Tim Walz is the most popular candidate on either ticket
Former president Donald Trump made an unusual foray into political science in July, arguing that “historically, the vice-president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact.” At the time, his running mate J.D. Vance was stumbling through a gaffe-filled rollout, having been drafted two weeks earlier. It seemed as if Mr Trump’s academic pronouncement was only intended to comfort himself—but it may have some merit. The vice-presidential debate did little to refute him (see Lexington).
Expectations were high for Minnesota’s Governor, Tim Walz, the running mate of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. The former high-school teacher and football coach has a folksy persona and a credible claim to being the most popular candidate on either ticket. In theory, this means the VP debate was an opportunity for the Harris-Walz campaign to reach voters who would not give Ms Harris a hearing. More likely, neither Mr Vance nor Mr Walz substantially moved the dial. Snap polling found voters evenly divided on the question of the debate’s winner.
Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko, two political scientists who study the effects of vice-presidential picks, find little evidence that running mates have a substantial effect on vote choice. Most voters are focussed almost exclusively on the top of the ticket, as Mr Trump suggested. But if the former president has been reading their book, he may have skipped over a less comforting finding—that the most substantive effect of the vice-presidential pick is how it reflects on the nominee themselves. Republicans will hope that Mr Vance’s debate performance reassured voters about Mr Trump’s judgement.
In pre-debate poll ratings, there was a gulf between Mr Vance and Mr Walz (see chart, which also illustrates Ms Harris’s surge in popularity on assuming the Democratic nomination). Although the number of people with a favourable view of Mr Walz outweighed the number with an unfavourable view (by 4 percentage points), the opposite was true for Mr Vance (by 11 points). While Mr Walz outpaced his boss in net favourability, Mr Vance ran slightly behind his. In fact, Mr Vance was the most unpopular vice-presidential pick of recent history, according to analysis by FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit. He was even less popular than Sarah Palin, Alaska’s former governor and John McCain’s running mate in 2008, who has become the textbook example of a bad pick.
Mr Walz’s high ratings could be explained to some extent by the number of people who did not have any opinion of him before the debate. In polling conducted by YouGov in September, an average of 8.9% of Mr Trump’s supporters said they did not know if they had a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, compared with 6.4% of Ms Harris’s supporters of Mr Vance (see chart 2). But this also posed an opportunity. Unlike in September’s presidential debate, a substantial number of viewers saw the opposing party’s representative on stage without many preconceptions.
A snap poll by CNN suggested that ratings of both debaters surged among viewers, from net positive 14 to 37 percentage points for Mr Walz and net -22 to -3 points for Mr Vance. It is too early to say whether this positivity will extend to the broader electorate but it is unlikely to have much bearing on the presidential race in either case. Both VP candidates are defined by their association with the top of the ticket and, in Mr Walz’s case, the incumbent president, Joe Biden—who is more unpopular than either set of nominees. If they lose in November, both Mr Walz and Ms Harris can blame their boss. ■
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