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The Likable Lies of Campaign 2024
Are likable liars the secret weapon of campaign 2024?
After the Tuesday night vice presidential debate ended, there was widespread praise about the demeanor of the candidates, Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance. “Voters overwhelmingly characterized the debate as positive in tone,” wrote CBS News, which hosted the debate and then conducted a poll right immediately afterward. The BBC headline used the word “politeness” to characterize the debate. GZERO used “civility.” It’s true. A much-needed Midwestern decency prevailed throughout the VP debate, the expected personal attacks giving way to a wider policy discussion.
After watching the screed-filled mayhem about immigrants eating pets that characterized the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate, the VP face-off was like sipping a cold beer in the middle of a heat wave.
But something about this new political “decency” beer doesn’t taste right, and it’s causing a massive hangover. The common decency displayed by Vance and Walz cleverly masks constant deceptions, and yet that doesn’t seem to have any impact on the campaign. In fact, there’s more controversy about the candidates being fact-checked by journalists — that is their job! — than about candidates lying.
Vance won the debate because he had one job: Don’t look like the “weird” guy Democrats say you are, don’t insult women, don’t alienate voters by being the extreme Trump attack dog. He exceeded all expectations. He was prepared, likable, and polished, sawing off Trump’s rough edges with the candor and geniality that appeal to independent voters in swing states. On the surface, it was a master class and might well help secure Vance’s role as the Republican standard-bearer of the future. Below the surface, though, there was an indelible flaw: Vance kept lying.
For example, Vance claimed that Trump didn’t try to destroy the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare — but that he actually saved it! That was such a revisionist spin that it took me a while to even process it.
“WhenObamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and healthcare costs,” Vance declared smoothly, “Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
It sounds so reasonable that you might forget that it has no connection to reality. Trump repeatedly claimed his goal was to “let Obamacare fail” and, in 2017, he brought in the “repeal and replace” vote to finally kill it. That vote failed when Trump’s nemesis, the late Sen. John McCain, famously gave it the 1 a.m. on-the-floor thumbs-down. Claiming Trump saved Obamacare is the equivalent of “We had to destroy the village to save the village,” the logical contradiction that became a parody of perfidy during the Vietnam War.
Vance’s likable lies extended to the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s overt attempt to illegally stop the peaceful transition of power. “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20,” Vance said, as if the mob, the deaths, and the arrests of Jan. 6 never happened. The guy Vance replaced, former VP Mike Pence, has starkly contradicted this nonsensical claim, telling Fox News back in 2021 that he refused to comply with Trump and “his gaggle of crackpot lawyers” who “didn’t just ask me to pause. They asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election.”
Just a reminder: Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives in 2021 because of his actions supporting the insurrection, and he was the first president in 150 years to be a no-show at the inauguration of his predecessor. Of course, Trump still claims the results of the election were fake, and this week he is facing new allegations about his potentially criminal actions leading up to the events of Jan. 6 as revealed in the recently unsealed legal brief from special counsel Jack Smith.
Later in the debate, it got worse, as Vance would not admit that the last election results were fair, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Rebranding Jan. 6 as a peaceful transition of power where a bunch of curious patriots took a friendly tour of the Capitol building is swampland in Florida that no sucker needs to buy.
Finally, Vance claimed that he “never supported a national ban” on abortion. “I did, during [sic] when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard.” Again, this sounds reasonable, and maybe Vance’s position has changed, but in 2022 he said on stage, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
Walz also had his likable liar moments. He had two jobs in the debate: Don’t look like the radical the Republicans claim you are and do no harm. Walz simply had to keep up his straight-talk, friendly neighbor, America’s coach persona. Apart from being nervous off the top and ragged and jumpy in his points, Walz for the most part did no harm, even if he was roundly seen as losing the debate by a slight margin. But he also could not explain his past lies.
Back in 2014, Walz declared to a congressional hearing that “as the events were unfolding [in Tiananmen Square, China], several of us went in. I still remember the train station in Hong Kong." Except he didn’t. Walz was in Nebraska at the time. When asked about it in the debate, Walz was flummoxed and fumbled badly, first saying he gets “caught up in the rhetoric,” then admitting that he is “a knucklehead at times” and then, finally, “All I said on this was, I got there that summer and misspoke on this. That is what I have said.” He never admitted that he had lied but made the weird case that being a good guy makes this excusable.
