A funny thing happened during Aerosmith’s “Permanent Vacation” tour in the late 1980s.
The Bad Boys from Boston were touring with some up-and-coming rockers who had recently released their debut album. As the tour went on, that album became a global sensation. That opening act was Guns N’ Roses.
I bring this up today not because I particularly care for either band — I’m sorry to the fans! — but because it mirrors an oddity of tonight’s vice-presidential debate.
Running-mate debates are supposed to be small potatoes, a diversion between the presidential debates, which are generally considered to be much more consequential. But without another presidential debate on the schedule, the bout between Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator JD Vance of Ohio could well be the last major televised face-off between representatives of both tickets before the election.
The supporting act, in other words, has become the headliner — and that means this veep debate just might be a bigger deal than usual.
“Because this is the last moment that a large swath of Americans are going to have a unified impression of this race, it does up the stakes for both Walz and Vance,” Kerry Healey, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, told me. “Ending on this note is something that gives the debate additional weight.”
‘Do no harm’
There is an argument, of course, that vice-presidential debates are always important. Healey, a political figure who knows a thing or two about the importance of being No. 2, made it when I called her today.
She served under Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts — and, when Romney was running for president in 2012, she helped his running mate, Paul Ryan, prepare for his debate against Joe Biden, then the vice president.
“I think vice-presidential debates are more important than people generally give them credit for,” she told me. She said they required a special touch.
“You need to be very mindful that you’re speaking not only for yourself but also for your principal,” Healey said. “You have two goals. One is to win the debate, but the other is to do no harm to the person who brought you to that point.”
Both Walz and Vance have been preparing as if their debate is the big show. Walz hunkered down for what was essentially a debate camp in Michigan, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg playing the role of Vance. Vance has been doing “murder board” sessions, while Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a Republican, was recruited to play the role of Walz.
“For any candidate, in any debate, they are all-important, stressful, nail-biters — ‘Oh, my God, this is everything,’” said Marla Romash, a Democratic strategist who has prepared many a candidate for debates over the years, including Al Gore, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, in 1992.
Debate preparation isn’t just about what happens inside a practice session, she said. One major component then, she said, was tempering the sky-high expectations about how he would do against Dan Quayle, then the vice president.
“These were the potato-with-an-e days,” she said, referring to how Quayle had been widely mocked for misspelling the word while visiting a classroom. “The expectation was that Dan Quayle was going to get eaten. We had to really adjust expectations.”
The expectations game has gone into overdrive for tonight’s showdown — though it’s something of a race to the bottom. Trump appears to have lowered the bar for both of them. In an interview yesterday with his former aide, Kellyanne Conway, he called Walz a “moron” while suggesting that the debate would be “rigged” against Vance. Walz and his allies, meanwhile, have tried to set expectations high for Vance, emphasizing his Yale Law School credentials. In what might be an attempt to lower expectations so that Walz can exceed them, Walz’s allies have suggested that the governor won’t come across as a smooth debater.
Final appeal
Maybe it makes sense that the sequence of debates would feel a little nontraditional. It has, after all, been a whole season of switches and swaps when it comes to the role of No. 2.
Trump left his former vice president, Mike Pence, by the wayside after he refused to try to help him overturn the 2020 election, and this summer Trump selected Vance to join him on the ticket. Harris, of course, was Biden’s running mate, until she was not and suddenly needed one of her own.
And now a pair of men who were lesser-known nationally just a couple of years ago are set to make their tickets’ last big televised appeal to voters before the election.
“The fact that it’s the last debate currently scheduled makes it unique,” said Joel Goldstein, an emeritus professor of law at St. Louis University who also happens to be an expert on the vice presidency. He wrote a book on the subject with a subtitle that includes the phrase “the path to significance.”
Other veep debates have mattered before, he said. The 1976 vice-presidential debate helped to “credentialize” Walter Mondale, then a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Goldstein said, making him a figure whom Jimmy Carter, as the party’s presidential nominee, began to refer to repeatedly on the campaign trail. And Biden’s able performance against Ryan in 2012 — including a moment when he called the Republican’s claims “malarkey” — helped the ticket regain its swagger after a halting first debate performance by Barack Obama, then the president.
Veep debates have sometimes produced highly memorable moments, as my colleague Adam Nagourney pointed out today.
And Goldstein mentioned something else. Anything major that happens tonight may linger longer in the news cycle without another presidential debate to wash the memories away.
Join us for the debate!
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator JD Vance of Ohio will face off tonight in a debate hosted by CBS News at 9 p.m. in New York City. We’ll stream it live at nytimes.com, where my colleagues will offer real-time analysis, fact-checking and more.
How to pass the time in the meantime? Whet your appetite with a little pre-debate fact-checking of the claims both candidates have made on the campaign trail. Go to the game tape with our story on Vance’s history on the debate stage or a look at what we learned from watching Walz’s old debates.
Maybe, before the debate, you want to go deep on either of the candidates. Read about how Walz rose in the Democratic Party and the small Nebraska town that shaped him. Or read about Vance’s complex relationship with his mother and his emerging relationship to Trump.
You could revisit my trip to Walz’s old congressional district or my look at how Vance has turned taking questions from the press into political theater.
Whatever you read, join us at 9. I’ll be back in the morning with an early On Politics, breaking down the debate.
The post The Veep Debate, or When the Opening Act Becomes the Headliner appeared first on New York Times.