With grace, style, and relentless messaging, Senator Vance clobbered Governor Walz in last night’s vice presidential debate.

Mr. Vance, with even a religious grounding, showed how to make crucial policy issues easy to understand for the average viewer. 

And, while hammering away at the policy message, he skillfully blended in his inspiring life story and his intimate understanding of the American dream.

Mr. Vance was so good that I think it’s quite possible he moved the needle for the Trump team. 

Maybe that’s unusual for a vice presidential debate. I suspect Mr. Vance’s clarity and repetition could do it. 

With 34 days to go before the election, it is clear that the economy and borderless illegal immigration are the two issues that will decide this election. 

So, Mr. Vance, on 11 separate occasions during the debate, talked about high take-home pay and low inflation during the Trump years. 

Take-home pay – that was President Reagan’s easy-to-understand phrase aimed at working class families. What real money is left in your wallet or pocket book after taxes and inflation. 

Mr. Vance said this key point 11 times. “I think he got a tough job here because you’ve got to play whack-a-mole,” he said of Mr. Walz. “You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver rising take home pay, which of course he did. You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver lower inflation, which of course he did. And then you simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries and housing unaffordable for American citizens.”

Mr. Vance added that “We can get back to an America that’s affordable again. We’ve just got to get back to common sense economic principles.”

Simplicity is the most elegant form of messaging. And repetition is crucial in politics.

Meanwhile, Mr. Walz was tying himself up in knots desperately trying to remember all the things his team crammed into his head. Much of the time he just fell back on meaningless word salads.  

He even bungled the abortion law from his own state, where a new Minnesota law allows abortion at any stage of pregnancy if a doctor approves. 

Mr. Vance actually tried to help Mr. understand his own state’s law. There’s more. Vance reminded people of the Biden-Harris affordability crisis.

Everyone has suffered because consumer prices have risen much faster than typical working class wages during the Biden-Harris term. 

During President Trump’s tenure real average weekly wages went up 9 percent. During the Biden-Harris years, real average weekly wages fell over 4 percent. 

Under Trump, median family income rose roughly $6,000. Nearly five times the paltry $1,300 gain under President Biden. 

That’s the affordability crisis. And people know it. 

Personal borrowing costs for mortgages, cars, credit cards sky-rocketed — even though they’re not part of the Consumer Price Index. 

This is a huge kitchen-table issue. Affordability. A crisis. Mr. Vance mentioned this six times during the debate. 

Every time Mr. Walz started throwing out some complicated big government spending plan, Mr. Vance would gracefully acknowledge that there might be something good someplace in one of those plans, but Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had more than three-and-a-half years to do it. 

Why didn’t they do it? 

Including immigration. And Mr. Vance mentioned illegal immigration 15 times. While Mr. Walz supported a Senate bill that would have allowed millions of illegals to continue to come over the border.

Illegal immigration and crime: Nothing hard to understand. Mr. Vance made it easy. And he was polite. And he occasionally agreed on something with Mr. Walz. 

Yet he would remind that day one of any Harris idea was 1,400 days ago. And this went along with the seven times he mentioned three-and-a-half years. 

All of this is so effective. A few key points repeated a number of times with good humor and friendliness. 

And anyone could see that Mr. Vance is a very smart young man who knows a lot about all kinds of policies, as he ran circles around Mr. Walz. 

Feature Mr. Vance’s closing statement: “We have the greatest country, the most beautiful country, the most incredible people anywhere in the world. But they’re not going to be able to achieve their full dreams with the broken leadership that we have in Washington, they’re not going to be able to live they’re American dream if we do the same thing that we’ve been doing for the last three and a half years.”

Of course he won the debate. And for those of us who watched it, we saw, dare I say it, presidential timber.  

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.