Did Vance’s smooth debate performance win folks over? What did Walz leave on the table? Will this move the needle with undecided voters? Errin’s joined by Sarah Longwell, Republican strategist and master of the focus group, to break down the Vice Presidential debate between Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance. Civility and decorum took center stage – but as Sarah explains, that might be a disservice to the American people.
Today’s episode is sponsored by Way To Win and features Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Way to Win. Way to Win is a national hub for donors with a data-based approach to political funding that wins elections, advances transformative policy, and builds lasting power in the states. We work in partnership with those most impacted by injustice to win near-term elections while building long-term power, to improve lives, and to achieve a representative democracy that works for all.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Sarah Longwell is the head of Republican Accountability Project and Republican Accountability PAC, Sarah supports Republicans who stand up for democracy and works to hold election deniers accountable. She founded Defending Democracy Together 2018 with Bill Kristol to defend America’s democratic norms, and is publisher of The Bulwark and host of the podcast “The Focus Group.” Sarah Longwell is an outgoing member of The 19th’s board of directors.
Follow Sarah on X at @SarahLongwell25
Episode transcript
The Amendment podcast transcripts are automatically generated by a third-party website and may contain typos or other errors. Please consider the official record for The Amendment podcast to be the audio publicly available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Errin Haines:
Between…Oh my God, y’all hear my dog? Yes. Who’s suddenly going nuts. Sorry. Ginger, get out! All right. All dogs and people have been secured.
Errin:
Hey, y’all, welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics and power from the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines. So on Tuesday night, Governor Tim Walz faced off against Senator JD Vance in the vice presidential debate on CBS. It was definitely not the brawl that we saw in the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Pretty civil overall, I would say. But, look, it doesn’t matter what I think about this debate. It matters what voters think, which is why I was so eager to talk to Sarah Longwell. Now, Sarah is a Republican political strategist whose work focuses on defending American democracy from the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Sarah has conducted hundreds of focus groups and leads campaigns that are aimed at reaching persuadable voters. Who are they? Where are they? She currently serves as the Executive Director at Republican Voters Against Trump and is publisher of The Bulwark — a must read — and hosts their podcast, The Focus Group, a must-listen. Plus, Sarah is an outgoing member of The 19th Board of Directors. So Sarah, I’m so excited to get into some of the key moments from the one and only vice presidential debate. Thank you so much for being here.
Sarah Longwell:
Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Errin:
Absolutely. So listen, I mean, let’s just get into it. What’s your initial reaction? I mean, did this debate go about how you expected it to go?
Sarah:
Yeah, I guess it did. I mean, look, this is JD Vance’s sweet spot, right? Guy’s a Yale-trained lawyer and all-around performing liar, and slippery kind of smarmy guy. And so, a couple of cameras, a couple of moderators and one opponent. That is where he does well. Where JD Vance does less well is with actual humans, engaging in actual human interactions. Let’s say he’s trying to order a donut, talk to a normal, you know, just, like, an everyday person. He struggles with that, but he is good in these debate situations. Tim Walz, who, you know, he’s debated a couple times. I went back and watched some of his old debates. It’s clearly not his comfort spot. This just isn’t what he does. He is much more comfortable with regular people, in front of people, chatting with people, talking to ’em about normal things.
Sarah:
But like the pitter patter of a debate is not for him. And you saw it immediately. He was uncomfortable. And the first question was a banger. It was a hard one. It was like, “Should we go into Iran?” You know, I mean, it was tough. And I think he struggled, sort of from the jump. But what’s interesting, I watch these things now, and now that I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of focus groups, I know that my reaction is not going to be the same as the voter’s reactions. And the reason I know this is ’cause I am much more, like, not JD Vance in the sense that I am somebody who likes to lie to the American people all the time. But like JD Vance, like a lot of the sort of pundit and political class, like I didn’t go to Yale Law.
Sarah:
Actually I didn’t go to any law school. But, like, I get the debate side. Like we’re all kind of these liberally arts educated people who listen. You know, we’re grading on style, we’re grading on substance. Man, that is not how voters are listening to these things. And so I did two groups out of the jump first thing this morning because I gotta touch grass. And for me, touching grass is listening to voters to get a real sense of what happened. ‘Cause if you asked me last night, and I was doing the live stream, I was like, oh man, this was just…JD Vance, he was smarmy, but he was slick. He was shooting blue steel from his eyes. Like he looked good, he seemed very comfortable in the environment. He gave good answers, and in fact, shaded so many of the crazy and extreme things. He said, he sort of, um, either walked them back in some way, like just on the abortion issue, for example, he started being like, “You know, we need to teach women to trust the Republican party again. We need to earn their trust back.” It was very conciliatory. He was very nice to Tim Walz. Tim Walz was very nice back. It was a very Midwestern, civil debate, which provided a certain kind of emotional cover for JD Vance.
