What Went Down At The Vice Presidential Debate

Pence avoids Trump’s harsh language on immigration, but he, like Trump, implies a link between illegal immigration and crime. There’s no basis for that claim. As I wrote before the last debate, there is essentially no evidence to suggest immigrants pose a greater risk than native-born Americans. If anything, the opposite is true: Multiple studies have found that immigrants have lower rates of violent crime than native citizens.

Not trying to do too much theater criticism here, but Kaine seems too inclined to run through his script, instead of taking advantage of opportunities to be responsive to what Pence says. We’ve seen very little improvisation on his part.

The deportation force that’s being debated right now is pretty controversial — Trump called for one last year, but the more concrete an entity his campaign has become, the more the Trump team has tried to back off their candidate’s initial stance.

There are many ways to frame the immigration question, Micah, but one of my favorites is Pew’s do immigrants “strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents” or “are a burden because they take jobs, housing and health care”? Among Trump’s primary supporters, 69 percent said they were a burden. Among all registered voters, 57 percent said they strengthen the country.

Harry, Trump’s hardline immigration stance pretty clearly helped him in the GOP primary, but what do we know about how it plays with the wider electorate?

I was just trying to puzzle out the same thing. On our TV, Kaine – on the right of the screen – looks to his right – off frame – when talking to the moderator. Pence – on the left of the screen – looks to his left – also off frame – when talking to the moderator. But then when they look at each other they look towards the middle of the frame and… I think I just confused myself. But looking at a photo of the setup of the table, it appears that there are offset camera angles to make for some weird geometry. Or maybe it’s just me and Claudia.

Kaine has a habit of interrupting to his own detriment. Elaine Quijano was trying to hold Pence’s feet to the fire on a question about implicit bias in the police system, and Kaine was so eager to get his point in he interrupted the moderator. Important tip: Viewers tend to find the moderator a lot more believable than the candidates. If the moderator is doing your work for you, let her.

It’s important to distinguish between trends in immigration in general and in illegal immigration, specifically. They look very different. The total number of immigrants living in the U.S. is rising; the foreign-born share of the population is on track to hit a record later this century. But the number of undocumented workers has held more or less steady in recent years at around 11 million. One thing that’s true of both legal and illegal immigration: It is diversifying. The number of new immigrants from Asia now exceeds the number from Mexico and other Latin American countries. And the number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico has been falling in recent years, while the number from Asia and Africa has been rising.

Pence implied that black police officers can’t have implicit bias against black people: “Senator, when African-American police officers involved in a police action shooting involving an African-American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African-American police officer of implicit bias?” But there is evidence that some black police officers, too, can have implicit bias against black people.

Pence says immigration is driving down wages of American workers. That’s a hot debate in economics right now. First the part pretty much everyone agrees on: Immigration is good for the economy as a whole. Immigrants work at higher rates than native-born Americans; they start companies at a higher rate; and they make the economy as a whole more productive. A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that immigrants don’t take jobs from native-born workers or drive down their wages overall. But there’s more debate over how undocumented immigrants affect the wages of less educated American workers. A famous study from David Card found that the Mariel boatlift — the sudden influx of Cuban refugees into south Florida in 1980 — didn’t affect wages much. But Harvard economist George Borjas recently re-evaluated the evidence and found a bigger effect. There have been several more papers on both sides of the issue since then.

Kaine and Pence just had a very spirited debate on racial bias and law enforcement. Every moment we spend on that topic probably helps Clinton. Why? Only 19 percent of Americans trust Trump on this issue, while 41 percent trust Clinton.

Pence is taking a very different tone when it comes to criminal justice than Trump did during the first presidential debate. Trump talked repeatedly about the need for “law and order” and implied that crime rates were surging in the U.S. (The murder rate did rise in 2015, but other types of crime haven’t seen the same increase.) Pence has embraced the same policies, such as “stop and frisk,” but hasn’t taken the same apocalyptic tone.

Kaine brought up the dozens of times Philando Castile — a black man shot and killed by a police officer at a traffic stop in July outside Minneapolis — was stopped by police. Studies show that black Americans are disproportionately targeted by many policing programs — and are killed at a much higher rate than other Americans.

Pence and Kaine are agreeing on community policing, but Pence has put a little “law and order candidate” spice on it, saying that police resent the fact that the populace is becoming prejudiced against them — “enough of seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement.” He brought up Clinton’s assertion during the Sept. 26 debate that everyone has “implicit bias” and riffed from there. It’s no coincidence that Trump has gotten the endorsement of some important police unions.

