There seems to be a general consensus in the media and the American public at large – left, right and center – that Democratic VP Candidate Tim Walz turned in an inferior debate performance last Tuesday night against his Republican opponent, Senator J.D. Vance. Late night talk show hosts such as Stephen Colbert tried to spin Walz’s mistakes away by characterizing the debate as ‘boring’ and ‘overly civil’, but the fact of the matter is that Walz lost pretty badly.
In Greymantle’s view, the Democratic contender not only lost the debate, but fell flat on his face despite displaying a high level of energy, humanity and Midwestern charm. Those assets were not enough to save Walz’s performance. Walz stumbled badly on five key points, which his quick-thinking and smooth-talking opponent immediately seized upon, much to his advantage. From Walz’s perspective, the debate might have been titled “How to Lose A Debate with a Populist in Five Easy Steps”.
Populists in America are basically alike, regardless of whether they are isolationists like Donald Trump, conspiracist firebrands such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the cooler and more sophisticated model that is J.D. Vance. There are five broad rules for how to engage with these people and not shoot yourself in the foot with your own pistol. Governor Walz broke all five of them last Tuesday night.
To understand why, let’s walk through each of those five rules in turn.
Rule #1: Never Give an Evasive Answer to a Direct Question
When the moderator asked Governor Walz to back up his claim (since debunked) that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square Uprising in the spring 1989, he should have just said, “No, actually. When I said that recently, I misspoke. It’s 35 years ago and my memory of that time was a bit patchy. I was actually in Hong Kong in August of 1989, about two months after the uprising was crushed.”
That’s basically what Walz said when the moderator was forced to ask her question a second time, after Walz initially gave a long and misleading response that both avoided, and evaded, giving a direct answer. Here’s an excerpt:
“Look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska town of 400. A town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of ’89 to travel to China, 35 years ago. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. Now, look, my community knows who I am. Look, I have poured my heart into my community.”
Sentimental stuff, right? But he avoided providing a clear and honest answer until Nora O’Donnell asked him a second time: “Where you in Hong Kong in June 1989?”
Populist-curious voters absolutely HATE IT when politicians do that. Giving evasive non-answers to simple questions is something that drives these voters nuts. They complain about it vociferously when they call into talk radio shows. When an elected leader gives an evasive answer to a direct question, a populist-leaning voter will basically write that politician off as a liar henceforth.
In the view of a lot of persuadable swing voters, Tim Walz is now, in all likelihood, seen as a liar.
Rule #2: Never Wax Poetic About the Time You Spent in a Foreign Country, Particularly if that Foreign Country is Now America’s Biggest Strategic Competitor
Not only MAGA populists, but many Independents and unaffiliated “swing voters” view China as a major threat to the United States, and are resentful of the outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing jobs to nations such as China, India and Mexico. Most Americans don’t travel outside the U.S. even for vacation, unless it’s to the Caribbean or Bermuda or, at best, to the UK.
Many of these voters are suspicious of other Americans who have traveled frequently overseas.
Here is more of Walz’s answer to Nora O’Donnel’s question:
“…Then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of ’89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China…
But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world.”
For a persuadable voter who is maybe a bit Trump-curious or nostalgic about Trump’s first term in office, but also has big doubts about Trump’s character, Walz’s answer just screams, “I am a globalist! I have spent lots of time outside the U.S., much of it in China.”
That is not a great way to portray oneself to Independent voters these days. But seemingly, no one passed along to the Democratic VP contender that particular piece of advice.
A better Walz response might have gone something like this: “I was given the opportunity by the GI bill to make a trip to Hong Kong when I was a first-year teacher, because I was curious and had never been outside the United States. During my time in Hong Kong, I came to understand the anxiety and suspicion with which the people of Hong Kong viewed the government of mainland China. People in Hong Kong were supporting the democracy protesters in Beijing that summer. They learned that China is basically an authoritarian system that doesn’t respect democratic freedoms.”
That type of response would be more in keeping with the attitudes of a swing voter.
Rule #3: Never Take the Position that the Preferences of Local Voters Should be Ignored
During Vance and Walz’s exchange on the subject of abortion rights, Senator Vance stated his view that the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 had done a democratic service to the country by placing abortion rights back in the purview of the states. The voters within the states, who have varying preferences and values, can now determine what level of abortion rights should apply in their states. Vance essentially said, “It’s up to the voters now, and that’s not a bad thing.”
Here’s an excerpt of Vance’s remarks on abortion:
“I want to talk about this issue because I know a lot of Americans care about it, and I know a lot of Americans don’t agree with everything that I’ve ever said on this topic. And, you know, I grew up in a working class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options. And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me. And I know she’s watching tonight, and I love you.
And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship. And I think that what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American People’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us.
[Because] we have a big country and it’s diverse. And California has a different viewpoint on this [abortion] than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy. And I think that’s what makes the most sense in a very big, a very diverse, and let’s be honest, sometimes a very, very messy and divided country.”
During the last set of remarks, Governor Walz was vigorously shaking his head “no” to indicate he disagreed with Vance’s comments. Walz’s negative head-shake probably indicated that he believes that abortion should be a federally-protected right.