Errin:
Yeah, I mean, look, uh, we are in agreement on so much, you know, much like last night with those two candidates on stage, you and I are also in agreement because, uh, you know, my initial takeaway after watching last night was, uh, “Yes, this meets expectations.” Right? At the same time, like you said, journalist Errin, you know, can see one thing. And that is absolutely not necessarily voter’s interpretation of what they’re seeing in a debate. I think for people who were kind of tuning in for the first time to this election, or starting to pay attention, starting to pay attention to these vice presidential candidates, that was not the JD Vance they’d heard about in media reports. That was not the JD Vance that they had necessarily seen on social media, uh, you know, interacting with folks, or not interacting with folks so well.
Errin:
Talking about, uh, Haitian immigrants eating pets, that kind of, I mean, like, none of that was really on display in this debate last night. So you really kind of the “Hillbilly Elegy” version of JD Vance — that very calming, you know, voice explaining to America what, you know, a Trump-Vance presidency would look like. A lot of people, maybe, who were watching and seeing Vance for the first time might have thought, “This guy’s not so bad. This guy doesn’t seem weird to me.” Right? Like, “I’ve heard this person was supposed to be weird.” That’s not really what I’m getting. At the same time, you know, Governor Walz, he didn’t necessarily come across as confident or even, you know, where were the zingers that he normally has, right? The campaign rally Governor Walz, or even the convention speech Governor Walz, like that was not who we saw last night…
Errin:
…in the debate. You were absolutely right. Midwestern nice was definitely the vibe that I felt like I was looking at. It did not seem adversarial or acrimonious at all, especially in terms of like, neither of them really attacking each other. Now, they definitely went after, you know, the top of the ticket. Um, you know, they both did some of that, but in terms of going after each other, there was really not very much of that at all. And so I definitely did wonder what voters were supposed to make of that coming out of those 90 minutes. So I’m so glad that you already are asking voters if this is going to move the needle at all. I think it gives our news cycle certainly something to talk about, but what does it really mean to voters?
Sarah:
The voters, they, like, they watched it and they found they thought JD Vance did a good job. Like, I’ve listened to two groups today, one of swing voters and one of voters who voted for Trump in the past, but are kind of down on him, not interested in voting for him again, or don’t, they’re like, you know, kind of out on him. And they all were like, “Oh, yeah, JD Vance did a really good job. He was sharp and smart and sounded competent, but I still don’t trust him and I don’t trust Donald Trump.” And they thought Walz seemed uncomfortable, but also thought he was fine. They were kinda like, “He seemed fine, he seemed all right.” And, like, they noted his sort of discomfort, but also found him sort of relatable enough and didn’t think, nobody thought he had, like, a catastrophic debate.
Sarah:
Nobody thought, you know, “Boy, the whole campaign is just now, you know, upended by this performance.” Yeah. One of the other things that stood out to me from the focus groups was how much the voters liked that the debate was civil. Like, many of them remarked on the fact that it seemed more like a presidential debate in the fact that it both had more substance and more civility. And I think that that’s because voters don’t realize that anytime you have a debate where Donald Trump is on the stage, right, he brings, sort of, the chaos with him onto the stage. He’s hurling the insults. And so you’ve gotta be prepared. You know, he’s telling lies constantly. And JD Vance was also smoothly lying. But like the voters liked the vibe, ’cause voters like it. These guys, they don’t like the “everybody yelling at each other.
Sarah:
And I can’t follow what people are saying, and they’re talking over each other.” But I think for the other sort of divide between pundits and voters, or, I’ll speak for myself, and maybe a little bit, maybe, my Never Trump Tribe, is we see Donald Trump as a real existential threat, right? And we have been fighting against, I think, as you said in my intro, sort of this, what we see as, like, an authoritarian menace coming from Trump. And JD Vance is like his little errand boy who has, you know, changed his positions, is in this role specifically because Trump got rid of his last vice president because he did his job and certified the election. And JD Vance won this gig with Donald Trump by going around and saying he would not have certified the election as Mike Pence did.