Kaine touted his achievement of reducing crime when he was mayor of Richmond, touting community policing. What he didn’t mention was Project Exile, a program to take gun cases federal that many politicians in both major parties, including Kaine, touted at the time but that is unproven. Today Richmond has backed away from the program, as have many communities around the country, and some Democrats oppose it. Trump calls for bringing back and expanding Exile on his website.

I think the combination of the candidates talking over one another and the moderator talking over the candidates is probably making it harder for voters to focus on the substance.

This feels like a debate out of the normal-election multiverse. But does a classic Democrat-vs.-Republican debate on taxes and funding Social Security do anything to move the needle for this year’s remaining undecideds?

Kaine says he wants to “close loopholes” that let people buy guns without a background check. Evidence from Missouri and Connecticut suggests that universal background checks can reduce gun homicide (and also gun suicide). But the evidence is much less compelling on other gun restrictions that Clinton and Kaine support such as a ban on the sale of assault weapons.

Pence says Trump will cut taxes and preserve Social Security and Medicare. Trump has also pledged to preserve military spending. Yet he also says he won’t increase the deficit. That’s pretty much impossible — Trump and Pence would need to make massive cuts to the 25 percent of the budget that’s left over.

It was smart of Kaine to say he’d protect Social Security, which he called “one of the greatest programs that the American government has ever done.” A Pew poll in March showed that at least 62 percent of supporters of all five of the major remaining presidential candidates at the time said Social Security benefits should not be reduced.

In case anyone is wondering, the Orioles hold a 2-1 lead over the Blue Jays in the fifth inning.

I’m really interested to see whether or not this tax issue makes a big difference to voters living on the edge between Clinton and Trump. Trump has been saying for months that he’s a smart businessman — it’s something his supporters admire in him. That the campaign is standing behind this as a smart business move and the fact that income tax returns aren’t necessarily a punch-you-in-the-gut issue right off the bat, makes me wonder whether it will be something that sticks in the craw of swing voters.

I’m watching the CNN livestream with the little squiggly lines from a focus group of “undecided Virginia voters.” Almost no matter what the candidates have said so far, they’re flatter than a curling rink in Manitoba.

Substantively, this debate feels like a draw so far. But there are two reasons Pence is looking good: First, his body language is stronger. Between Kaine’s interrupting, looking down during Pence’s answers, and water breaks, Kaine looks a bit overeager. Second, Pence simply looks and sounds more reasonable than his running mate — and anything close to a draw in this debate might be interpreted as a Republican win given last week’s proceedings.

As Pence and Kaine go after each other’s records, keep in mind that both are fairly well liked in their home states. Kaine’s favorability rating is 51 percent in a recent Roanoke College poll in Virginia. In a recent Monmouth College poll, Pence has an approval rating of 54 percent in Indiana. That’s part of the reason that both Kaine and Pence have given their presidential candidates boost in their homestates, as Nate pointed out.

Elaine Quijano started early by asking each of the vice presidential candidates why their running mates are unpopular. It sounds like a tough question, but it’s really not a very useful one. It’s no better than when presidential candidates are asked why people don’t like them. There’s no good way to answer it. If you say “because the media keeps saying horrible things about them,” you sound defensive and pathetic. You’re not going to say, “because my candidate has made some horrible choices.” Kaine answered pretty well by trying to redirect to a discussion of Clinton’s positives, and Pence’s approach — just saying Clinton is awful — was fine. But we didn’t learn anything about any of the candidates from the exchange.

Kaine’s fiscal record as governor differs sharply from Pence’s. As governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010, Kaine proposed raising taxes and hiking fees to pay for more government spending, especially on transportation. Not many of those proposals became law, due to a combination of opposition in the legislature and the national recession that hit midway through Kaine’s term. But philosophically, Kaine’s approach was broadly similar to the platform Clinton has espoused as a presidential candidate. Kaine’s tax hikes, though, would have hit a larger swath of his state’s residents than Clinton’s, which are more narrowly targeted at wealthy Americans.

Pence promised a Trump-Pence White House would work on “repealing all of the executive orders that Barack Obama has signed.” But as my colleague Dhrumil Mehta wrote in 2014, “the use of executive orders peaked in the era of the New Deal (FDR set the record) and has been on the decline since.” At the time, Obama was averaging 34 executive orders per year; he’s now down to 33. George W. Bush averaged 36 per year, and FDR averaged 291.

The national debt and deficit have come up a couple times, but as my colleague Andrew Flowers has written, those topics have become less and less salient as political issues over time. Not only are candidates talking about the debt less — Americans have grown increasingly less concerned about it.

