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October 4th, 2024 (Permalink)

The Veep Debate

Here are some provisional thoughts on the vice presidential "debate" earlier this week.

  • The "Debate"1: On the first of this month, a so-called debate was held between the vice presidential candidates of the two major parties, Republican Senator J. D. Vance and Democratic Governor Tim Walz. Though the format was a joint news conference―see below―there was more actual debating this time than during the previous debates this year2.
  • The Debaters: Vance was a much better prepared and more effective debater than former president Donald Trump in either of his two debates this year. Trump lost his debate against Harris and he did not win the one against Biden, rather Biden lost it. In contrast, Governor Tim Walz was ill at ease and appeared poorly prepared for the debate, unlike Kamala Harris in her only debate appearance. In particular, Walz did not have an adequate answer prepared for a question about his past misstatements that he should have anticipated―but more about that in the next section.
  • The Format: The debate continued this year's unfortunate return to the dual-moderator, joint news conference format, with two reporters from the host network asking the candidates questions that they frequently ignored. This began with the first question of the debate, in which both candidates were asked whether they would support or oppose a strike by Israel on Iran's nuclear facilities. Walz did not directly answer the question, using it instead as an excuse to attack Trump. Vance retaliated in kind, defending his running mate and attacking Kamala Harris, though at the end of his time he did indicate support for Israel's right to self-defense.

    The most glaring failure to answer a question was Walz' reply when asked by moderator Margaret Brennan to explain why he falsely claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Initially, he dodged the question with a rambling biography but, to her credit, Brennan pressed him for an answer. Walz then claimed that he "misspoke": if so, he "misspoke" several times, once as recently as February of this year3. Walz should have expected the question and prepared a quick confession and apology since there was no way he could get away with denying or excusing what he had said.

    If, perish the thought, our political debates continue in this format, we need moderators such as this who will press the candidates to answer the questions asked, and then point out any persistent failures to do so.

  • The Moderators: The aforementioned Brennan and Norah O'Donnell, both of CBS News, co-moderated the debate. Their moderation was decidedly mixed: as mentioned above, Brennan did a good job of insisting that Walz directly address her question about his past misstatements, but she also tried to act as an instant fact-checker, which led to one of the most memorable moments of the debate.

    When Brennan tried to fact check Vance's claims about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance immediately pointed out that this violated an agreement that the moderators would not try to fact check the candidates during the debate4. This is exactly what Mitt Romney should have done when Candy Crowley broke the rules by trying to fact check him during his debate with Barack Obama5. If the moderators don't abide by the rules they agreed to, why should the debaters?

  • Fallacies: There are too many to catalog, and not just by the debaters, so I'll pick one committed by a moderator as an example. In asking a question about how to reduce violence committed with guns, O'Donnell claimed that "the leading cause of death for children and teens in America is by firearms.6" This is only true if "children and teens" is redefined to exclude children under the age of one year old7. Moreover, "teens" includes those eighteen and nineteen years old, who are usually and, for many purposes―such as voting―legally considered adults.

    Since you have to define a concept before you can count its instances, one of the most common statistical tricks to inflate or deflate a number is to redefine it8. Politicians and activists often want to inflate or deflate a number, either to scare or reassure us as the case may be. In this case, activists want to alarm us about violence committed with guns, and one way to do so is to make us think that such violence is the leading cause of death for "children". However, it is clearly a redefinition of "children" to exclude those under the age of one, and while those eighteen or nineteen years old are definitely "teens", they are usually considered adults. Finally, most of the deaths by firearms of those in this artificial age group of 2-19 occur in the teen years. Without all of this definitional legerdemain, the leading cause of death for children is vehicle accidents.

    It should be needless to say that pointing this out is not to downplay the problem of violence with guns, and it shouldn't be necessary to play statistical tricks like this to get people concerned. The problem is worrisome enough without exaggeration.

  • Who won?: The consensus seems to be that Vance won handily9, but reading the transcript―as I usually do instead of watching the debate―I had the impression that the outcome was much closer than the consensus suggests. I would still judge that Vance won, but that the result was relatively close. I've since watched some of the debate, and think one reason why Vance overwhelmingly won the general verdict is a matter of style rather than substance: he appeared poised and well-prepared, whereas Walz was nervous and occasionally flustered.

    While this debate was much better than the previous presidential one, I hope that one of the losers is the joint news conference format. The Democrats have benefitted at the Republicans' expense from the transition from debates arranged by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) to these network-sponsored ones. The CPD is, of course, imperfect but it handled past debates much better than the television networks have done this year. Perhaps the Republicans will have enough sense to go back to the CPD four years from now; either that or insist on a more balanced selection of outlets, such as including Fox News, though the Democrats will, of course, try to refuse it as Harris did earlier this year10. In any case, while Vance may have won this debate despite the odds against him, the GOP lost the debate negotiations this year.

Notes:

  1. From this point on I will drop the quote marks on "debate", though this event did not have a genuine debate format.
  2. See:
  3. Danny Hakim & Amy Qin, "Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.", The New York Times, 10/1/2024.
  4. David Bauder, "CBS News says it will be up to Vance and Walz to fact-check each other in veep debate", Associated Press, 10/1/2024.
  5. See: Second Presidential Debate Logic Check, Part 2, 10/20/2022.
  6. Stefan Becket, "Read the full VP debate transcript from the Walz-Vance showdown", CBS News, 10/2/2024.
  7. Nur Ibrahim, "Are Guns the Leading Cause of Death for Children in the US?", Snopes, 4/3/2023.
  8. See: Redefinition.
  9. See, for instance: Alan Rappeport, "Who Won the Debate? A Crisp Vance Fends Off Walz", The New York Times, 10/2/2024. Also see the online poll reported in: Hugh Cameron, "Who Won the VP Debate, Vance or Walz? Newsweek Readers' Verdicts", Newsweek, 10/2/2024. Newsweek doesn't explain how the survey was conducted, except to say that it was done online, so it's possible that it could have been gamed by partisans.
  10. Nur Ibrahim, "No, Harris Didn't 'Back Out' of Sept. 4 Fox News Debate with Trump", Snopes, 10/2/2024. A silly "fact check" apparently justified because some anonymous individuals I've never heard of claimed on social media that Harris "backed out" of the debate. No, she didn't "back out" because she refused from the beginning. For a similarly silly "fact check" from earlier this year, see: Soviet Anti-Semitic Propaganda & the Death of the Debates, 2/1/2024, footnote 2.

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