Wednesday night’s face-off between Republican Mike Pence and Democratic opponent Kamala Harris has the potential to completely debunk the punditocracy’s myth that vice presidential debates don’t make much difference. Pence, in particular, has a chance to be the most important vice-presidential debater in history.
Two prior veep debates proved quite important, if not provably decisive, in the results of their respective elections. (More on those shortly.) Yet neither of those featured elements as unprecedented as this year’s contest.
It may be indelicate to say, but simple actuarial tables show it is more likely than in any other United States quadrennium that one of the vice presidential candidates will be president within four years. The American public understands this. The public knows President Trump is 74 and that Joe Biden will be 78 on Inauguration Day. Biden would be older on his first day in office than the oldest previous president, Ronald Reagan, was on the very last day of Reagan’s two terms. Biden is a survivor of near-fatal brain aneurysms. Trump is overweight, breaks most rules of dietary health, and is suffering from the coronavirus, which, according to early indications, carries the likelihood of lingering, long-term damage.
The public thus knows that the 2021-25 vice president could be more than just an afterthought. One of these two people could soon become leader of the free world.
Expect, therefore, a relatively high rate of viewership for this debate. Expect another thing too — Pence will be unflappable, and Harris might prove unlikable.
Pence has proven in the past to be calm and collected, even if not exciting. He was widely seen four years ago as having bested his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine in debate, and of having “stopped the bleeding” then occurring in the Trump campaign. Harris, however, has a more problematic history. As my colleague Tim Carney noted in July, the more the public saw of Harris in last year’s long series of Democratic primary debates, the more they disliked her. She attacked opponents wantonly, even insinuating at one point that Biden was a racist. She also wasn’t up to the task of defending her own positions or shifting standards.
This isn’t to say Harris is incapable of drawing blood from the Trump-Pence team, or that the cratering Trump campaign is salvageable. It is to say, though, that in a volatile year roiled by pandemics and street pandemonium, and with a candidate such as Harris who tends to run hot, the possibility exists for a political explosion that upends the race. This is especially true because Harris has major vulnerabilities in her far-left record.
Despite the myth of vice-presidential unimportance, the veep debate arguably helped shift the trajectory of the campaigns not just in 2016, but in 2000 and 2004 too. In 2000, then-Texas Governor George W. Bush had been running neck and neck with vice president Al Gore until Bush’s running mate Dick Cheney debated Democrat Joe Lieberman. The Cheney-Lieberman debate was remarkably, admirably cordial, but Cheney made his points more clearly and forcefully. Cheney was near-universally declared the victor, by a huge 19 points in one poll, and the Bush-Cheney ticket jumped to a small but steady lead it would not relinquish until news of Bush’s one-time drunk-driving arrest emerged the weekend before Election Day.
Cheney rode to the rescue again in 2004 after Bush performed poorly in his first debate against challenger John Kerry. Cheney famously kept his cool when John Edwards mentioned that one of Cheney’s daughters is a lesbian, and he was generally seen as having stopped the erosion in his ticket’s support.
Lesson: Do tune in on Wednesday night. Something politically momentous may happen.
