The vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on Tuesday was something of a stalemate, though it did feature several striking moments and offered an interesting preview into what presidential politics might look like once Donald Trump is off the stage. It isn’t clear yet how genuinely undecided voters responded to the debate — a CBS poll afterward showed 42 percent of debate watchers thought Vance won and 41 percent thought Walz did, while 17 percent thought it was a tie. A CNN poll showed 51 percent thought Vance won and 49 percent thought Walz did (CNN didn’t offer the “tie” option). Scored purely on affect and debating technique — without regard to factual accuracy — Vance did a bit better. He stuck to his two-pronged strategy: first, to blame Kamala Harris for everything voters don’t like that has happened under the Biden administration; and second, to put a reasonable-seeming face on Trumpism.  In doing so, though, Vance said many misleading or totally untrue things, such as that Donald Trump saved Obamacare, that immigrants caused the US housing crisis, and that Trump was merely peacefully discussing “problems” with the 2020 election rather than blatantly trying to steal that election from the rightful winner, Joe Biden. Walz’s performance was rockier, and while he had his moments — he spoke effectively about health care, abortion, and Trump’s threat to democracy — his answers were less disciplined and more scattershot. He seemed flatfooted by a question regarding his past, reportedly untrue claims to have been in Hong Kong at the time of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 — not exactly the most important and pressing issue of the day, but something he probably should have prepared a better answer for. So, on points, Vance may have won by a nose. But he did so in a way that is unlikely to matter very much, if at all, for the presidential contest. In general, vice presidential debates very rarely impact the polls. And this particular debate lacked any breakout moment likely to dominate headlines for days in what’s become a very crowded October news environment (Middle East escalation, Hurricane Helene, the port strike).  This debate almost certainly didn’t change the race — we may not even be talking about it for much longer — but there were some interesting moments that told us more about the candidates and the politics of 2024 as we head into the campaign’s final month. Say what you will about JD Vance, but the man knows how to code-switch. When he attended Yale Law School and when he promoted his book Hillbilly Elegy, he knew how to sound appealing to liberal elites. When he tried to cultivate the far right to win the Ohio Senate primary in 2022, he went all-out saying absurd and offensive things (in a way that has hurt him this year, when his remarks about “childless cat ladies” resurfaced). And on the debate stage Tuesday, he was laser-focused on sweet-talking swing voters.  Vance didn’t engage in bomb-throwing; he wasn’t an attack dog or an edgelord. He assured viewers that he felt their pain and that their pain was all Kamala Harris’s fault. (He solved the problem of how to hold Harris responsible for Biden’s record by simply rebranding the Biden-Harris administration as the “Kamala Harris administration,” pretending she was in charge of everything all along.) When abortion came up, Vance — who said in 2022 that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and said in 2023 that he wanted to prosecute people who sent abortion pills through the mail — took the unusual rhetorical tack of admitting the public didn’t trust the GOP on the issue and that he and his fellow Republicans needed to earn their trust.  For those worried about the whole “Trump tried for months to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden when he lost the election” thing? Well, let Vance set your mind at ease. Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20th,” 2021, after all. Who cares what happened in the two months before that, anyway? The real threat to democracy, Vance claimed, was the “censorship” of Kamala Harris. That last pivot may have been a bit too smooth because when Walz asked Vance directly who won the 2020 election, Vance dodged again, claiming he was “focused on the future.” For anyone who remembers how Trump’s months-long campaign of lies helped cause the chaos of January 6, 2021, Vance’s answer will likely not be convincing. But this is a topic where he can only go so far to avoid angering the guy at the top of the ticket. —Andrew Prokop When Kamala Harris suddenly became the Democratic presidential nominee and needed to perform an expedited running mate search, Walz stood out from the crowd of Democratic hopefuls by doing some compelling media appearances, including the one where he memorably dubbed Republicans as “just weird.”  This seemed to contrast with both Biden’s and Harris’s tendencies to be extremely cautious about doing unscripted press, and made some Democrats overjoyed that they had found a politician who was out there putting forward a message in the media. In retrospect, those strong Walz interviews were all with friendly interlocutors, not in the oppositional, high-stakes setting of a debate. Indeed, when the Harris camp vetted Walz for VP, he admitted that he was a “bad debater,” CNN reported in August. On Tuesday morning, Politico reported that Democrats were privately worried about how Walz would fare in the debate. And once the debate kicked off, some commentators watching it wondered where the Tim Walz who was good on TV had gone.  Walz’s performance was not disastrous. Far from it. He seems to have come off just fine to viewers, per CBS’s post-debate poll, and he had several good moments. For instance, it was smart of him to ask Vance directly whether Biden won the 2020 election, and to call Vance’s dodge a “damning non-answer.” It was not exactly a masterful showing, though. Walz seemed uncomfortable in the format compared to the smooth-talking Vance, he didn’t really seem to have one overarching message that he kept returning to, and he often missed opportunities to call out Vance’s lies and misrepresentations.  