Sarah:
And so JD Vance is unfit. JD Vance should not be treated as though he is just a normal, everyday candidate. And so I think we are kind of looking to Walz, like, anytime you get a crack at one of these guys, what you desperately wanna see is for somebody to say in front of the American people who are watching “This guy, you know, he is supporting someone who would not engage in the peaceful transfer of power.” When JD Vance last night said that Trump, you know, did have a peaceful transfer of power, like, what kind of like…? And Walz did call him out on it, but not until the like ninety-second minute of the 90-minute debate was like right at the end. And so I think there’s just a little bit of frustration in sort of wanting to see… Like, I both, I love substance, and I love civility, and so much of that has been missing from our politics since Donald Trump came in. And so it’s a little hard to criticize the debate for being substantive and civil. On the other hand, the stakes are very high, and the American people should not be gaslit into thinking JD Vance is just a normal guy. And so I sort of thought there was a lot of, like, missed opportunities from Walz.
Errin:
I guess, kind of, on that point, because you’re right, it was a more substantive debate. We got a lot more into issues. And yet, to your point, you know, CBS had said going into this debate that they were not going to fact check, right? And so when you did have JD Vance saying things on the stage that were not true, like that does give him an air of credibility, right? Like, that gives them an air of credibility, which is the argument for some for fact checking in real-time. That didn’t happen. So what does it mean to have substance if we’re not actually going to have people fact checking when people are getting substance, but not necessarily accurate information?
Sarah:
Yeah, I think the fact-checking question from the moderators is actually a really difficult one. I had Dana Bash on my program after the ABC debate to, sort of, ask her what she thought. ‘Cause the CNN, when she and Tapper did it, they didn’t fact check right? Then the ABC moderators did fact check. And then CBS in this said that they weren’t going to fact check. Although, at one point, when JD Vance did start talking about the Haitian immigrants, and then said he only cared about the Americans. He wasn’t interested in talking about the Haitians. Cared about the Americans of the town. And, one of them, I can’t remember which one, one of the moderators said, “Many of the Haitians are American immigrants.” And he was like, “You said you weren’t gonna fact check!” And I gotta say it was such a telling moment, because he can’t do his thing if somebody’s fact checking him, which is why there is such an outcry for fact checking.
Sarah:
On the other hand, what Dana’s argument was, and I think what, clearly, for the most part, CBS’s argument was, is that the candidates need to be there to fact check themselves. Like it’s a debate. They are the ones who have to do that. And, like, I can sort of see both sides of this. I think I come down…when they started fact checking on the CBS or, sorry, on the ABC. When I saw, like, when it started to happen, I was like, “Oh my gosh, do my ears deceive me? Is somebody actually gonna fact check these guys, or fact check Donald Trump and, like, point out that he is lying?” And I was excited about it. Like, my gut reaction was to be excited. But it is a tricky road. The question is sort of, like, “What is the journalistic duty of somebody there? Like, because Dana was making the point in a one-on-one interview…
Sarah:
…You fact check. Like, you are there. You push back in a one-on-one interview. As a moderator, you are simply there to be a stand-in to facilitate the conversation between the two people. You are not there, like, to insert yourself. And so, I don’t know, it’s tough, but I will say, Tim Walz, he couldn’t fact check. I mean, he just, like, that just wasn’t what this guy was gonna do. And actually, Tim Walz, I think Tim Walz is such a nice person, right? Which he might not be quite built exactly for this political moment because he is such a nice guy. What he does is he looks for common ground. He just does it with the other human beings who were in front of him. He wants to find common ground. And so you could see him, sort of, extending himself to JD Vance all the time, nodding when he agreed with something…
Sarah:
…JD Vance was saying. Like that’s clearly what he is like as a person. But as a result, what ended up happening is it looked like he was kind of affirming so much of what Vance was saying. And so, forget fact checking, Walz was actually, in many ways, kind of humanizing JD Vance on the spot, because that’s what he does as a good person. Yeah. That might not be what we needed out of that last night. That being said, listening to these voters, it’s clear to me this is not a big needle-mover one way or the other. I’m just always, there aren’t that many inflection points left in this election cycle. And this was one of the last chances to, sort of, try to get a bump and some momentum.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm. And draw the contrast, right?
Sarah:
And draw the contrast. Right. Yeah. And I think that just kind of didn’t happen, but I don’t think it was, like, I don’t think they’re gonna see, like, a two point drop in the swing states. I don’t think anything like that. I don’t think voters, that’s where they are on this. I think they’re kind of like, “Yeah, it’s fine.”
