Donald Trump’s senior aides saw JD Vance as having a slick debate performance over Tim Walz, according to people close to Trump, that made his campaign appear palatable despite the former president’s increasingly caustic threats such as vowing to prosecute his perceived enemies.
The campaign aides also believed that Vance reset the narrative over his image and likely came across in a more favorable light to undecided voters after a brutal few months of being hammered for making disparaging remarks about women as “childless cat ladies”.
Vance’s favorability issue was perhaps the principal priority for Trump’s senior aides because they saw it as potentially fixable and if so, beneficial to the Trump campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day in what has become a vanishingly close race against Kamala Harris.
Related: School shootings, childcare and cost of living: key takeaways from the Walz-Vance debate
Afterwards, Trump predictably claimed Vance won the debate, but a CBS News poll confirmed how vice-presidential debates matter increasingly less in close elections compared to ground game efforts to drive turnout.
In the post-debate poll, 42% of respondents said Vance won the debate, 41% gave the win to Walz, while 17% said it was tied – suggesting the main takeaway remains that it is unlikely to play any material role in which campaign wins each of the seven battleground states in November.
Broadly, Trump’s aides were relieved that Vance came across as more polished than Walz in his answers and that Vance, for the most part, was able to deliver attack lines without interruption or immediate factchecking from Walz of the CBS News moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan.
They were also relieved that Vance got away with whitewashing Trump’s record on trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack and resulted in criminal prosecution.
Vance falsely claimed Trump did not want to destroy Obamacare but wanted a bipartisan solution to affordable health care, when in actuality Trump was thwarted in the Senate by Senator John McCain. Regarding the Capitol attack, Trump never called the National Guard and resisted calling off the rioters until it was already over.
Related: Vance refuses to say Trump lost the 2020 election in Walz debate
Trump’s vice-presidential nominee got called out on uncomfortable territory – namely abortion and gun violence, to the second of which Vance at one point said his policy solution to prevent mass school shootings was to have stronger doors and windows.
But Trump’s aides suggested after the debate that Walz had enough of his own flubs that they could use to distract from Vance’s shaky answers.
In particular, the Trump aides noted that Walz misspoke on gun violence when he said he had become friends with some of the school shooters – he clearly meant to say shooting victims – and then struggled to explain why he falsely claimed he had visited Hong Kong at the time of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.
“Tonight, Senator Vance proved why President Trump chose him as his running mate. Together, they make the strongest and most dynamic presidential ticket ever, and they are going to win on November 5th,” Trump’s co-campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement.
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