However, it also demonstratively indicated that he did not believe abortion regulations should be left to local voters. In other words, Walz was affirmatively disrespecting voters’ decisions in certain states to enshrine abortion bans into law, and to elect state representatives and governors who have enacted those bans. Disagree all you want on the morality of abortion, but it’s unwise to suggest that you would disrespect and ignore the will of voters in any given jurisdiction.
To anti-abortion and conservative voters in many jurisdictions, Walz’s head shake and follow-up remarks indicated that he would restrict and overturn their voted preferences if given the power to do so. By contrast, Vance’s remarks indicated respect for the preferences of different groups of voters across varying jurisdictions, and a pragmatic position on the complexities of democratic politics. That was a canny way for Vance – the running mate of a man often accused of representing a threat to core democratic norms – to play the issue and suggest that democracy is safe with him and Mr. Trump.
Rule #4: Never Say that If You Are Elected to High Office, You Will “Trust the Experts”
One of the core features of 21st century populist movements is that populists have no trust in highly credentialed experts. Scientists and academics can no longer rely on the goodwill of the public, who displayed fawning deference to them for much of the 20th century.
Perhaps the leveling effects of the Internet have made knowledge superficially “democratic” while at the same time undercutting the teaching authority of libraries and universities. Perhaps a series of highly visible policy failures since the year 2000 – the failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the loss of good manufacturing jobs – have shattered the public’s faith in the governing classes. Perhaps the vast expansion of the Western and global entertainment complexes have people living in a mental ‘Lotus Land’.
Perhaps it’s all of the above.
Whatever the reason, populist-leaning voters are not merely distrustful, but activelt antagonistic toward experts. They would rather listen to the ramblings of a YouTube star or TikTok ‘influencer’ than the words of a Harvard-trained PhD in microbiology or economics.
Of course, it’s crazy. But when you are a politician trying to win the votes of a slice of such people in a crucial election, who have to respect – at least superficially – where they are coming from.
But this is what Tim Walz instead said last Tuesday night:
“Now, you had a question about experts, said this, I made a note of this. “Economists don’t, can’t be trusted. Science can’t be trusted. National security folks can’t be trusted.” Look, if you’re going to be President, you don’t have all the answers. Donald Trump believes he does. My pro tip of the day is this, if you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic, not Donald Trump.”
And here is J.D. Vance’s response:
“Governor, you say trust the experts, but those same experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we’d get cheaper goods. They lied about that. They said if we shipped our industrial base off to other countries, to Mexico and elsewhere, it would make the middle class stronger. They were wrong about that. And for the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus, we’re not doing it anymore. This has to stop. And we’re not going to stop it by listening to experts. We’re going to stop it by listening to common sense wisdom, which is what Donald Trump governed on.”
For most people without a college degree, Vance’s answer is a powerful one. The fact is that the academic and business elite in the United States were in favor of free trade and other policies since decried as “globalist” in the decades between the early 1980s and mid-2010s, and during that 35 year period, the American working class saw their incomes and living standards stagnate or decline. This goes directly to the policy failures mentioned above.
Walz’s accusation that Donald Trump “should have listened to the experts” when he was President comes across as hollow and tone-deaf.
Rule #5: Never Defend Censorship or Restrictions on Free Speech in Any Form
Populist voters, along with most Republicans and a fair number of Democrats and Independents, believe that Democratic Party leaders and the knowledge complex of universities, film studios and media organs aligned with them are not fully committed to free speech protections laid out in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A general attitude of censoriousness, sometimes labelled as ‘cancel culture’ has become a problem within universities and even large corporations.
Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has also been credibly accused of trying to silence alternative viewpoints in the Republican Party, but does not have the power to do the same in American society at large, where the left-liberal coalition currently holds greater cultural power.
For this reason, it’s very important for Democratic candidates for office to be clear that they do not support restrictions on free speech.
Here is an excerpt from the Vance-Walz debate on this particular subject:
J.D. Vance: But you guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship.
Tim Walz: You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme court test.
JD Vance: Tim. Fire in a crowded theater. You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks. That’s not fire in a crowded theater. That is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.
Tim Walz: Yeah, well, I don’t run Facebook. What I do know is I see a candidate out there who refused, and now again. And this, I’m pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate.
Notice that Walz never rebuts Vance’s assertion that Kamala Harris wants to use the power of government and Big Tech to censor Americans and prevent them from speaking their minds. Instead, he references the old adage that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre” and then defends the policies of the Biden-Harris Administration on misinformation by saying, “Yeah well, I don’t run Facebook”.
In the ears of a populist voter, those responses are weak and induce suspicion. What they really want is a clear and unequivocal statement from Walz that he does not support censorship of speech in any form, and would oppose any attempt to impose such policies from above if he becomes Vice President.
Walz could have defended Harris’s record by saying: “Well, that’s not true at all. Kamala Harris has not tried to censor Americans while she has been in office. That is a lie. And a Harris-Walz Administration would not attempt to restrict Americans’ free speech rights.”
That’s all Walz had to say. That he did not make a statement to this effect suggests, even though it may be false, that there is at least some truth to Vance’s assertions. Walz should be talking about the First Amendment and how it is sacred in his eyes. Instead, he is brushing the question off by saying that he isn’t in charge of Facebook. It was a weak answer.
Greymantle hopes that Govenor Walz learns from his shortcomings in the debate last Tuesday and corrects them on the campaign trail. American freedoms could depend on his doing so.
Until next time, I remain —
Greymantle