Errin:
To your point about Walz and his, kind of, demeanor and tone during the debate, like, I do think the combination, you know, now that we have seen all four of these candidates in a debate setting, the case for decency that Harris and Walz are making, you know, like “We are decent human beings,” right? Like, that definitely is how Walz came across last night. I mean, even being able to share a stage with JD Vance and for that to be not an acrimonious evening wa,s to the extent that that is something that voters can appreciate, maybe that was something that meant something to them. But I do wanna go back to the other thing that you brought up. And that is, you know, the January 6 moment that happened in the debate, because I did think that that was one of the big moments of the evening. But you’re right, that came pretty late in the night.
Errin:
So, you know, I’m wondering, one: How many people hung in there, you know, to even make it to that moment? And I’m sure that, you know, the Harris-Walz campaign, who certainly thought that was a big moment, were probably one and the same. They couldn’t, I mean, that is the ad that they cut within hours of this debate being over. That ad is already out and airing, kind of, it’s showing that exchange where Walz specifically asks JD Vance iff Donald Trump lost the election, to which Vance says, you know, “I’m focused on the future,” and Walz responds, “That is a damning non-answer”. That really was one of Walz’s big moments. I thought that was kind of a low point for JD Vance. These are people who could be in a position to, you know, be presiding over a Senate certifying an election in four more years.
Sarah:
Yeah. I think that Walz had to get that in there. I’m glad he did. I don’t think that many people were hanging in there to the bitter end
Errin:
Do you wish it had happened earlier in the night?
Sarah:
Yeah, I wish it had happened earlier. Not only because I think that it’s such an important thing to draw contrast on, or to point out about Vance and Trump, but also ‘cause I think it might have shaken Vance a little bit. Like, you know, Vance had just a real head of steam, like, as soon as it looked. And you could see this with Kamala, too, the way that, you know, she kind of picked up as she went along.
Errin:
Definitely.
Sarah:
She found her footing pretty early, though. I mean, she just, it was just a little talking pointy at first, and then she kind of hit her rhythm and she was good. And the reason she hit her rhythm is ’cause she knocked Trump off with that crowd sized question, right?
Errin:
Yes.
Sarah:
And once Trump was off his game, it was over and she got her confidence. So the reason I would’ve brought it up earlier is I think he could have shaken Vance up a little bit earlier on something where he is weak. He knows he is weak. He doesn’t feel good about it. ‘Cause everywhere else he was really polished. I don’t think it matters from a “what do voters absorb though.” Typically, look, the number of people who watch a vice presidential debate in real time. I’m interested to see the numbers, to see if it was a little higher than normal.
Errin:
Same.
Sarah:
But I suspect that, based on what I’m seeing, both the Harris campaign and for the media, the fact that JD Vance, that he got kind of pinned down on that and avoided it, was one of the biggest takeaways.
Errin:
Mm-hmm.
Sarah:
It is the thing that people are going to see this morning in their headlines. People are gonna see clips of on social media that they’re gonna run ads about. And so I think they will stick the landing on that overall. Like they got the social media moment. Just what so much of this stuff is now. They got out of it what they needed. But, you know, I just think he kind of needed more moments like that. Like he kind of missed…
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
When I say, like, things were left on the table: Ukraine. Ukraine is a place where, JD Vance, he doesn’t support helping Ukraine.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
And, like, I would’ve liked to have seen Walz pin him down on that. And the foreign policy came hot and heavy, like, right out of the gate, and…
Errin:
Right.
Sarah:
And, I think, Walz, it was tough for him. But, like, Walz got that really tough question about his own record on Tiananmen Square.
Errin:
Yes.
Sarah:
Which he answered very poorly. Had to have known it was coming.
Errin:
That was his low point. Probably his worst moment. Yeah. I think the other point about the January 6th question is: the future of democracy is something that is very important to voters. And so asking that question early, because it is a priority for people going into this election, right? And especially maybe even some of those undecided voters for whom democracy is a very important issue for them to see that contrast, I felt like could have been meaningful. There didn’t really feel like there were enough moments of stark contrast in the way that that moment felt like a very stark and obvious contrast between the two of them.
