The VP debate was forgettable (fly aside). Are we surprised?
Stefano Frullini
On Wednesday 7 October, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence faced Senator (and Democratic vice presidential nominee) Kamala Harris in the first and only vice presidential debate in the 2020 U.S. election season.
Photo: Charlotte Holah
First, a quick introduction to VP debates. In ‘normal’ times, these are pretty low-stakes events. The first rule for a president’s running mate is ‘do no harm’ – support the manifesto and avoid causing trouble to the campaign. This means that no one is all that interested in what VP nominees have to say, because their job is not to have independent ideas, but to support and facilitate the enacting of the platform they are running on.
From this perspective, the interest of VP debates lies mainly in the fact that they get someone who doesn’t look quite like the top-of-the-ticket nominee to speak in favour of his (alas) agenda. Compared to Donald Trump’s boisterous demeanour and eclectic ideology, Pence is a quiet, reliable, old-school Christian conservative with fairly ample political experience. Harris is only the third female VP nominee ever (and the first non-white one) and is more than 20 years younger than white, moderate Joe Biden. It was potentially interesting to see different voices supporting the same manifesto.
But, this year, there were further reasons to look forward to the VP debate. One is that both presidential nominees are historically old. Trump, the oldest-ever first-term president, will be 74 years old on Inauguration Day (20 January 2021); Biden will be 78. Crudely speaking, there is a non-zero chance that either VP nominee would become president before the 2024 election, which makes it all the more important to get to know them. Also, look at how the debate physically played out. A small, mask-wearing audience. Two Plexiglass screens between the debaters. The COVID-19 pandemic is still very much raging across the U.S. and the world. This is not an ordinary year, so how would a very ordinary format adjust to the situation?
So, all in all, it was reasonable to approach the debate – if not with trepidation – at least with a modicum of curiosity, no? Well, if you did, you were in for a hefty dose of disappointment. In theory, the debate touched upon many important topics – the pandemic, of course, but also climate change, foreign policy, and the Supreme Court nomination. And the overall atmosphere was much more civil than… whatever the first presidential debate was. But one could argue that if the first debate was a chaotic nothingburger, Wednesday’s VP debate was a more polite one – but a nothingburger nevertheless. Also, most likely due to Susan Page’s ineffective moderating, both debaters were left free to dodge questions and reiterate more or less stale talking points catering to their respective bases. The result was less of a debate than the juxtaposition of two separate, non-communicating, over-rehearsed stump speeches. In terms of policy, of knowing what the candidates actually stand for, Americans are none the wiser.
Harris landed her most effective blow in her opening statement, when she termed Trump’s handling of the pandemic crisis ‘the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country’. It was an easy point to make, as the Trump administration is massively unpopular on Covid-19. Pence made a half-hearted attempt at arguing that Trump ‘put the health of America first’, but the most interesting thing about his rebuttal was that he used the issue of Covid-19 to make a textbook point about conservative, small-government politics: the administration – he said – ‘trust[s] the American people to make choices in the best interest of their health’.
Pence’s finest moment came when he asked Harris for a clear answer as to whether Biden would ‘pack’ the Supreme Court should he win the election. The Supreme Court is composed of nine judges appointed for life: five are conservative, three are liberal and one seat is vacant following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on 18 September. If the Republican-dominated Senate manages to confirm the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court Justice, and all indicates that Republican Senators will at least try to do so in the next few weeks, the Supreme Court would have a solid 6–3 conservative majority for potentially decades to come. In response to this, some Democrats have floated the idea of creating new Supreme Court seats and appointing more liberal justices, a proposal usually referred to as ‘packing’. But would President Biden actually go as far as increase the size of the Court, unchanged since the Judiciary Act of 1869? He has repeatedly avoided answering the question, and Harris hasn’t been any clearer: she said that the Senate should not confirm any nominee until a new president is sworn in, but remained ambiguous as to what would happen if a nominee is in fact confirmed. On the other hand, Pence himself dodged a question as to whether Trump will recognise the legitimacy of an electoral defeat – and Trump himself has been vague on that point before.
To sum up, the debate was okay in terms of etiquette (or maybe we just have a very low standard by now?), but when it came to the really thorny questions it was a spectacularly missed opportunity. From a practical standpoint, a tie is still a strategic victory for the Democrats: the election is less than four weeks away, Joe Biden leads in the polls by almost ten points and there is no indication that this debate will jeopardise his edge. But Wednesday’s lack of substance raises a more big-picture question. Do we still need debates at all? In this age of extreme partisanship and culture wars, do they really change anyone’s mind? On the post-debate episode of the FiveThirtyEight podcast, political journalist Clare Malone argued that debates serve the purpose of getting politicians on record and therefore help hold them accountable. But what about debates who fail to extract any meaningful statement from the politicians they are supposed to put on the spot? Can the ‘talking-point trap’ be avoided by appointing a more assertive moderator, or changing debate rules here and there? Or is it a more structural problem attesting to the state of the political discourse, in America and elsewhere?
The debate, in other words, was a failure. But it still had its winner: a fly that, during a discussion of systemic racism, landed on Pence’s forehead and remained there for the better part of two minutes as he went on speaking. The fly immediately became a bit of a meme and even got its very own Twitter account, which at the time of writing had already amassed over 121,000 followers. So, yes, a wandering fly turned out to be the one memorable moment of the night – hardly enough for the historians of the future.
