The 2020 vice presidential debate

Following President Donald Trump’s recent Covid-19 diagnosis, the next debate has been canceled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, according to the Wall Street Journal and CNN.

On Thursday, Trump upended recently unveiled plans for a remote debate, saying on Fox Business, “I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate.”

When President Donald Trump chose Vice President Mike Pence as his running mate, Pence’s job was simple: Be normal.

And during his debate with Sen. Kamala Harris on Wednesday, Pence attempted to play the part, often seeming to represent an entirely separate administration from the one he purportedly serves.

At the vice presidential debate on Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence accused Sen. Kamala Harris of undermining public trust in a Covid-19 vaccine. But the American public actually blames President Donald Trump for politicizing the issue, according to numerous polls.

Moderator Susan Page asked Harris during the debate whether she would take a vaccine if one were to be approved by the Trump administration.

Not a single question at the first two debates has addressed one of the policy areas in which President Donald Trump has been most effective at bringing his vision to fruition over his first term: immigration.

Instead, the candidates have only mentioned immigration in passing. During Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris briefly nodded to Trump’s statements about Mexicans coming over the border on the campaign trail in 2016, in which he called them “rapists” and “criminals.” She also briefly mentioned the travel ban he enacted right after taking office, blocking citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and creating chaos in airports across the US before courts forced him to amend the policy, which still remains in effect.

Quick polls of who won a political debate are necessarily imperfect indicators. They include only those who watched the debate rather than the broader electorate, and they precede the coming several days of spin wars and media narratives that will help shape voters’ understanding of what happened.

Keeping those shortcomings in mind, the first poll we have of vice presidential debate viewers is good news for Sen. Kamala Harris — and her running mate, Joe Biden.

Among the similarities between President Donald Trump and his No. 2: Vice President Mike Pence didn’t mind interrupting his debate opponent, either. According to data from NBC News, Pence interrupted Kamala Harris roughly twice as many times as she interrupted him during Wednesday’s vice presidential debate.

It’s a pattern that’s in line with research about how comfortable men are interrupting women in many contexts, including meetings: According to a 2014 study from George Washington University, men interrupted 33 percent more when they were speaking with a woman versus a man, and women didn’t interrupt to the same degree.

Today, Bill Kristol is a prominent Never Trumper who racks up liberal retweets by the thousands of his scorching attacks on President Donald Trump. But in 1993, Kristol, who’d served as Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, was an influential Republican operative, running the Project for the Republican Future. And he was scared. President Bill Clinton had begun his push for a universal health care system and Kristol worried congressional Republicans didn’t see the danger it posed.

In a famous memo, Kristol warned that “Any Republican urge to negotiate a ‘least bad’ compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president ‘do something’ about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy — and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security.”

There was only one real winner of Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate: the fly.

Pundits will talk about the merits of the debate, who had the most speaking time, who helped their presidential candidate the most. All of it will be eclipsed by a black housefly that temporarily got stuck on Vice President Mike Pence’s head.

Donald Trump seems likely to lose this election, and if Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate ends up being important to the outcome, that would be a freakish and historically bizarre conclusion.

But viewed in isolation, Vice President Mike Pence’s performance was a master class in how to play a weak hand strongly. Liberals ought to pay attention to the way he outperformed Sen. Kamala Harris because it’s a reminder that not every Republican politician is as inept as Trump.

Editor’s note, October 22: This story was originally published on October 7, covering the vice presidential debate. For coverage of the October 22 presidential debate, click here.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Vice President Mike Pence faced off in their one and only debate of the 2020 presidential election at the University of Utah on Wednesday, and the backdrop was a stark one.

Susan Page, USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, will be helming the moderator’s desk at the vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City on Wednesday.

Page will have the job of pressing Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris on key questions, ensuring they stay on subject, and urging them to respect time constraints — all things that Fox News anchor Chris Wallace had difficulty doing during a tumultuous debate last week.