Sarah:
Yeah. And it’s interesting, you know, when you say “democracy” with voters, it’s a tricky word for voters. ‘Cause they’re not necessarily like, “Oh, I’m voting on democracy,” right? And democracy kind of means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But what January 6 does is it reminds people of the chaos of Trump, of the fact that Trump doesn’t respect people and, like, the rules and the rule of law. And it’s all wrapped up in this thing around democracy. Like, are you gonna certify votes? Are you gonna take my votes seriously? Are you gonna count it? And I really think getting at that, raising the salience of January 6, reminding people, ’cause it slides back in people’s minds. Like the economy is the front of people’s minds. Immigration is very front of mind for people. And you know, democracies, oftentimes people, like, you’ll see surveys and people will say, “democracy matters.”
Sarah:
And you think, “Oh, okay, well this is good because…” but we interpret that as people understand that Donald Trump’s a threat to democracy. But that’s not it. Half the time it is Republican voters saying, “Well, the Democrats tried to steal the last election.”
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
And so I’m always careful about just saying, you know, or about thinking that democracy is driving people, even though I’ll say when it comes to the swing voters, the critical voters, a lot of the center right and right-leaning independents who are moving away from Trump, it is because he denied the results of the last election.
Errin:
Right.
Sarah:
And so it is, to me, it’s always like, not so much a broad issue of democracy, but it’s a decisive one for a certain group of people.
Errin:
And January 6 really is a lot of what they mean by…
Sarah:
That’s right.
Errin:
…Their concerns around democracy. Okay. We gotta take a break real quick, but we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
Way To Win midroll:
Hi, my name is Jennifer Fernandez Ancona, I am one of the co-founders of Way to Win, and I’m the Chief Strategy Officer. Way to Win was founded in the wake of Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. And we are dedicated to upending politics as usual. We do that in a number of ways through funding, grassroots organizing in competitive battleground states to funding messaging and narrative work to try to get us all singing from the same hymn book. And we have been supporting candidates up and down the ballot who are really bold champions for our values and the kind of future that we wanna see. It really is a coalition-driven approach. We don’t see any one voter segment being able to necessarily flip the election. We see a value in mobilizing and persuading at the same time, which we call Mob persuasion. We see the value in speaking to this full diverse coalition — that it’s diverse along race, gender, and geography, but also ideology.
Way To Win midroll:
We have a big tent in this anti-MAGA coalition that has delivered wins for Democrats since the 2018 cycle in the post-Trump era. So we ultimately see our role as helping to shore up and grow that big diverse coalition. I mean, Kamala Harris says it, we have so much more in common than what separates us. What we found is that when you focus on people’s values, the vision, the things they actually want for their families, it is really more similar than you would think across a range of diverse people. So that kind of curiosity about what unites us is part of what helps us figure out those message frames. And the two examples that I would point to are, number one: the idea of freedoms. People really value freedom. It’s one of the top values of all Americans that all Americans share. And it’s a contested topic.
Way To Win midroll:
And actually Tim Walz talks about this very well — this contrast between what do we mean when we say freedom? The Republicans talk about it as restricting people. Or they might think about it as, like, the rights of property owners or the rights of the wealthy and big corporations. And when we think about freedom, it’s a much more expansive view, which is why we also say freedoms, plural, because it’s not just one thing. It’s multiple ways that we can be free: free to be who we are, free to live with clean air and water, free from gun violence, freedom to control our own bodies and decide whether and when we have children, of course. So the idea of freedom is very resonant and popular and motivating across all of our coalition. I am thrilled at how much the Democratic candidates and the party have adopted the freedoms messaging.
Way To Win midroll:
The second example is when we talk about economic issues, what’s helpful is to think about it in a larger picture. So it’s not just dollars and cents, but it’s actually what makes a better life. That means higher wages. That means better jobs. It also means the freedom to decide when you wanna have children. It also means the ability to send your kids to a safe school. So there’s a way that we can thread a lot of issues together. And that tends to be part of when we can find that sweet spot where it’s both mobilizing for the folks who are more with us and persuasive to the folks who we still need to bring in. That is going to be the deciding factor: Is she the agent of change in the new generation? And can these voters, especially younger, Black and Brown, largely male, can they see an economic vision where they see themselves in it and they believe that choosing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will make their lives better? That choosing Trump and the Republicans will just make things harder for them and more expensive? That’s a simple way of understanding this election. It’s about our freedoms, it’s about our families, it’s about our futures and we wanna keep hitting that over and over again. And that is exactly what Way to Win is gonna be working on for the next 30-some odd days.
