coined the whole “They’re so weird” against all of these GOP figures, against JD Vance in particular? Where did that energy go?

Marchman Team: It was a pretty unimpressive performance, and he kept ceding … The thing that struck me was, he wasn’t going to come off too negative. Clearly, he came in with, his mission was to pivot everything to Trump, and he wasn’t going to spend his time going after Vance, and that’s clearly a strategic decision. Tactically, he kept ceding ground on every issue to Vance. He gave the premise over, so there was a question about the support among the American public for mass deportation. He just spun off that instead of confronting that reality, saying, “We should talk about what mass deportation would entail. It would entail house-to-house searches by some sort of federal force working in cooperation with local law enforcement, house to house, going in your basement, going in your attic, looking under the covers.” That one stuck out to me, and there are any number of reasons why he might not have taken that attack, but it felt like on every issue, including the ones where he really should have the upper hand, like abortion.

Leah Feiger: I mean—

Marchman Team: Vance gave a long peroration about how pro-family he is, and sure, it’s regrettable when people bleed to death because they didn’t get medical care, because it was illegal. What we really want to talk here about is supporting families. Walz pretty much said, “There’s a lot of things that Senator Vance said there that I agree with, and we’re all in support or families.” Not really. There are really significant policy differences and values differences here, and he just kept ceding. He came off either unprepared or unwilling to actually mark any distinction between the two of them.

Leah Feiger: Well, he did push back ever so slightly against this right-wing conspiracy that has been promoted by Vance, and Trump, and a whole host of others, that Democrats support babies getting aborted at nine months, which is just incredibly untrue. He did say, “No, that didn’t happen, but you’re totally right,” Vance going into, “We care about families, we care about this.” They kept mentioning specific women that have been impacted by these policies, and they got into some minutiae of the laws. Vance just fully lied through his teeth, but if you did not know that, he sounded so on top of it. He sounded like he so deeply cared about women and cared about their families. Where did the childless cat ladies man go? This is someone who actually, apparently all of a sudden, as of Tuesday, October 1st, at 11 pm Eastern, cares about women now? That was such a shocking turnaround, and Walz did not hammer him nearly hard enough on it. This is the Democrat’s best talking point by miles, and he just couldn’t do it.

Makena Kelly: If this debate was about speaking to independent voters, then JD Vance was supposed to be a translator of Trump to those people. What does this mean in actual policy? What does this mean in what you can expect from what our future administration would be? Going into that, Walz did not … It seemed like he wasn’t even prepared to tear apart that translation, to meet Vance where he was there, and actually tell him, “Actually, what you’re saying is incorrect. Here I am going to fact-check you. Here I am with the talking points that we had prepared, that we pulled and know are strongest against independent voters.” That just wasn’t there at all.

Marchman Team: In fairness to Walz, he’s in an impossible position, because one of the main Vance tactics was to portray the vice presidency as an all-powerful office that can pass legislation without the involvement of the Congress. That has a lot of discretion over things as opposed to being someone who opens supermarkets. Walz is in this position where the public is dissatisfied with the state of the world, the direction of the country, and yet he has to perform a pseudo-incumbent function even when he has nothing to do with this. To whatever extent, Harris should have to own successes and failures of the Biden Administration. Walz certainly shouldn’t have to. I think he was terrible, I think he got his clock cleaned, but that’s a really hard position to be in.

Leah Feiger: It’s for sure a tricky one. Your comment, though, about change is so interesting, because with the Harris-Trump debate, she managed to appear as the change candidate. She managed to position Trump as the incumbent, and Walz was just not able to capitalize on that. Instead of doing all of this fact-checking and really shutting Vance down, and getting those gotcha moments, that just didn’t happen. Instead, he got gotcha-ed himself a little bit. Do we think that this Tiananmen Square thing has legs? Although first, actually, let’s talk about the accusation from the right that Walz has engaged in “stolen valor.”

Marchman Team: OK, so on the stolen valor point, the argument is that Walz who served in, I believe he was in the National Guard during, I can’t remember if it was in support of Iraq or Afghanistan, but he was deployed to Europe in a staging area. The argument has essentially been that he had said something along the lines of, “I served in a time of war,” and the argument is that he was misrepresenting himself as having been an infantryman on the front line when he wasn’t. This isn’t the place to litigate the ins and outs of that, but it definitely has been a narrative, where Republicans have been portraying Walz as a liar who’s misrepresenting his military service and making it seem much more substantial than it actually was.

Leah Feiger: Trump has called Walz a disgrace to our country over this.

Marchman Team: I’m putting this all very neutrally. In the debate, Walz was asked why he had represented himself as having been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, and he gave a very fumbling, incoherent answer, where he called himself a knucklehead and said he had misspoken.

Tim Walz [archival audio]: I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that. Those same people—

Marchman Team: It appears, as best I can tell, from what he was saying that he is saying that he was there during that summer. Obviously, it was a summer of protests. He was in the region at that time, and he had drawn lessons from that. I think it could have legs a little bit in terms of Walz being a fibber, just kind of …

Leah Feiger: I think it adds to it. It’s this, it’s stolen valor. Even when you’re actually parsing through the specifics of it, is it that terrible?

