Vice presidential debates don’t matter, we have been assured over and over. No one votes for vice president or a presidential nominee for her or his choice of running mate. You can go back and look at snap polls taken after past vice presidential debates and find basically zero correlation with the final election results.

All that said, the debate between Governor Walz and Senator Vance may turn out to matter. There’s no question, certainly, about who came out ahead. As a heartfelt opponent of President Trump, Joe Klein, led off, “Well, we saw the high school studies teacher destroyed by a professional politician last night. This wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close.”