It’s no surprise that Pence is touting his economic record as governor; expect Kaine to do the same. So let’s get this out of the way right away, then: Governors have very little control over their states’ economies. (Presidents don’t have a lot of control, either.) Still, as I wrote last year, if you’re going to evaluate governors’ economic records, you should at least account for how their states usually perform relative to the national economy. By that metric, Kaine and Pence both look pretty unremarkable. Virginia’s unemployment rate spiked under Kaine because of the nationwide recession, but the increase was actually less than would be expected based on historical patterns. (Kaine was helped by federal stimulus spending, which boosted Virginia’s many government contractors.) Indiana’s unemployment rate under Pence, meanwhile, has been right in line with the national average.

“The war on coal” is a phrase that Pence just dropped three times — that’s a phrase that was dropped pretty much for Western Pennsylvania and the Mahoning Valley area of Ohio, I’d say. Ohio just swung ever so slightly into the Democrats column according to our forecasts, and Pennsylvania is blue as well, as of this evening.

One thing to keep in mind as Kaine and Pence are going after each other is that most Americans have no idea who these guys actually are. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, more than 50 percent of voters have no opinion of either one of them. It’s almost as if you picked two fairly random people off the street to debate. That’s part of the reason why they aren’t unpopular, as Seth previously pointed out.

Pence brags that he balanced the budget as governor. (In fact, Indiana ran a surplus in his most recent budget.) Indiana is one of only a few states where the governor isn’t required to submit a balanced budget. (Kaine’s home state of Virginia, interestingly, is another.) Pence has proposed a constitutional amendment to change that. Still, even without an amendment, Indiana faces relatively strict limits on the circumstances under which it can borrow. That conservative record, of course, has plenty of critics. Liberal groups have attacked Trump for spending too little on education (though the fact-checking site PolitiFact judged “false” Clinton’s claim that Pence had “slashed” school funding). And fiscal watchdogs have criticized Pence for short-changing the state’s rainy-day fund.

Pence has already taken a couple shots at Obama’s stewardship of the economy. That’s an interesting choice. Under Obama, the economy has clearly improved: Unemployment has fallen below 5 percent, job growth has been solid and the latest data from the Census Bureau shows that household incomes rose 5.2 percent in 2015, the fastest growth on record. On the other hand, economic growth has been slow, and many Americans remain pessimistic about the economy. Pence has clearly decided that the bad news outweighs the good in voters’ minds.

It’s five weeks to Election Day. Not that much time left. For Trump, any news cycle where he’s not actively gaining ground on Clinton (or, lately, losing ground) puts him further behind the eight ball. Perhaps Trump’s live-tweeting this evening is an attempt to keep the focus on the top-of-ticket battle. Or perhaps Trump just likes tweeting.

The top of the ticket may be an all-New York affair, but the Pence-Kaine matchup might be a pretty good proxy for where both parties are headed on the map. Indiana is a state Obama carried in 2008, but Democrats haven’t looked all that competitive since, especially because the manufacturing sector job losses that helped propel Obama into office are playing into Trump’s message this year. Trump and Bernie Sanders carried Indiana in the state’s May primary. Virginia is headed in the opposite direction. In 2008, Obama became the first Democrat to carry the Old Dominion since 1964, and Republicans might not even be competitive this year. One reason is that voters in Virginia have a brighter economic outlook: It ranked 7th in Gallups’s 2015 Economic Confidence Index, while Indiana ranked 33rd. Clinton carried Virginia in the March primary, and Marco Rubio nearly topped Trump thanks to his strong performance in Northern Virginia.

Kaine opening up the first line of attack: “Donald Trump always puts himself first. I don’t understand how Gov. Pence can support [him.]” This debate seems like it’s on track to make Pence deal with a version of what Kelly Ayotte was faced with in a debate last night in New Hampshire — defend Trump as a fit role model and leader for the nation.

Pence used his opening speech to get in a dig at Obamacare. I doubt it will come as a surprise to readers that Clinton has supported Obamacare, while Trump has said he’d repeal the law. Less talked about is the fact that Kaine represents a state that chose not to expand Medicaid, one of the law’s biggest provisions, while Indiana did expand the health insurance program for low-income people under Pence’s leadership. Medicaid was expanded in Indiana in 2015, and as of August this year, more than 400,000 people were enrolled under the expansion. Indiana’s expansion has been controversial, though. The state received a waiver from the federal government to make several changes to the program, including requiring everyone enrolled to pay some sort of monthly premium, no matter how low their income. The Obama administration has made it clear they don’t plan on approving exceptions like it in other states until Indiana’s program has been fully evaluated.