Marchman Team: I don’t think he came off great. I don’t think it’s …

Leah Feiger: Yeah, he came off not well in the fact that he called himself a knucklehead. That was tough to see. That was definitely a JD Vance smirking moment. I just couldn’t stop watching him that entire time.

Marchman Team: Yeah, and it’s something you’d really … If the guy was gilding the lily a bit, everyone gilds the lily a bit, at least at this level of politics, and you really should have a comeback for that. I think there was a little bit of confusion. I was in the region during that period, I wasn’t in Hong Kong at the time of those specific protests. I wasn’t in Tiananmen Square when the man was standing down the tank, but I was there at that time. It was a time of great change, as we all remember, the Berlin Wall. There’s a way to do that. He seemed completely flat-footed, which was just bizarre.

Leah Feiger: Obviously, we should point out, and perhaps our lovely moderators could have as well, that Trump is a serial liar, and compared to his many, many, many whoppers over the years, I could have seen a funny turning point of Walz going, “This is nothing. Let’s talk about some greatest hits.” For a campaign that is so focused on the meme-able moment, on the pivot to social, on the pivot to TikTok, they did not manage to grab a lot out of this. Of course, we’re not even talking about Springfield. JD Vance was one of the big, big instigators of the whole Haitian immigrants, Haitian illegal immigrants are eating your friendly neighborhood pets. They’re eating your dogs and cats. When Springfield came up in the debate, this was such an opportunity for Walz to go in, and he did. He did mention that some of this rhetoric had led to schools having to have a lot of extra security, or having to have all these additional drills, but he didn’t go after Vance specifically. He barely went after Trump specifically.

Makena Kelly: This would’ve been a turn too for Walz to be like, “OK, let’s talk about lying and fibbing. You’re the person who literally went on the news last week or whatever week it was, saying that we can embellish these stories to really get everything across that’s happening to rural America right now because of immigration.” That would’ve been an awesome pivot point, and of course, it just didn’t happen.

Marchman Team: He also had the opportunity to say that what Vance was saying was still just flatly false. Vance, as he did throughout the debate, basically took this rhetorical position, kind of distancing himself from Trump, or treating Trump as like a crazy uncle who, “Eh, we all know what he says, but let’s not worry about that. He says a lot of stuff.” He backed off the claims that Haitian illegal immigrants are kidnapping people’s pets and barbecuing them, but he presented it as his attempt to bring attention to the serious problem of immigrants flooding into Springfield and overwhelming the hospital systems, overwhelming the school systems, something of which there’s literally no evidence. People have looked at mortality rates, they’ve looked at 911 waiting times, all these different metrics. There’s no evidence that the migrants are overwhelming the hospital system. The school system, they need more ESL teachers, they need things like that. Those are legitimate issues to bring up. There’s a very easy way to bring up those issues without getting into blood libel. Walz missed the opportunity to go on offense with that when this whole issue came up, affirmatively defending these people and saying, “These are people who are here legally, who are in this town because the town has jobs, and they don’t have people to do them, period.” He was very forceful in making the point that Trump and Vance’s rhetoric has led to bomb threats and all sorts of horrible stuff, but it was, again, to me, an example of him just kind of ceding the premise a little bit. This is not a problem. Really, this is not a problem. He allowed it, I thought, to be presented as a huge existential problem for the country in a way that was just pretty ridiculous.

Leah Feiger: I agree. To a larger extent, if I’m to continue summing up his performance, JD Vance managed to go from honestly appearing as a total robot who deeply does not care about large swaths of the population, to someone who cares, to someone who cares about a viewer like you, and Walz let him do that.

Marchman Team: He really cares about his friend who told him all about the abortion she had because she was in an abusive relationship, which from the way everyone reacted to it, I figure must explain his support for Roe versus Wade—

Leah Feiger: Except …

Marchman Team: … being stated as the law.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, a total rewrite of history. When we come back, whether this debate actually matters.

[[Break]

Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. What did right-wing Twitter make of Vance? Were they into it? They seemed pretty ambivalent about him over the last couple of months. Did he sell them?

Makena Kelly: Well, I was seeing Jack Posobiec, of all people, being really excited, every Fox News, late-night Fox News host tweeting about it. Charlie Kirk was extremely stoked to have this guy back in the ring and in good vibes once again. It felt like when Vance had his first speech at the RNC, that felt a lot more of what we saw tonight, right? Everything that got lost in between July and now October 1st disappeared a little bit. It seemed like right-wing Twitter was very happy to erase those past couple months.

Leah Feiger: They’ve coalesced. He is their candidate, like we’ve been talking about. He translates Trump, and maybe it’ll work. Why not throw yourself behind him?

Marchman Team: Also, it kind of feels like the soft bigotry of low expectations. This guy’s been on a two-month rampage of insulting everybody who’s not—

Leah Feiger: Everyone.

