Some political debates hit like an earthquake and immediately change the political landscape. Joe Biden’s disastrous debate in June against Trump is already the classic example: Even as the debate progressed, it was immediately clear that his inability to speak coherently at a crucial moment meant that Biden’s political future was over. But most debates aren’t like that. To the extent that they have an impact, they are more like the shift from fall into winter, a slow and gradual change that takes many days to be felt as a mild nip in the air turns into outright coldness. The public watches the debate over the course of 90 minutes or two hours, but the processing of what it saw takes time. It’s a process that is aided and abetted by the media coverage, especially clips that distill a moment.

The classic example of a slow-fuse debate moment that ended up having an impact is Gerald Ford’s famous gaffe in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter. Fending off critiques that his foreign policy was indifferent to the oppression of the USSR, Ford declared, “I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” Ford’s point was a subtle one: that even under Soviet rule, Poles had a spirit of resistance. But his wording made it sound like he was flippantly disregarding Soviet imperial domination of Eastern Europe.

Initially, not all viewers picked up on this gaffe, and even the immediate press coverage tended to minimize it. As The Washington Post noted in a 2024 review of the incident:

Still, it took about a day for the damage to sink in. The Times’s debate story didn’t mention the gaffe until the seventh paragraph; The Post made even less of the comment in its initial report.

Over the next few days, the full import of Ford’s words began to sink in, especially after they were highlighted over and over again in press coverage. The fact that Ford, far from clarifying his remarks, stubbornly dug in only made matters worse. Ford lost crucial days in an election and solidified his reputation as an out-of-touch oaf.

Tuesday’s debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz is likely to play out with the same slow-fuse dynamic. Initially, the night seemed like an unexpected victory for Vance, who is much less popular than Walz but who made a credible show as a policy-savvy and surprisingly civil voice of Trumpism. Vance, as I observed in my Monday column, has two modes: He can be either ingratiating (presenting himself as a sober and polite voice of rational dispute) or alienating (presenting himself as an angry, incendiary cultural warrior).

On Tuesday night, it was the ingratiating Vance who showed up—the one who didn’t yell, tried to find common ground, and even seemed open to listening to criticism of Republican policies on issues like abortion. Vance was an effective salesman for a kinder, gentler MAGA. To be sure, his entire sales pitch was little more than a con game. As my colleague John Nichols noted last night, much of what Vance said was a pack of lies, based on deliberately supressing his own hard-right politics. Walz was faced with the dual burden of having to fact-check these lies even as he presented the arguments for the Democratic Party.

Since smooth lying is often rewarded in politics, there is an argument to be made that Vance won the night—especially since Walz by contrast seemed a little over-prepared and wooden. It’s not surprising that conservative admirers of Vance, notably New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, were exhilarated by the debate. According to Douthat:

The Ohio senator is delivering one of the best debating performances by a Republican nominee for president or vice president in recent memory and making a case for Trump’s record far more effectively than Trump has ever been capable of doing.

Vance’s performance has included a dose of self-conscious humanization, an attempted reintroduction to his blue-collar background and striking personal biography after weeks of effective Democratic attacks on his right-wing podcast commentary. It’s included some careful rhetorical tap dancing and policy jujitsu on issues like climate change and abortion. But mostly it’s just been an effective prosecution of the case against the Biden-Harris administration, focusing relentlessly on encouraging viewers to be nostalgic for the economy, the immigration landscape and the relative foreign-policy calm of Trump’s term.

Current Issue

November 2024 Issue

But Douthat’s victory dance was premature. The instant polling done after the debate shows that it was basically a wash. A CBS poll found that 42 percent thought Vance won, 41 percent that Walz won, and 17 percent that the debate was a tie. A CNN poll showed 51 percent thinking Vance won, against 49 percent thinking that Walz won.

But even these poll numbers should be treated as preliminary, because Walz very smartly played a long game in the debate. While he wasn’t able to bait Vance the way Kamala Harris did with Donald Trump (memorably getting the former president to obsess over his crowd size and complain about Haitians eating cats and dogs), Walz did provoke a few comments that will do immense damage to the Trump campaign.

The key to Walz’s strategy was not to go after Vance directly (since very few voters care about the vice president); rather, Walz got Vance to commit himself to one of Trump’s most unpopular actions, inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Near the end of the debate the following exchange occurred:

WALZ: Did [Donald Trump] lose the 2020 election?

VANCE: Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?

WALZ: That is a damning nonanswer.

This was part of a larger exchange where Vance pointedly and repeatedly refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the election. ABC’s MaryAlice Parks reports, “Harris campaign tells me they are already cutting ad on Jan 6th exchange from VP debate. They said it was the biggest gap they saw in focus group. Walz getting points for his pushback defending democracy.”

The Harris campaign is right to focus on this exchange. Even more than Gerald Ford’s Poland gaffe, it’s an error that illuminates—in an easy-to-understand way—everything wrong with a candidate. Vance’s comments show not just his own moral cravenness but also the way Trump has bullied all those who work with him into accepting the Big Lie about the 2024 campaign. If the Harris campaign and its surrogates keep pushing this clip, they can bog down the Trump campaign for days if not weeks in defending the indefensible.

Tim Walz’s performance on the debate stage wasn’t as spectacular as Kamala Harris’s when she baited Trump. But Walz got the job done. Walz has lit a slow fuse that will explode in the coming days and damage Trump’s presidential bid.