The VP debate showed us who Mike Pence and Kamala Harris really are

For anyone who watched the last debate and briefly mistook it for two bald men fighting over a comb among a nuclear-waste dumpster fire, tonight’s face-off between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris was a big improvement. There was policy discussion; there were respectful asides where the opponents thanked each other for appearing; there were some stand-out quotable lines and a lot of soporific beltway talk; there was casual sexism and a man talking way over his time while a woman kept to the rules and silently fumed about it. In other words, it looked like the kind of politics we’re all used to. In its own way, it was reassuring.

“Senator Harris, it’s a privilege to be onstage with you,” said Pence, before delivering some rehearsed bits about how Harris doesn’t trust, believe or like “the American people” and how she’s “more liberal than Bernie Sanders”. The VP has been accused of being robotic in the past, and he played up to that stereotype today, faithfully recycling lines Trump himself used in the first presidential debate against Biden but styling them in quieter, calmer tones: “We inherited the slowest economic recovery in decades” from President Obama; “On day one, Joe Biden’s going to raise your taxes.” He stayed relentlessly on-message, speaking over his allotted time for almost every question while moderator Susan Page repeatedly said, “Thank you, Mr Vice President” with increasing exasperation. It took us a full hour to get to the point where Page had to fully reprimand Pence while reminding him that “your campaign agreed to these rules”, though, which was a massive improvement on the week prior.

Kamala Harris’s “Mr Vice President, I’m speaking” was the phrase of the night and she had to utter it repeatedly. Whether that will go down well with voters watching is unclear — it seemed like it started out as a pithy catchphrase but eventually became wearied. It was she who got properly into policy, describing specifics on tax plans, how a Biden-Harris administration would overhaul the justice system, and why Trump’s personal tax situation is so worrying (“When you’re in debt, you owe somebody,” she said, direct to the camera, adding that “the American people need to know” who Trump might make backroom deals with to work out his tax situation if he was allowed to continue as president.)

Harris came away with the powerful soundbites: “If you have a pre-existing condition — heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer — they’re coming for you. If you’re under 26 and on your parents’ plan, they’re coming for you,” she said, of Pence and Trump’s plans for healthcare. “You lost that trade war with China. You lost it,” she said, when Pence tried to boast about bringing China to heel, adding, “We are in a manufacturing recession because of it.” In response to a repeated Pence accusation that Biden would end jobs in fracking, she simply looked at the camera — a debating move she and Biden share — and said, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact.” And as she rounded off her final answer, she said, “We will win and we will not let anyone subvert this democracy,” something I wished she’d expanded on earlier in the debate.

Pence had his moments, too. When talk turned to foreign policy, he spoke about the murdered Isis hostage Kayla Mueller in painfully graphic detail. At a particularly stomach-churning moment, he described how the young woman’s captors “abused her horribly” while Biden and Obama “hesitated for a month,” all as Mueller’s parents sat in the front row at the event in Utah. Harris, who seemed somewhat taken aback, simply apologized directly to Mueller’s family and then pivoted to how Trump had reportedly called US troops “losers” and “suckers”.

“You’re entitled to your opinion but you’re not entitled to your own facts,” Pence said in another interesting moment, at which point Harris laughed and said, “Nice line.” Politics nerds might have noticed that the line was taken from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a life-long Democrat who has been described as “the anti-Trump of politics”. It does seem a little rich for someone within the administration of “alternative facts” to say that people aren’t entitled to such things, but what do I know?

Harris warmed up during the debate and came to a strong, calm, controlled finish, while Pence appeared to wind down after the first twenty minutes. He relied much more on personal attacks and appeals to emotion, couched though they were in a measured way. Calling Harris a member of “the establishment in DC” felt tired and very 2016. He did deliver some strong lines while repeatedly demanding that Harris answer whether she and Biden would pack the courts — “I want the record to show she didn’t answer the question,” he said after a few spirited minutes of back-and-forth — but he undid a lot of that when he gave a meandering, soulless answer about whether justice was done for Breonna Taylor which segued after seconds into a description of “rioters and looters” and how much he condemns them for “burning down hair salons”. The contrast between how he talked about Taylor and how he talked about Kayla Mueller, a young woman of the same age, was truly something.

One thing pundits worried about when Biden picked Harris as his running mate was her ideological differences with the Democratic nominee and whether they could be fully reconciled. Those differences are not huge — both Biden and Harris are moderates within the party — but they do exist. They were evident on the Democratic nominee debate stage earlier this year. In contrast, it’s often said that there is “no daylight” between Trump and Pence: that they are, ideologically, joined at the hip. This was evident tonight, as Pence stuck by the president’s side and stuck with his tactics as well. Harris, on the other hand, was much more adept at talking about her own personal record and perspective. That’s important when you consider that both are running alongside men in their seventies, one who is sick with a virus which could have long-term health implications.

Kamala Harris clearly won the debate in terms of providing policy and detail and actually answering the questions, but she missed opportunities as well. Pence walked away relatively unscathed, able to deliver almost every point he must have wanted to get across. Will minds be changed across the nation after tonight? Well, it’s more likely than last week. But most people were probably left wondering why the most presidential-seeming candidates were on this stage instead of at the top of the ballot.