Walz later claimed that Trump hasn’t paid taxes in over a decade and half, which is also not true. According to a report by the Committee on Ways and Means, Trump has paid taxes in some years, even if the rates were shockingly low. For example, he listed $641,931 in federal income tax in 2015 but only $750 in the next two years. Trump didn’t pay any taxes in 2020. Walz didn’t need to lie about Trump’s taxes as the evidence is already damning, but he did it anyway.
Revealing that politicians lie is about as shocking as saying the pope is Catholic. And to the credit of many organizations like CBS, CNN, and others, there were a lot of articles fact-checking the debate. Still, no matter how frequently it happens, you wonder why it doesn't cause an anaphylactic voter reaction? After all, someone who lies to voters in a campaign will, logically, lie to them in power, and who wants that? Would voters rather have likable over believable?
Four years ago, Newsweek published a survey with Redfield and Wilton Strategies that showed 54% of Americans agree that “lying has become more acceptable in American politics.” Voters don’t care about a lying candidate because the end justifies the means. A new study called “When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics” examined “explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding.” The study found that when lies help push the overall political aims of a candidate to victory, their supporters have no issue with it.
“A lot of people’s support for politicians who say things that aren’t true isn’t because they believe those statements per se, but they view that misinformation as supporting political goals that they believe in,” one of the authors of the study, assistant professor Ethan Poskanzer, told the University of Colorado.
The other factor at work here is sowing doubt in everything. The Steve Bannon “flood the zone with shit” strategy has tainted the political process, so partisan voters are urged to disbelieve anything that harms their candidate while believing everything their own leader says.
Lying can sometimes come off as crude, aggressive deception: “Immigrants are eating your pets!” And there are different kinds of lies: Some statements are blatant lies, others are exaggerations, and some are misleading, out-of-context statements used to make a point. So there are degrees, but let’s focus on the blatant lies because they are so obvious.
One other key factor to consider is frequency. Some candidates lie much more than others and so get called out for it more. In the presidential debate, Trump lied over 30 times while Harris told one lie and made a few misleading statements. Trump’s rate of lies might seem like a vulnerability, but he has cleverly turned it into an attack line, claiming that fact-checking proves that the fake news machine is biased against him. Repeat a lie, get called out for it, and claim you are the victim of a media conspiracy. It works. But it works even better when the candidate can do that and still be likable, and grab headlines for their decency, not their deception. That is what Vance and, to a lesser degree, Walz did.
In 2024, the likable liars may end up being the difference in a close election.
Republican Sen. JD Vance and Democrat Gov. Tim Walz greet each other before they square off during the CBS News vice presidential debate in New York City on Oct. 1, 2024.
Civility wins: Vance and Walz play (mostly) nice, spar on policy
The debate kicked off with the escalating situation in the Middle East, as the moderator asked the candidates whether they would support Israel if it launched a preemptive military strike against Iran. Both candidates said Israel has a right to defend itself, but while Walz dodged answering the preemptive question directly, Vance said it was “up to Israel what it needs to do to keep their country safe. We should support our allies.” He also praised Trump’s deterrence strategy, saying that the world was more stable under his administration – an argument that is becoming more potent as the situation in the Middle East escalates.
Climate change came second, as North Carolina reels from Hurricane Helene, and as Americans across the country are facing more frequent, and expensive, natural disasters. Walz focused on the Biden-Harris administration’s investment in clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act, pointing out that it created jobs and gave funding for adapting infrastructure to withstand climate change.
Meanwhile, Vance did not explicitly deny that carbon emissions are warming the Earth, straying away from Trump, who has repeatedly called it a hoax. But he emphasized the need for more investments in nuclear and natural gas, and for restoring US energy production and manufacturing, which he claimed was cleaner than producing it overseas.
The discussion about abortion offered Walz one of his strongest moments. He rearticulated that the Harris-Walz campaign stands for restoring Roe v. Wade and for reproductive rights, one of Democrats’ strongest issues heading into November.
Surprisingly, Vance criticized the uneven availability of abortion services and referenced instances where state regulations resulted in medical complications for women. While this concern runs contrary to the times he has said he supports a national abortion ban, viewers unfamiliar with Vance’s previous statements would have heard a candidate who was sympathetic to the need to ensure reproductive care. He even acknowledged that the GOP needed to do a better job in “earning the American people’s trust back” on abortion issues.
