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Trump could change his mind, and the first reaction of Democrats on Thursday was an eye roll. The president managed to blot out second-day spin around the vice-presidential debate. Republicans who were happy with Pence's performance, ready to pick up his best lines and sharpen them against Biden and Harris, were tossed back in the maelstrom.
Maybe there was no other option. Wednesday's debate was a parade of missed opportunities, falling short of what Democrats and Republicans had hoped for. Respectively, that was a ritual humiliation of Pence and something that would terrify voters about elevating Harris. Pence did more than ever to portray Harris as a radical, but Harris generally ignored him or pivoted to another topic.
If there is a second Trump-Biden debate, the top-of-ticket candidates can refocus the race. The president grabbed a kind of strategy this morning, accusing Biden and Harris of abandoning more liberal tax and climate positions after the Democratic primary.
But Trump had already been doing that, with mixed results. (It doesn't help the president that Biden never adopted left-wing positions on these issues.) And unlike four years ago, when Pence nimbly deflected questions about Trump by focusing on Hillary Clinton's gaffes and record, his case against Biden (the 2009 swine flu, slow action in freeing hostages, failing to move America's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem) was outweighed by Harris's attacks on the administration's management of the coronavirus. Here are a few big things the candidates never said, even when prompted, that could have given us more clarity about the race and its stakes.
'Here's what we'll do in a second term.'
Some of Pence's best moments came on an issue that other Republicans have played defensively: the 2017 tax cut. Biden, who wants to get rid of most of it, has occasionally gotten over his skis and said he'd get rid of all of it. Biden's gaffes put Harris in a nearly impossible position, where by defending Biden's stated policy, she was contracting some of his words.
"Joe Biden said twice in the debate last week that on Day 1 he was going to repeal the Trump tax cuts," Pence said, accurately. "Those tax cuts delivered $2,000 in tax relief to the average family of four across America."
Pence was more effective than Trump had been in selling the administration's economic record. But like the president, he had little to say about the next steps or any agenda over the next four years. By the end of the debate, he seemed to have contracted a Trump tic of re-litigating the 2016 election, answering a question about election integrity by insisting, based on specious intelligence, that the Russian election interference of 2016 was some kind of backfiring plot by Hillary Clinton.
Harris's most effective moments, in terms of what can be messaged in the final 26 days of the race, came when she simply laid out Biden's agenda without interruption. For the first time at any presidential or vice-presidential debate, a nominee said that their administration would "decriminalize marijuana" - a winner in polls that other Democrats have been timid about discussing. Unlike Biden last week, Harris mentioned that Democrats want to "lower Medicare eligibility to 60."
'Here's what the Green New Deal actually does.'
Green activists have scored some Pyrrhic victories in these debates. They've pushed moderators to ask about climate change, a subject ignored until the final 2016 debate. And they've succeeded. The Sunrise Movement led the effort to reframe climate policy as a "Green New Deal" that would remake the economy and then make it boom, an effort that has led to some of the oddest exchanges of the combined three onstage hours so far.
The problem is this: The Green New Deal concept was created before there was a Green New Deal to discuss or vote on. In early 2019, Democrats including Harris co-sponsored a Green New Deal resolution that encompassed everything from a jobs guarantee to a vast new sustainable farming program. Republicans called their bluff, scheduling a vote on the text, and Democrats either voted "present" or opposed it. And then they went about creating their own climate plans as they ran for president. But their old signatures never faded.
An idea designed to embolden Democrats ended up flummoxing them, which played out again last night. Moderator Susan Page's questions about the Green New Deal didn't mention any of its details, while Pence savvily filled in the gaps - though not as efficiently as other Republicans have. (His attack on retrofitting buildings, which would by definition create jobs, landed with a thud.) And Harris didn't lay out the campaign's actual climate policy.
"I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking," Harris said. "That is a fact. I will repeat that Joe Biden has been very clear that he thinks about growing jobs, which is why he will not increase taxes for anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year."
'This is what should happen if Roe v. Wade is overturned.'
Nine days ago, when Biden said the landmark 1973 abortion ruling was "on the ballot," the president challenged the premise, asking "how" it could be a voting issue if Biden didn't know how Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett would rule. Last night, Pence got a direct question - "If Roe v. Wade is overturned, what would you want Indiana to do?" - and filibustered, first by discussing the administration's airstrike against Iran's Qasem Soleimani, then by accusing Harris of harboring bias against Catholic nominees.
The box step around the fate of legal abortion has become a genuine trend, with down-ballot Republicans such as Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa also disputing the idea that a 6-to-3 conservative majority would gut or overturn Roe. "I would never presume how Judge Amy Coney Barrett would rule," Pence said later, returning to Page's question without answering it. Instead, Pence mentioned the least popular Biden-Harris position on the issue - "taxpayer funding of abortion" - before returning to court-packing.
What's the problem? Forty-seven years into the life of "Roe," with the antiabortion movement growing confident that it can overturn it, voters not focused on abortion still don't really know what the ruling does. It has become a stand-in for "legal abortion," the allowance of which is generally popular; thus the Republican focus on particularly gruesome scenarios to pass limits and see whether courts will uphold them.
'Here's what I think about court-packing.'
Biden has denied media and voters his position on expanding the Supreme Court, a priority of left-wing activists that is opposed by more than enough Democratic senators to kill it. When reporters hear any politician dodge any question, they get interested. Local news anchors, who have only 5 to 10 minutes with candidates when they come to their cities, had started cycling the "court-packing" question into their sessions with Biden.
But we've now gone through half or all of the televised debates - total number TBD - without a definitive Democratic answer. The political calculation is obvious, that this is a boutique issue that doesn't show up in polls or focus groups and that any time spent on it would be better spent attacking the unpopular push for a Supreme Court confirmation before the election.
"Joe and I are very clear," said Harris, filibustering with a flattering (and not quite right) story of President Abraham Lincoln waiting until after his reelection to fill a vacancy that changed the balance of the court. "The American people are voting right now, and it should be their decision."
'Please answer the question.' The commission has now tried two notably different approaches to moderating these debates, with two very different sets of candidates. Last week, Fox News's Chris Wallace acted with exasperation, but often effectively, to interrupt and yank Trump and Biden back to their topics. Last night, USA Today's Susan Page kept the candidates on topic for the 15 minutes they discussed the pandemic but lost them when she asked Pence whether there were "safeguards or procedures when it comes to the issue of presidential disability."
Page didn't get much assistance from the candidates. There was nothing stopping Pence or Harris from interrupting to say that their rival was dodging a question. Indeed, that was how Pence accused Harris of dissembling on "court-packing." But that was a one-off. If Cleveland suggested there was no way to stop Biden and Trump from talking over each other, Salt Lake City showed how the campaigns, in a cooler environment, can talk past each other. And once they walk away from the microphones, a louder voice talks over all of them.
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