A typical vice presidential candidate is worth a net of about 2 percentage points in his home state. That is, if a candidate would otherwise have won a state by 5 points, she might expect to win by 7 points instead by naming a running mate from that state. So has Kaine moved the polls in Virginia? And has Pence in Indiana? Actually, both of them do seemed to have helped the top of the ticket a bit. On the day before Kaine was named as Clinton’s running mate on July 22, FiveThirtyEight’s adjusted polling average had Clinton ahead by only 2.6 percentage points in Virginia. Today, she’s up by 6.5 points in our adjusted polling average, a net swing of 3.9 points toward Clinton. There’s a catch, though, which is that Clinton led Trump nationally by only 2.6 points when she named Kaine as her running mate. Today, her lead is larger: 4.3 percentage points. So Kaine has produced a net swing of 2.2 points toward Clinton in Virginia, relative to the national average. That’s almost exactly in line with our expectations for a VP bounce. How about Pence? Trump led in our Indiana adjusted polling average by 8.4 points at the time he named Pence as his running mate; today, he leads by 10.0 points, a 1.6-point shift. Trump trailed Clinton by 3.9 points overall at the time he named Pence, versus his 4.3-point deficit now. So relative to the national average, Pence has swung Indiana by 2.0 points toward Trump, also right in line with the historic average.

Pence is going full Mellencamp with this intro — small, cornfield values, a big ol’ contrast to city boy Trump. Expect to see more! That, plus plugging his “lifetime of experience” in politics. Again, a big ol’ contrast with Trump.

One of the interesting things about both Kaine and Pence is their experience. They both have served as governor. They both have served in the U.S. Congress. I cannot think of a single vice presidential nominee since at least the first vice presidential debate in 1976 that served both in the Congress and as governor of their home state. In other words, they both have a lot of experience compared to previous vice-presidential nominees.

When it comes to being matchy-matchy, both Kaine and Pence have policy position differences with the heads of their respective tickets. Both have also hustled to align with — and in Pence’s case, keep track of — what their presidential candidate is doing. Kaine shifted his stance on the Trans-Pacific Partnership to match Clinton’s current opposition to the trade bill. (Clinton too once supported it.) And Kaine has a more restrictive view of the presidential authority to use force against groups like Islamic State than Clinton does. Pence was enthusiastically in favor of the TPP, but when he teamed up with Trump, he said he questioned the wisdom behind it. And sometimes there are questions of degree in a stance. Trump presided over what’s been termed “the most anti-LGBT platform” in the GOP’s history, but Pence has a long history of opposing gay rights, including while he was a congressman, sponsoring an amendment that would have prohibited same sex marriage in 2003; and voting against the Employee Non-Discrimination Act in 2004. That act would have prevented LGBTQ Americans from being fired because they were gay, which at this time is left to state law, not federal law. Tonight, among all the other ways to measure the debate, you can see how closely the veeps-in-waiting hew to their own party line.

If tonight’s audience is like last Monday’s, it’ll be younger and less overwhelmingly white than the typical primary debates. The median age of viewers of Monday’s Clinton-Trump debate was 53 — well below the median age for most Democratic and Republican primary debates this year, over 60. (The debate carried on Univision was an exception, with a median age of 48.) And 26 percent of viewers of Monday’s debate were not non-Hispanic whites, above many of the Democratic primary debates and all of the Republican ones. This data doesn’t include online viewers, who are likely to be younger. CORRECTION (Oct. 5, 7:15 a.m.): A previous version of this post misstated the demographic makeup of the audience for last week’s presidential debate. Of those watching, 26 percent were not white or were Hispanic. The audience was not 26 percent non-Hispanic whites.

Here are three questions I have about Kaine’s strategy tonight:

1. Do we see “conciliator Kaine” or “attack dog Kaine” more? Kaine’s reputation in Virginia has been as an earnest governor with a knack for soothing nerves in the heat of fierce partisan debates. But the modern role of a vice presidential nominee has been to jab the top of the opposing ticket.
2. Will we hear Kaine, for example, seek to tie Trump to David Duke.Will Kaine try to use his home court to his advantage? Not that it matters much to viewers (in fact, as Harry has written, VP debates don’t tend to affect trend lines much if at all), but Prince Edward County, Virginia, is an important historical site as a result of the school desegregation fight in the late 1950s, and it will be interesting to see if Kaine might invoke that history tonight.
3. How do social issues factor into his strategy? Republicans have attacked Kaine over his past legal defense of death penalty convicts, but one issue we didn’t hear much about in the last debate was LGBTQ rights. Kaine might use Pence’s support for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana to portray the ticket as socially out of sync with the country, especially because Trump hasn’t shown much interest in the issue.