On the economy, Vance argued it was better under Trump and highlighted the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, expressing unease about the relocation of production to nations like China. Walz didn’t disagree with him on manufacturing and China, but he also highlighted Harris’ plans to create an “opportunity economy” and plans to increase housing.
They both attacked their running mates’ economic records. “Tim, I think you got a tough job here because you gotta play Whac-A-Mole,” Vance said, accusing Walz of having to “pretend” that Biden’s economy didn’t have higher inflation than Trump’s. Walz rebutted that Harris from Day One had been plagued by “Donald Trump’s failure on COVID that led to the collapse of our economy.”
When asked about immigration, Vance called for a strict crackdown at the Southern border, saying the Trump administration would focus its mass deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Walz focused his answer on the bipartisan border deal that Republicans tanked in the Senate at Trump’s request earlier this year. He also highlighted the Biden-Harris administration's success in curbing the opioid crisis and took Vance to task on lies he told about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people’s pets. The altercation, one of the spiciest of the night, led to both men’s mics being muted.
So, who won? With 35 days left before the election, few voters are likely to be swayed by the outcome of this debate. Vance appeared prepared and reasonable and landed significant punches against Walz and Harris that the Minnesota governor struggled to refute. He was also effective in laundering many of the Trump-Vance tickets’ most extreme statements on immigration, abortion, and healthcare to make them sound more appealing to moderates.
Walz struggled out of the gate. It was apparent that he had done fewer press interviews and was less comfortable on the debate stage than his Yale-educated, frequent-cable-news-guest opponent. The governor spent much of the debate with his head down, taking notes. But he ended strong, vigorously pressing Vance on giving a “damning non-answer” to the question about whether he would acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election.
Vance was, in large part, performing for an audience of one: Trump. After a series of recent flubs spurred rumors that the former president might regret his VP choice, Vance knew he needed to win over the boss. While Vance strayed away from Trump’s rhetoric, the former president seemed pleased with the performance, posting on Truth Social in all caps, “GREAT JOB JD.”
Vance and Walz face off
Vance and Walz face off
Political scientists have longdebated the importance of presidential debates, but they tend to agree that vice-presidential debates are simply sideshows without much importance for election results. The most famous moment from any past VP debate was Lloyd Bentsen’s admonition of Dan Quayle as “no Jack Kennedy” in 1988, and it was Quayle’s running mate – then-vice president George Herbert Walker Bush – who easily won that election.
But Tuesday's faceoff between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz may be different. National and swing-state polls suggest this might be the tightest presidential race in decades, and there hasn’t been much news in the past week to give either candidate new momentum. The Sept. 10 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is now old news, and the two don’t appear likely to debate again. That may spark more interest in tonight’s faceoff.
The current stalemate may also increase the audience for tonight’s vice-presidential debate, Vance, currently a senator from Ohio, will likely prove much more disciplined than Trump did against Harris in advancing the campaign’s strongest arguments and exploiting Harris’ biggest vulnerabilities. Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, will be introducing himself to many voters who haven’t yet heard the sound of his voice. His humor and Midwestern accent may marginally boost Harris’ chances in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the states that offer her the likeliest path to victory.
Will you be watching? If so, check out GZERO's debate bingo card!
Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Aug. 3, 2024.
President Panic and the Grievance Ceiling
Has Donald Trump become President Panic and hit a grievance ceiling?
The confidence the world saw at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after Trump survived a terrifying assassination attempt is suddenly gone. The rallying cry of “Fight, fight, fight!” has been replaced with “whine, whine, whine,” a transformation encapsulated in feverish social media posts Trump is sending from his baroque bunker in Mar-a-Lago.
Clearly caught off guard by Biden’s exit, the former president is struggling to find a way to frame Kamala Harris’ sudden surge in momentum. After Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and held a series of massive rallies, Trump released what ranked as one of his most bizarre social media posts. (OK, it’s not on the RFK Jr. level of “After falconing with my pals, I picked a dead bear cub off the highway to skin it and eat it but instead decided to secretly dump it in Central Park and stage a fake crime scene by pretending the bear was killed by a cyclist,” but then, what is? Hold RFK’s animal cruelty beer, Gov. Kristi Noem!)
