On Wednesday, Nov. 6, the presidential election will be over. But even by then, we may not know the winner.
In recent weeks, the experts have been trying to tamp down expectations that we’ll know the outcome by the time folks go to bed on election night — especially if, as recent polls seem to suggest, the race is as close as it is at the moment.
Given how close the race appears to be, Tuesday’s vice presidential debate was declared consequential as the last major event likely to happen between the two presidential campaigns, with no further debate scheduled before Election Day.
But by the end of the night, many pundits appeared to have changed their tune, saying the vice presidential debate probably didn’t move the needle much, if at all.
But the question remains if anything was said that might cause that elusive undecided voter to make a decision.
Renée Cross, senior executive director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston, said her overall takeaway from the debate was the tone.
“It was unbelievably civil. They didn’t seem to be trying to attack each other constantly. We certainly didn’t have any memorable attacks,” she said. “Certainly nothing along the lines of what we’ve seen historically. You know, particularly if you look back to 1988, where we had Lloyd Bentsen, of course, beat down Dan Quayle. We’re still seeing clips of that decades later. Nothing like that occurred last night.”
Cross said that based on the optics of the evening, JD Vance won the night.
“Debates are about primarily two things: performance/optics and policy,” she said. “And in terms of performance in the way they presented themselves, I think JD Vance came out very confident, but not overly so.
He was much more moderated in his tone. You know, there was no talk about immigrants eating pets or any of the other claims we’ve heard him make on the campaign trail. So in terms of being in control of the debate, I would certainly give that to JD Vance.”
Both candidates dodged questions, including one Vance avoided answering about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“When it came down to that very last question, that very critical question surrounding Jan. 6 and accepting the results of the election, Vance did stumble,” Cross said. “And he would not directly answer whether or not Trump won the election in 2020.”
Walz also had a number of his own stumbles, including when it came to a question about why he once said he was at Tiananmen Square in China during the infamous protests there in 1989.
“That question was probably the one where Waltz did stumble the most,” Cross said. “Walz came out, I think, nervous and probably understandably so. But when pressed to say why he stated that he was at Tiananmen Square in China during that terrible upheaval, he just could not answer it articulately. He came right out and just said, ‘well, I’m a knucklehead.’
Now, on one hand, folks can relate to that. We’ve all said things that we probably shouldn’t have said. But to come right out of the gate, talking about being a knucklehead, may not have been the strongest way to answer that question.”
Cross said there weren’t many surprises from the candidates when it came to their positions.
“Overall, however, I think the one aspect that was surprising was the number of times that the two candidates said they agreed with each other,” she said. “By one count, there appears to be 12 areas of agreement during that relatively short period last night. We certainly didn’t see anything like that in the Harris-Trump debate.”