It has been 425 days since the first debate of the 2016 election. https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/783453468631699456

On the elections podcast yesterday, we did a very high-minded preview of tonight’s debate. I encourage you to listen to it. We also had this exchange towards the end.

Nate: Commission on Presidential Debates, here’s what you should do: You should turn the VP debate into a tag-team debate. You have the presidential candidate and the VP candidate appear together, as a ticket. So you can cross-examine one another. Jody: They’re on together at the same time, or they tag out? Nate: There are different levels. You can have one-on-one, or two-on-two, or two-on-one… every permutation, and in that 90 minutes time to have every type of argument. Jody: That would just lead to Mike Pence and Tim Kaine standing off to the side while Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton just debate each other. Nate: You could do that, you could have a cross-party team, where the VPs scrutinize the presidents…that would be great!

Sign me up.

At some point during tonight’s debate, political observers will likely wonder aloud why Pence, Kaine or both are in the No. 2 positions on their respective tickets. After all, both are reasonably well-respected and articulate advocates for their parties. Neither has the history with scandals or many of the other negatives associated with the person at the top of their tickets. Why aren’t they in first position? It’s not a bad question, but it gets an important feature of American politics wrong. Pence and Kaine are somewhat more liked — or at least less hated — than Trump and Clinton, respectively, precisely because they’re not at the top of their tickets. According to recent polling trends, Pence has a 37 percent favorability rating and a 31 percent unfavorability rating — a net favorability of 6 percentage points. Tim Kaine’s figures are at 32 percent favorable and 30 percent unfavorable, a net favorability of 2. Compare that with Trump (37 favorable/59 unfavorable, a net favorability of -22) and Clinton (43 favorable/54 unfavorable, a net of -11). On balance, the vice presidential candidates sound a lot more popular. But there are also a great many voters — roughly a third of the electorate — who just don’t know enough about them to register an opinion. There aren’t many people undecided between Clinton and Trump. What would happen if Kaine and Pence were at the top of their tickets and got all the attention that goes with that? Chances are, they’d be nearly as unpopular as the people at the top of their tickets now. This is due to the rise of negative partisanship, by which people feel roughly the same way they have about their own party but have come to increasingly despise the other party and see it as a threat to the country. Any new information a Republican-leaning voter hears about Kaine is likely to be viewed through a very negative lens, where moderation is seen as spinelessness and working with the business community is viewed as corruption. Tell a Democratic-leaning voter that Pence is a principled conservative, and he or she will hear that he is an extremist zealot. The vice presidential candidates will certainly be better known after tonight and as they do more campaigning in the coming weeks. But right now, one of their biggest assets is their relative anonymity.

Answer Alex, the answer, it seems, is to be found in the 2000 campaign. Al Gore held a small advantage going into that year’s vice presidential debate, and George W. Bush held a small advantage coming out of it. I’m not sure it’s fair to attribute Bush’s gain to the vice-presidential debate, however. Why? The vice-presidential debate that year came on the heels of a presidential debate, which is likely what caused the numbers to move. Still, in terms of which election saw the biggest before/after shift around a VP debate, it was 2000.

Much of the coverage of the first presidential debate focused on the theatrics (Trump’s interruptions, Clinton’s pre-planned attack on Trump’s comments about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado), but as I wrote at the time, there was a fair amount of substance hiding beneath the surface. The debate featured a pretty in-depth discussion (by debate standards) of the candidates’ policies on taxes, trade, criminal justice, nuclear deterrence and other issues. But the first debate also skipped over some major issues: education, health care, climate change and, perhaps most surprisingly, immigration. It’ll be interesting to see if those issues come up more in tonight’s VP debate.

Most Americans don’t use Twitter, and the media — including me — probably focus too much on it. Also, tonight’s debaters’ Twitter followings are tiny compared to their running mates’. OK, now that those caveats are out of the way, let’s look at the difference between the people who follow Tim Kaine on Twitter and those who follow Mike Pence, based on an analysis by TweepsMap, a Toronto Twitter analysis company that estimates people’s location, gender and age from their Twitter profile text:

• For followers with estimated gender (so excluding accounts of organizations or businesses), 39 percent of Pence’s followers are women, compared with 47 percent of Kaine’s. (Perhaps because the Clinton-Kaine ticket is winning among women voters.)
• Only 18 percent of Pence’s followers are under 24, compared with 41 percent of Kaine’s. Followers over age 64 make up twice the share of Pence’s followers than Kaine’s: 9 percent to 4.4 percent. (Young voters favor Clinton-Kaine, while older voters favor Trump-Pence.)
• Pence gets a bigger share of his followers than Kaine does from the swing states of Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Kaine’s big edge is in his home state, and swing state, of Virginia.