Eliyahu Gasson | opinions editor

Tim Walz and JD Vance went head-to-head Tuesday night in what is arguably the most influential debate in the 2024 election. This is likely to be the last time representatives from the two campigns will have the opportunity to make their case in a head-to-head setting before November.
 

The two candidates went back and forth in a refreshingly civil manner, a far cry from the incoherent and harmful rhetoric Americans have grown used to hearing from Donald Trump. But by being so nice, Walz missed an opportunity to call his opponent out for what he is — a weirdo.
 

At this point, nearly everyone is aware of the lies about legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Trump and Vance have accused of eating pets. Trump infamously brought it up in the presidential debate against Kamala Harris last month in a now notorious sound bite.
 

Vance later admitted to intentionally spreading this lie in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
 

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told host Dana Bash.
 

Vance has also gone after women who don’t have children calling them “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” referring to prominent Democrats.
 

Walz never once called him out for his lies or off-base comments. It’s refreshing to watch politicians on different sides of the aisle be truly civil on a national stage for once in this election, but being nice won’t get you anywhere in the Trump era of politics.
 

Harris and Walz need to be reminded that Trump — and my extension Vance — do not espouse normal views, nor do they employ fair campaign tactics. The Democratic candidates seemed to have recognized this in past, especially Walz.
 

“And when they try — which they did and will again — when they tried to overturn fair elections, that is not just weird, that is un-American,” Walz said at a rally in August.
 

Walz kept telling those around him that he was a nervous debater and was anxious about letting Harris down. And maybe that had something to do with the cooler rhetoric at the debate.
 

Walz did get lucky near the end when he asked if Vance thought Trump lost the 2020 election, to which he replied by immediately pivoting off topic. He criticized the Biden administration for “censoring” Facebook users during the Covid-19 pandemic, based on reports from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg who claimed the White House “repeatedly pressured” his company to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic.
 

“That is a damning non answer,” Walz said.

Trump picked a VP who doesn’t seem to agree with him …
 

… and the campaign knew as much when they were vetting him according to the campiagn’s research dossier on Vance, which was allegedly procured by the Iranian government in a hack of the Trump campaign and published by journalist Ken Klippenstein.
 

The 271-page document includes sections called “Vance’s anti-Trump record and establishment ties” and “Vance’s questionable conservatism.”
 

The contents of the dossier are old news. Anyone paying close enough attention to politics could recall Vance’s “never Trump” statements up until the 2020 election.
 

“… I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” Vance said in an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 2016.”
 

Vance built his career off of his support for white working class people mainly through his best selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” released in 2016. He garnered attention for addressing the root of the anxiety that led white working class voters, who previously voted for Obama, to switch to Trump.
 

After realizing the direction the Republican Party was taking in 2020 Vance saw the writing on the wall, and realized that the best way to get closer to the levers of power as an advocate of white working people was to side with the man he spent most of his career criticizing.
 

One of Vance’s strategies during the debate was to agree with Walz. He claimed to agree with Walz that immigration, gun control and housing were issues that needed to be dealt with, and he was able to calmly and coherently explain the Trump campaign’s solutions for most of them.
 

He probably knows, deep down, that running on the Trump ticket is not authentic to who he is. He doesn’t feel comfortable with the racism, the sexism, the homophobia and the transphobia he has been pushing since endorsing Trump in 2020. But he feels pressure to keep up the charade. Few people get the opportunity to be vice president of the United States, so why give up now?