Walz’s answer on his own misrepresentation of his 1989 visit to Hong Kong — in which he talked about his Nebraska childhood for a while before concluding he “misspoke” — was genuinely bad. Fortunately for him, of all the issues that came up on the debate stage, that’s the one of least relevance to substantive issues affecting Americans today, and the least likely to affect voters’ decisions about whether to cast their ballots for Harris. —AP One of Vance’s more remarkable lies of the night was this: Donald Trump saved Obamacare.  He said the law “was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden in health care costs” before the former president took office in 2017 and started loosening some of its rules. “I think he can make a good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along,” the Republican vice presidential candidate said. Donald Trump supported the Republican Congress’s effort to roll back most of Obamacare, including undoing some of the regulations for preexisting conditions and making major cuts to Medicaid. It failed because of John McCain. Trump dramatically cut funding for enrollment outreach. He tried to introduce Medicaid work requirements for people covered by the Affordable Care Act’s expansion (but was stopped by the courts). He deregulated short-term insurance plans that left people vulnerable to thousands of dollars in bills if they had a serious medical emergency. In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, the ACA marketplaces covered 12.7 million people. In 2020, when he lost the election to Joe Biden, they covered 11.4 million. After four years of Biden, 21.4 million Americans are getting their insurance through HealthCare.gov or one of its state counterparts. Voters have come to trust Democrats on health care much more over the years since the law Republicans tagged as “Obamacare” passed. More than 60 percent of Americans now say they like the ACA.  In 2010, Obamacare was the culprit for the Democratic wipeout in Congress, but its political fortunes have turned dramatically. In 2018, Democrats won the House, largely by running on a message that without a Democratic check, Trump’s myriad efforts to topple the law would succeed. Ever since, it has been a political asset for them against Republicans — forcing Vance to simply pretend that Trump’s health care record is different from what it is. —Dylan Scott From the start, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, the CBS news moderators, made it clear they did not think it was their job to keep the candidates grounded in reality.  “The primary role of the moderators is to facilitate the debate between the candidates, enforce the rules, and provide the candidates with the opportunity to fact-check claims made by each other,” Brennan told viewers. And for the most part, the moderators allowed the candidates’ answers to go unchecked.  The questions themselves were either not probing enough or poorly framed. When Brennan turned to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign promise to build 3 million homes, for example, she confoundingly asked Walz where those homes would get built, not how.  And despite Trump’s continued election denial and Vance’s previous statements that he would not have certified the 2020 election results, the moderators left questions about the fate of American democracy till the very end. One of the debate’s most memorable moments was when Vance wouldn’t answer Walz’s question about whether Trump lost in 2020.  Viewers don’t have to look too far back to see how it is, in fact, possible to have good debate moderators. ABC News’s David Muir and Linsey Davis did a much better job moderating last month’s presidential debate. They fact-checked the candidates in real time — making it hard for even Trump to get away with lying — and pressed both Harris and Trump with tough questions. They also tried to avoid letting the candidates dodge questions entirely.  Luckily for O’Donnell and Brennan, they’re not going to stand out; they’re not the only debate moderators who have stumbled in the Trump era. The voters, on the other hand, are the unlucky ones.  —Abdallah Fayyad After nine years of increasingly toxic political discourse and six weeks of mud-slinging between the two No. 2s on the trail, it was reasonable to expect a nasty affair when Trump and Harris’s attack dogs were unleashed on one another on the debate stage. So it was a little shocking that Walz and Vance not only refrained from hurling personal attacks at one another, but even found common ground at many points. Midwest Nice prevailed: kind on the surface, followed by the occasional sting. While Vance was criticizing Harris’s approach to the southern border, he seemed apologetic: “Tim, I agree with you,” Vance said. “I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think Kamala Harris does.” Later on, the two would find comity over the effects of off-shoring and trade deficits. “Much of what the senator said, I am in agreement with him on,” Walz said. And after Walz mentioned his son had witnessed a shooting, Vance reacted sympathetically: “I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting and I’m sorry about that. I want to say — Christ have mercy. It is awful.” This seems to be the way the debate will be remembered, if at all. It made both candidates seem more normal, civil, and human than they had seemed before — a particular advantage for Vance, who came in needing to soften his image. It may have been strategic politeness, but it was notable in an era when so much politeness has been dispensed with. In snap polls of debate watchers, both Walz and Vance saw increases in their favorability ratings. Focus group respondents seem to be saying similar things. “I hadn’t seen a debate like this in a very long time,” one undecided Michigan voter told CNN’s Phil Mattingly. “They supported each other. They were kind. And it was warm and fuzzy — you could watch it without being offended.” —Christian Paz

