Kaine’s interruptions were annoying and undercutting him, until he sucked Pence into doing the same.
The quality of the questions were on the surface pretty good, although the inability of the moderator to keep things on target also undercut.
Pence was smoother, BUT -— he denied what he had said about Putin, and he denied what Trump had said. I think the Clinton campaign will be be able to to hit back on that.
Ultimately, unless Trump can regain some of how much he has lost from college educated White women, he cannot win. On two issues, the debate and responses played to Clinton’s advantage.
First, the issue of spread of nuclear weapons. Trump has undoubtedly advocate letting additional nations get nukes and that is scary for many of those women.
Second, the issues at the end, once the issue became abortion it was advantage Dems, because the vast majority of that demographic favors some level of choice.
I do not think this debate will have much if any effect. I suspect that other issues will soon eclipse any interest in this.
Frankly, I have no interest in considering whether Pence helped himself for a future nomination.
I do think that some of what Trump tweeted will undercut whatever gain he might have marginally gotten from Pence’s performance.
I did not follow closely of what others were saying.
I have listened to the talking heads on MS-NBC.
I am sorry we did NOT get to climate change, because that would have shown how much Pence rejects science — and that would have played very well with Millennials.
I think Kaine lost the opportunity to really lay the wood by interrupting as much as he did. On the surface for the first half Pence came across better, but he got sucked in. At the end, the last impression Kaine left was good, but the question is whether that would have fully registered.
Both candidates tried to get through their talking points. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it was annoying because it was so far out of context.
On CONTENT, Kaine was far superior. If someone actually cared about the content of proposals, there was no contest. But for too many people that really does not matter.
UPDATE I have now scanned quite a bit of commentary from a variety of sources on Twitter.
Knowing how quickly the Clinton campaign can turn things around, I am expecting that by tomorrow morning there will be a video some like this
Kaine — Your candidate said X
Pence — no he didn’t
Video of Trump saying X
Or even of Pence saying Y.
Which leads me to wonder
I think Kaine had several key goals
- put Pence on the spot of defending Trump on specifics, or not
- hammering away on several key issues, including the taxes
- hoping to suck Pence in (which he did to some degree)
Thus the interruption may have been a deliberate strategy to ensure getting the points in, again and again.
Immediate result — no real difference in the race
over the next few days — if I am write on a video response taking advantage of this, a mild advantage to Clinton.
Two other notes
- right wingers are going nuts. Chris Hayes tweeted that the frog folks on the Alt-R were beserk at Pence for his attacks on Russian
- there were tons of comments on Pence’s lack of defending Trump and perhaps working for himself. One tweet I saw said it was the second debate in a row where a Mike had failed Trump.
Make of all this what you will.