Errin:
Well, you brought up immigration, so I wanna talk about that because you did have, um, JD Vance really, kind of, hitting this issue a lot. JD Vance tying Harris directly to immigration, right? Which is what they’ve been trying to do, what we’ve seen in ads, kind of what we see on the campaign trail. Do you feel like that worked? I mean, kind of what worked and what didn’t for him on immigration?
Sarah:
You know, it’s interesting. Back in the Trump-Harris debate, Trump basically took every single question and turned it into immigration. Every single one, he tried to pivot to immigration because it’s a strong issue for them. It is the one on which voters trust them the most.
Errin:
Right.
Sarah:
JD Vance wasn’t doing that. And I think it’s because there’s been a little bit of a backfire on the, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” And he was hoping to avoid that, which he basically did, which is another place I wish Walz had kinda landed on him for lying and doing that to people. He has ruined that community. He has terrorized that community. He should be held accountable for. That should have been pointed out.
Errin:
Uh, yeah. I mean, Springfield. Missed opportunity for Governor Walz, for moderators, for both.
Sarah:
Yeah, for both. For both it should have been acted. It’s, like, still a problem down there. Um, like, they have totally upended that community by telling these lies. And I also think, you know, uh, JD Vance was able to call Kamala “the border czar.”
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Sarah:
He was able to, um, kind of, like, say, he did multiple times. “Fentanyl,” “They’re letting people pour across the border.” Harris…
Errin:
Harris is letting people in.
Sarah:
Harris is.
Errin:
She the one that’s doing this.
Sarah:
That’s right. And so he went right at that, and I just think it went more or less unanswered.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
And even with the child separation conversation, which was a question that sort of gave Walz an opportunity to hit Vance for some of the previous policies around immigration during the Trump administration. He just didn’t get there. And, so, I think he won most of the immigration conversations. But then again, look, it is a big liability for her. And then Walz did the one thing that I do think has been breaking through to voters a little bit, which is when Harris, in the last debate with Trump, brought up that there had been a bill that she had advocated for with conservative Janes Langford, and they had a deal, and Trump scuttled it for political reasons. I had a bunch of people in the focus group say, “Oh, I hadn’t heard that. I didn’t know that.”
Errin:
Mm-hmm.
Sarah:
And so, like, that, kind of, hammering on Trump for political reasons took this bill outta commission. They should keep going on that. And Walz hit it. He just didn’t hit it over and over again.
Errin:
I want to talk about this in terms of abortion. You had Governor Walz, kind of, personalizing abortion, again, tying in his own experience with fertility treatment. You had JD Vance saying, you know, “My party needs to do better.” Which feels like a different approach, obviously, that we’ve seen in the past. I guess, what did you think about how both of these candidates talked about abortion? Something we know is galvanizing folks going to the ballot box in November? May not be their top issue, but it’s certainly something that they care about. It
Sarah:
Is something they care about. And I think we should try to make it a top issue. I think that the Harris campaigns, they were at their strongest, I think, around the abortion issue around the convention.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Sarah:
When they were really wrapping abortion into a freedom agenda.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
That I feel like wasn’t, again, thematically, last night, I didn’t think they were really driving that in a way that they could.
Errin:
Do you think that’s because she has been the most, kind of, effective voice on tying abortion to the freedom democracy piece?
Sarah:
Yeah. I mean, I think he tried to get at it when he was like, “We’re gonna leave you alone.” Like, it was like, “We’re gonna mind our own business.” or whatever he said. Like, I think it was fun. I just, listen, here’s the thing about voters, and I think this is why I am not sure that while we saw Vance’s performance as strong, I’m not sure that it lands with voters quite the same way: Repetition really helps. Like, having themes and driving them is what it takes to break through to voters in this fragmented, you know, minimized-attention economy. Right. It’s, like, difficult to get. So, like, one of the things that’s happening was when you ask voters now about, uh, Kamala Harris and her views on the economy, they will say, “I like that she is from a middle class background. And I like that she’s for the middle class.” Okay.
Errin:
Because she’s been repeating that.
Sarah:
Because she says it to the point where, like, Republicans make fun of her, you know, “Oh, she starts all of her questions…” But, like, that is sort of what it takes…
Errin:
It works.
Sarah:
…for people to be like, “Okay, what does this person stand for?” And so I think for Walz…
Errin:
But also Donald Trump is very good at repetition.
Sarah:
Donald Trump repeats everything.