In any case, Trump just posted a panicky theory that Biden is going to fight Harris to reclaim the nomination. “What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” he wrote. “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”
Hard to decode any of this, but let’s try. Does Trump know anything about the inner workings of the Biden circle? No. Was Biden’s presidency “unconstitutionally stolen”? No. Biden is still president, and he decided — under great pressure to be sure — not to run again. Both Johnson and Truman did the same thing, so it can happen. It was not a “COUP,” as Trump later called it, though the irony was not lost on anyone that Trump is the one accused of trying to unconstitutionally steal an election and stage a coup on Jan. 6, 2021.
The post also descends into his usual litany of name-calling, from “crooked” for Biden and “shifty” for Schiff to “crazy” for Nancy Pelosi. He notably changed “Kamala” to “Kamabla” — and has done so a few times — which no one understands.
There does not seem to be a coherent Trump strategy yet to combat Harris or Walz, except for trying to find the juvenile name that sticks, à la Sleepy Joe. “Laughing Kamala” — is that a thing? Nope. Is laughter now a liability in America? No. Crazy Kamala? It’s a classic one — but doesn’t it already belong to Pelosi?
When the name-calling fails, there is always the fallback on race, a strategy Trump used against Barack Obama with the birther theory. At the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, Trump alleged that Harris had recently “turned Black,” dismissing her biracial identity. This made no sense, especially since his running mate, JD Vance, has biracial children. But Trump has doubled down on it anyway, bundling it with calling Harris a “DEI hire,” even though her record in politics is much longer than either his own or Vance’s.
This week, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said that Harris is now the front-runner and blamed the turn of fortunes on Trump’s empty personal attacks. “He’s losing it with speeches that have the same sort of ad hominem attacks to a public that has had enough and wants to look for something different, something new,” he told Vinnews.
In any election, a candidate has a floor of support — the base that will never leave them which, in Trump’s case, is the MAGA crowd that makes up about 43%-48% of the voting population — and a ceiling, the place they need to grow to win over swing states like Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, or Nevada. A new survey conducted by Marquette Law School shows Harris leading Trump among likely voters by 50% to 42%, when third-party candidates are included, and by 47% to 41% with registered voters.
The goal is to recruit new voters, independents, suburban women, unions, the Black, Latino, Jewish, or Arab-American voters. It appears as if there may be a kind of “grievance ceiling” or an “anger ceiling” in US politics, and Trump might have just hit it.
Trump’s strategy of unhinged personal insults, race-baiting, grievance-fueled conspiracy theories, and self-pity might have made his floor the same as his ceiling, which is fatal for a campaign. How does he put new things on the menu to attract new customers if he keeps cooking with the same old sauce?
One of the things Harris and Walz have done remarkably well is find a tone that makes the Trump personal attacks seem old, out of touch, and ineffective. Walz in particular has owned the happy warrior role, dismissing the entire Trump campaign as “weird,” a deft response that allows Democrats to take Trump seriously without admitting that he’s actually serious about anything.
They smile, they laugh, and they appear unaffected by the personal attacks. But they are hitting back too, rejecting Michelle Obama's maxim: “When they go low, we go high.” Walz and surrogates like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro love fighting on the low ground and have taken to spicing up their speeches with the truffle sauce of four-letter profanity that lends the out-of-touch elitist Democrat image a folksy touch. “Hey, we can swear too,” they seem to say. Shapiro’s maxim of GSD or “Get Shit Done” is now a crowd chant. Democrats are fighting MAGA mud with their own mud, and they are enjoying it, which used to be Trump’s secret weapon.
Luntz’s point is that Trump needs to stop panicking and start talking about substance, policy, and record. Harris and Walz are vulnerable on lots of issues: the faltering economy, the porous border, and the bloody Middle East. But Trump can’t seem to focus on substantial issues long enough to make this stuff stick. That explains why he has become President Panic.
There are still over 90 days left in this volatile, wild campaign, so if there is one lesson, it’s that the past is not prologue. The election is still very much up for grabs. Harris and Walz have started strong, but it ain’t about the start. It’s about the finish. In politics, as in baseball, being the closer is a hard job that few can pull off. Is Harris a closer? Will she wilt under the barrage of Trump attacks — he will find a more coherent strategy — as so many others have? Will divisions inside her party over say the policy on Israel, Hamas, and Gaza undermine the Democrats’ momentum in key states like Michigan? And what about the economy and the stock market meltdown? That is the hard test ahead.
Harris and Walz are still popping corks at their sudden change of fortune, but elections can make a candidate’s bubbly go flat before the second sip. For now, however, they are watching President Panic hit the grievance ceiling, and they are drinking it up.