Marchman Team: … a well off, middle-aged white guy, it seems like. The fact that he didn’t come out there and say something wildly offensive, it feels like people were really celebrating that. I thought he did well by any standard, but it did really feel like just the fact that he mostly didn’t say anything too off-putting or bizarre. Although he did say that he knew women who are really keen to go back to work immediately after giving birth, which, again, raises the question to me of whether he’s met any women aside from Meemaw …

Leah Feiger: One woman, one single woman. Also not saying your wife’s name.

Marchman Team: Why wouldn’t he want to talk about her? I can’t imagine.

Leah Feiger: Why not? The sanitization of it all, Vance explicitly said, “If Walz is the next vice president, he will have my prayers, best wishes, and help whenever he wants it.” Right-wing Twitter was loving it. It was totally, back to Makena’s point, it was that wink. It was that nod. It was like, “We are going to trounce this guy. However, I’m going to figure out how to appeal.” I guess the question is, does any of that matter?

Marchman Team: No. None of this matters at all. Nobody—

Leah Feiger: Tim.

Marchman Team: … Nobody cares. There’s not a single person in the United States who was sitting there, saying, “I can’t decide who to vote for, but after this, I’m going to vote for that Walz guy’s boss or that Vance guy’s boss.” Neither of them soiled themselves on stage, neither of them said a racial epithet. In that sense, it matters that neither of them did those things.

Makena Kelly: Talk about a low floor. Oh, my God.

Leah Feiger: Tim, no. For the last two debates, we have gone back and forth in Slack, “Does this debate matter? Do debates matter at all?” Yes. Historically, they have not moved the needle. Did the first debate of this cycle move the needle? Uh huh. Yeah. Obviously we have an entirely different candidate right now. We have Harris. Biden’s out. Did the debate a couple of weeks ago move the needle? It’s a little bit tough to say, but Trump did really badly. He did not do well, and that could have absolutely impacted, and we had to see him play a lot of different catch-up, and the campaigns play a lot of different catch-up over the last couple of weeks. This is a different era. This is a different campaign season. There is social media. I think that anything right now can be a tipping point. If it’s a meme-able moment from Vance absolutely trouncing Walz, then so be it. Fight me.

Marchman Team: I just don’t think it matters. I think the pool of people who could be persuaded here is so small, and the margin here was not that big. The only moment from a vice presidential campaign in my lifetime that I can think of off the top of my head is when Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy, and he was.

Leah Feiger: That was a good moment. That was a good reference. I will give you that one. At the end of the day, I think that this campaign is being decided in quick, meme-able, TikTok-able moments. They didn’t get their poll from Project 2025. Walz did not go in hard enough. They didn’t actually hit all of the items that they needed to hit, and Vance did. Makena, what do you think? Help us settle this.

Makena Kelly: Well, I think as much as it matters, it’s whether or not one of the vice presidential candidates can turn the other one into ammunition against their running mate. Tim Walz did not do a good job, and he isn’t, what he was supposed to do and what he has been doing since Kamala Harris picked him was to make these guys look weird, and strange, and out there, and like they shouldn’t be in power. We shouldn’t take them seriously at all. What Vance was able to do tonight was to be like, “Well, actually, let me reintroduce myself. I’m actually a very serious man and a very serious person.”

Leah Feiger: Then Walz said, “Yes, I am taking you seriously. You have a lot of good ideas. I agree with you.” I have never heard that so much on a debate floor before. They’re going to clip that. They should clip that.

Makena Kelly: Yep. Walz—

Leah Feiger: Pro tip.

Makena Kelly: … Well, talk about a terrible line tonight too, Walz saying that he has befriended school shooters, which was like—

Leah Feiger: Oh, I can’t even,

Tim Walz [archival audio]: Yeah, I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters. I’ve seen it. Look, the NRA, I was an NRA guy for a long time—

Leah Feiger: I assumed that that was a gaffe. Yeah, I can’t even discuss.

Makena Kelly: Yeah, no. If it’s not, then we need a 10,000-word story on that tomorrow.

Marchman Team: Let me jump in here to say that, Makena—

Makena Kelly: Yeah, go ahead.

Marchman Team: … I agree with you. While I don’t think it changes the race or is ultimately that big a deal probably, I can imagine a voter in Bucks County, right outside Philadelphia where I live, they just don’t like Democrats, too much taxes, too much corrupt unions, and big fat-cat school teachers. They don’t like Trump. He’s crazy. They support abortion rights. They’re not quite undecided. They’re leaning Trump, though, because those fat cats teaching in public school just have too much. Vance coming off as a reasonable person gives a permission structure for that person to say, “OK, this guy seems like he’s got his head screwed on at least.”

Leah Feiger: OK, so you don’t totally disagree with me.

Marchman Team: No, but I want to hear what Makena says.

Leah Feiger: I want you to say it. I want you to say, “Leah was right. Leah’s right. Leah could be right.”

Marchman Team: This doesn’t …

Leah Feiger: I need it. I need it.

Marchman Team: We’ll see if it matters.

Leah Feiger: Guys, thank you so much for joining us. It is super late over here, and this was a really good conversation.

Marchman Team: Thank you, Leah. I’ll take this up with you at another time.

Leah Feiger: Thank you. Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and give us five stars. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Vince Fairchild engineered this episode, and it was mixed by Antonio Fernandez. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast, and I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.