Sarah:
Donald Trump has, like, the cadence of an 8-year-old when he talks. And it really works, I think, a lot of times for voters ‘cause they’re like, “Okay.” It’s very sloganeering.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
Build a wall, make America great again, you know, very accessible politics. And this is, you know, um, this is actually something I meant to mention before that I think, um, I hadn’t actually, I’ve been doing media all day, but it’s the first time I really thought about it. Something you said, uh, sort of tipped me off. One of the things voters don’t like is a regular politician. Like, I hear this all the time. I knew DeSantis was cooked with the voters when everybody was like, “I think he is, like, just kind of a regular politician.”
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Sarah:
What they love about Trump is that he’s not a regular politician.
Sarah:
And I think what people like about Kamala Harris right now is she’s transcending regular politician into a more, uh, cultural phenomenon.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
That has been working for her. Last night, Walz didn’t seem like a regular politician.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
But JD Vance did.
Errin:
Yeah.
Sarah:
And so I also think that we look at this and think, well, JD Vance definitely won on technicalities and points. And I think Walz needed to drive themes a little better. I think he needed to be on offense a little bit more. But I also think that voters didn’t look at him and think, “Boy, he seems like a practiced slick politician.” They thought he was like, “I think he seems mostly like a normal guy. And like, that’s fine with me.”
Errin:
Yeah. And I mean, look, Trump is obviously the known quantity between the four of them. He’s the person that voters that the American people are very, very familiar with. The other three people on this ticket are people that a lot of the American people do not know, which I think is why you saw Vice President Harris doing so much to kind of lean into her personal story, talk about who she is, talk about her background, and also kind of pivot to how that might inform policy and how she would govern. Governor Walz, I think, people kind of did get a sense last night, uh, of him more as a person, you know, got kind of more of a sense of his personal story. I mean, yes, Senator Vance was very polished. He’s very good at debating. But like, how much did you actually learn about JD Vance the person, if that was somebody you were also looking to know more about?
Sarah:
Yeah, I mean, the one thing he kind of, he hid a little bit of his bio with his mom and his grandmother. Like he said that the grand…
Errin:
Grandmother piece. Yes.
Sarah:
And he was talking about, like, his beautiful children. He talked a little bit about his wife. Like he was trying to, he was trying to do a few things to humanize himself. Like I think last night, JD Vance was a big attempt, was like, “see me as a human because I’m not being good at connecting with humans through this campaign.” And I think that the problem is that, I think it helped a little bit in the sense that people, like, knew he was doing a good job. And maybe they learned a little bit more about him, but nobody came away thinking…he just had regular politician vibes all over him. And I think that that might be why at the end of the day, Vance I think, probably did himself a little bit of help.
Sarah:
He gave himself a little bit of help in terms of how deep his negatives were. Because I’ve never seen anybody – except for the way Republicans talked about Mike Pence in the two years after the 2020 election – I have not heard voters talk as negatively about a candidate as they do about JD Vance. They just do not like him last night. I bet he went from like negative 30 in favorability to maybe negative five. Whereas I think Walz probably just built a more positive identity, less because he demonstrated any particular kind of competency on the issues, but more because people were like, “oh, he had like a gun that he would take pheasant hunting after practice that he kept in his trunk.” And that guy seems normal.
Errin:
You brought up guns. I wanted to talk about that too, because you had JD Vance kind of talking about bolstering school security and America’s mental health crisis, the kind of stuff Republicans talk about when they talk about guns. But then you had Walz coming back. I also thought this was another one of his stronger moments when he was saying, you know, “sometimes it’s the guns” that line that he had that felt like more of kind of where a lot of the American people are. But I wonder what you thought about that, or what if the focus groups had anything to say about that gun violence moment?
Sarah:
So first of all, it didn’t come up too much in the focus groups. I think part of the reason that section was just a little bit muddled is Governor Walz tells this very, uh, he does kind of a quick story about his son being in, like there was a shooting and he was there and witnessed it. And at JD Vance, I thought he said some phrase that exhibited that he was, he felt great sympathy for that happening.
Errin:
Yes. It was, “good God almighty” or something like that.