And that's not all they found.

At the end of the vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz asked Sen. JD Vance a pointed question: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Vance’s response: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” There is a clear right answer — that the 2020 presidential election was in fact legitimate — and Vance refused to offer it. It was, as Walz immediately noted, “A damning non-answer,” one that showed viewers who JD Vance is and what he stands for.  Ultimately, every issue discussed earlier that night comes in second to the fundamental question of whether America’s democratic institutions deserve to endure. On that question, Vance truly is radical, and his exposure as such was the only truly important moment of the night. Many Republicans have embraced Trump’s lies about the last election. Some have done so reluctantly, but Vance has been enthusiastic. He has, among other things, fundraised for January 6 rioters and said he would have illegally thrown the 2020 election result to Congress had he been in Mike Pence’s position at the time. But what’s most distinctive about Vance is the degree to which he has paired 2020 conspiracy theories with a coterie of other anti-democratic positions and ideologies. In a 2021 podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the Supreme Court intervened, Vance suggested that Trump simply ignore the ruling and dare the Court to stop him. In the interview, he explicitly cited Curtis Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger who advocates for overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a form of monarchy — as an influence on his views in this area. None of this should come as a surprise. Anti-democratic radicalism has been central to Vance’s political identity since he began running for Senate in Ohio, widely discussed since he was tapped to be Trump’s vice president earlier this year. And yet, it wasn’t central to the vice presidential debate tonight. The moderators left it until the very last minutes of the event, only coming up after the debate was originally scheduled to end. Despite democracy being at the core of the difference between the two candidates onstage — in fact, the core ideological difference between the two parties today — it was treated as an afterthought.  In doing so, the moderators created an illusion of normalcy: allowing the two candidates to civilly discuss issues like housing and the deficit in a basically standard-politician manner, when in fact they disagree on an existential question about the nature of American government itself.  It’s also worth dwelling on Vance’s attempt at deflection — the confusing line about Harris trying to “censor Americans from speaking their mind” on the Covid-19 pandemic — because I think it’s essential to understanding the ideological scaffolding of anti-democratic politics on the right today. There are multiple theories on the right about how the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans, and it wasn’t exactly clear which particular one Vance was referencing. For present purposes, the details of the issue are less important than the ideological role they play. For Vance and others like him, it is essential to do more than just insist that Trump was right in 2020 — to go the extra mile and say that Democrats are the true threat to democracy in America today. That argument, the claim that he and Trump are democracy’s real defenders, serves as justification for taking aggressive action to seize power. When Vance proposed to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in 2021, he didn’t sell it as a naked power grab. Rather, he positioned it as a kind of counter-offensive: a necessary response to the left’s alleged stranglehold over the “deep state” in Washington. The rallying cry of Trump’s campaign to overthrow the 2020 election wasn’t that democracy was illegitimate, but rather that Trump had been robbed of his authentic victory by Democratic cheating. Stop the steal! The argument that “Democrats are worse” does more than just legitimize power grabs. It also is a powerful disciplining tool for wavering Republicans, the kind that aren’t on board with Trump or Vance’s rough-and-tumble politics. If they waver or blanch, the response that Democrats are more dangerous helps bring them back onside — producing the phenomenon known as anti-anti-Trumpism. In just one moment, in short, the veneer of normalcy carefully built up over the past 90 minutes was punctured. Vance not only exposed the true center of his candidacy, but also some of the key ideological scaffolding underpinning the Republican Party’s turn into anti-democratic territory. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

A question about whether Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) would challenge the 2024 presidential election results quickly devolved into a fight about censorship and big tech during the debate with Democratic candidate Governor Tim Walz (MN). “You have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal,” moderator Norah O’Donnell said to Vance. “Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?” Vance said that instead of the threats to democracy decried by Democrats, what’s really worrying is the threat of “big technology...

They can help take out the trash.

The racist rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, came up once again at tonight’s vice presidential debate between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). “Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he’s very worried about the things that I’ve said,” Vance said after his opponent criticized him for saying he’s willing to “create stories” about migrants to draw attention to Americans who are suffering. Vance then listed problems in Springfield — including overcrowded schools and rising home prices — which he claimed are happening “because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants who are competing with Americans.” When a moderator clarified that members of Springfield’s Haitian community are...

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Juno, the third-party YouTube app created for the Apple Vision Pro, has been removed from the App Store. In a post on Tuesday, developer Christian Selig said the app was taken down months after Google warned that it violates YouTube’s guidelines. Like Netflix, Google doesn’t make a YouTube app for the Vision Pro. That means you can only watch YouTube in Safari, which breaks out videos into Apple’s native video player. Google said a YouTube app for the Vision Pro is “on the roadmap” in February, but we haven’t heard any updates since. Sad news, but Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store. It's been a ton of fun to build, thanks to all who used it and enjoyed it! ❤️ https://t.co/W1xLBpKSgd

Nintendo may have just won its battle to put the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators out of business. In March, it sued Yuzu out of existence — and now it may have convinced Yuzu’s primary competitor, Ryujinx, to go away too. Ryujinx’s download page is now empty. Its GitHub is gone. And the emulator’s X social media page and official Discord now contains a possible explanation: Nintendo got to its lead developer, and convinced them to shut down the project for good. pic.twitter.com/2Ggt9SWoDI “Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he’s in control of,” writes developer and moderator...

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