Sarah:
Yeah. Was something like that that I thought ended up kind of being good for Vance. In the way that he was showing empathy. I think that Republicans always sound really dumb when they talk about door safety and like window safety. Like these are the problems. But like Vance kind of does that slick thing, and moved on in a way that I didn’t think either of them came out of that exchange. Actually. I think I would say the main thing for Walz is that Walz and Harris have both been trying to move to the center on guns in a way that says, I’m trying to figure out what to do about these school shootings and the fact that our kids are being terrorized while also making it clear that I believe that gun ownership is fine, and in fact, we are both gun owners and comfortable with guns. And so I think they’ve been trying to paint kind of a different picture than many other Democrats have, and I think that that works well for them. But I thought that JD Vance also painted a slightly different picture than a lot of less adept Republicans. Like, let’s view that Ted Cruz or somebody else who can be really schlocky on the gun issue. I thought JD Vance was also very capable at handling it in that exchange.
Errin:
Yeah. You know, just listening to you, I think it’s also interesting that we, or maybe I just have not heard it – and this could be the case that frankly for Governor Walz doing more interviews with reporters – this is somebody who was a teacher in the era of mass shootings in schools. And he’s talked about how his daughter has informed his thinking around guns and gun reform. But I would imagine that that experience also affected him and affected how he, how he thinks about this. So like the story that he told about his son was certainly something that we had not heard before. But I wonder what other kinds of stories are out there for him around that issue.
Sarah:
That is a great point. That is a great point. And it sort of goes to, I think what Walz struggled with last night, which is I bet in a conversational way, if he had been talking about this, he would have leaned on the fact that he’s a teacher. He’s like, look, absolutely. Lemme tell you what’s happening in these schools and like the drills these kids are doing. And I think, my guess is he could be very compelling in a conversational way about these things that like, he went into that debate though, all prepped, yes. Pete Buttigieg, who has the best words and is quick and light on his feet when it comes to these debates had prepped him. And I think, you know, Walz was nervous and he was all stocked up and prepped and like, he didn’t have the ability to kind of do that easy breezy. “Let me tell you the real story, lemme tell you about my background. Let me bring it all back to my own personal experience.” The ways that he was doing that in this debate felt a little, a little canned, right. Because he had been so prepped. And I think it’s just not his environment.
Errin:
Yeah. What did you hear in your focus groups about who they thought did better in this debate? Did they have thoughts on a clear winner?
Sarah:
So they didn’t talk about “win and lose.”
Errin:
Huh. Okay.
Sarah:
Think we think in terms of “won” and “lost,” and instead I listened to the voters. And actually I think that they liked Walz more after the debate. And I think they thought JD Vance was more talented than they thought, and maybe less extreme than they thought.
Sarah:
But we’re still suspicious of him. And I don’t think one debate was enough to make them either fall head over heels in love with Walz, or to decide they hated JD Vance, even like it’s sort of to totally redeem JD Vance.
Errin:
And like the other thing is, you know, there’s only, well at this point, there’s only one scheduled debate. So this was it, right? This was it. Meanwhile you’re going to have both of these candidates out on the campaign trail. You know, how they come across to those people is what is going to make the difference, it feels like to me, in a much bigger way than than whatever happened on stage last night.
Sarah:
I think that’s right. I think that’s right.
Errin:
Yeah. We’re onto the ground game and turnout now. It’s election season, people are voting. That’s right. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for the reminder that, yes, what we think matters. Obviously we would not have podcasts if that was not true, but what the voters think matters so much more. So thank you, thank you, thank you for helping me unpack this and for helping me to remind people that yeah we need to keep listening to voters over the next five weeks so that we know what’s gonna happen on the other side of November 5th.
Sarah:
Thanks. I wish I knew exactly what was gonna happen though.
Errin:
You know, don’t we all, don’t we all. Where’s my time machine?
Sarah:
Thanks for having me.
Errin:
That’s it for this week’s episode of The Amendment. But one more thing before y’all go, since I know we’ve got some listeners here in the South. So on October 17th, The 19th crew and I will be at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia – my hometown – for a conversation on Black women and the 2024 election. So I really, really hope that you will join me for this event. We’re gonna focus on the issues that the newer electorate cares about. Everything from climate justice to LGBTQ+ advocacy. This group we know is an absolute force at the polls, and it’s high time that we hear from them. So register now, reserve your space at 19thnews.org/atlanta2024.
The Amendment is a co-production of The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar, Faith Smith and Emily Rudder. The show is edited by Grace Lynch and Julia B. Chan, produced by Brittany Martinez, Grace Lynch and Luci Jones, and post-production support from Julie Bogen, Lance Dixon, and Wynton Wong. Artwork by Aria Goodman. Our theme music is composed by Jlin.