About half an hour into last night’s vice-presidential debate, the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan turned to Tim Walz and asked a question that the Minnesota governor had to have known would come. “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989,” she said, noting that new reporting suggests Walz didn’t go to Asia until months later. “Can you explain that discrepancy?”

“Look,” Walz began, “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies ’til the street lights come on.” He went on to explain how, as a teacher, he’d taken young people on educational visits to China. “I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.”

Kamala Harris chose Walz, most observers have agreed, for his Everyman aesthetic and fluency in retail politics. And so far, the affable former high-school football coach and hype man for Menards has mostly received glowing reviews. He is much more adept than his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance, at engaging with voters as a regular guy.

Which is why he should have had a better answer last night. And Walz’s failure to provide a coherent, succinct correction for an entirely predictable inquiry about one of his flubs suggests ill-preparedness for a spotlight that is only going to get brighter—and harsher—in the weeks to come.

Vance delivered a slick debate performance, though it would be a mistake to call it a “win” when he engaged in so much sinister revisionist history. In what would turn out to be the most striking moment of the night, Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. The senator from Ohio also mischaracterized Trump’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Vance claimed, falsely, that he’s never supported a national abortion ban.

Walz, for his part, deployed a few effective jabs. “That’s a damning nonanswer,” he said simply, after Vance’s election-denial tap dancing. Another time, in an exchange about gun-violence prevention and mental-health care, Walz looked right at the camera and said, “Sometimes it just is the guns. It’s just the guns.”

But when you’re running a campaign against liars and bloviators, it becomes all the more important not to lie or bloviate. And the Walz fumble on China was sloppy enough—and early enough in the proceedings—to feel significant. After his first answer, CBS’s Brennan gave him another chance to clarify. “All I said on this was, I got there that summer—and misspoke on this,” Walz said, before taking a long pause. “So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

The bungled response made the moment worse than it needed to be. And calling himself a “knucklehead” came off more cringeworthy than charming. But it wasn’t the first time Walz has been ensnared by his own nonanswers. In August, a video surfaced on social media in which Walz referred to weapons “that I carried in war” to explain his support for an assault-weapons ban. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, but was never deployed to a combat zone. Asked about it in a sit-down interview, Walz had an exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash that followed a now-familiar pattern.

“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed, actually, in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.

“I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about our children being shot in schools and around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am,” Walz said.

Bash pressed. “Did you misspeak, as the campaign has said?”

“I said we were talking about—in this case, this was after a school shooting—the ideas of carrying these weapons of war,” Walz replied, “and my wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct.”

Some Democrats dismiss these fumbles. “So he had a bad answer to something that happened 35 years ago. Next!” the political strategist James Carville told me. That’s right in the sense that Walz’s remarks seem more slippery than nefarious. He isn’t obfuscating, as Vance is, about the results of the 2020 election.

Still, Walz’s sloppiness highlights a bigger problem with media accessibility and versatility for the Harris campaign. Both Democratic principals have been reticent, seemingly reluctant to engage with the press; lately, Walz especially has been tightly bubble-wrapped. Unlike the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Walz does not regularly appear on cable-news programs or spar with reporters at campaign events. He is out of practice, and it shows.

This morning, perhaps as an attempt at post-debate cleanup, the Harris campaign announced that Walz is expanding his schedule. The governor will travel to several swing states in the next few weeks, and do a lot more media appearances, including a podcast, a late-night-TV hit, and two national-TV interviews. That will surely help Walz get in some badly needed reps. Perhaps he’s kicking himself that he didn’t before last night.

In the lead-up to last night’s vice-presidential debate between J. D. Vance and Tim Walz, CBS’s decision not to have moderators provide live fact-checking became a minor controversy. One pundit argued that this amounted to giving the truth-challenged Vance “license to lie,” and many of the Democratic faithful voiced similar complaints on social media. Mother Jones went so far as to precheck the debate. The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign declared: “JD Vance is going to lie tonight. A lot. So we are going to give you the facts.” It then fact-checked the event in real time, pointing out Vance’s dodges and deceptions.

At one moment early in the debate, the moderators seemed to struggle to suppress their journalistic impulse to correct the record. Contradicting Vance’s talking points about “illegal immigrants” in Ohio, CBS’s Margaret Brennan said, “Just to clarify for our viewers: Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status,” earning an irritated objection from Vance. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he protested.

Other than that one “clarification,” the moderators mostly didn’t. But contrary to what liberals might believe, the lack of fact-checking probably didn’t help or hurt Vance (and by extension, Donald Trump). The uncomfortable truth is that if, journalistically, news outlets like CBS have a duty to contest lies, politically, fact-checking is less magic bullet and more magic beans.

[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]

Since Trump rode down his gaudy tower’s escalator to announce his presidential bid nearly a decade ago, the public has been inundated with a deluge of his lies. And as the media, voters, and Trump’s opponents attempted to figure out how to rein in a politician of unprecedented perfidy, fact-checking and combatting disinformation found new salience in public life. In the intervening years, fact-checking has transformed from a necessary piece of journalistic due diligence into a fetish object for Trump-weary Democrats. Some Democrats came to expect too much from fact-checking, and often seem to accord debunking a kind of political power to beat back Trumpism.

The 45th president has been subjected to a sustained fact-checking campaign for the better part of a decade. I do not think it’s an exaggeration to say that no politician in American history has been fact-checked more thoroughly than Donald Trump. And yet, all those years of myth-busting have had next to zero impact on his electoral viability. He managed to attract new voters in the last election. And even as he spouts racist nonsense about immigrants—thoroughly myth-busted by journalists—he is increasing his share of non-college-educated voters of color in this election.

My point isn’t that Democrats should give up on fact-checking, but that they need to remember that debunking is not a substitute for politics. At the presidential debate last month, when Trump repeated the conspiracy that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the moderator duly corrected this bit of xenophobic fearmongering. For her part, Harris seemed to revel in Trump’s lies being called out live on air. “Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing, seeming to enjoy the moment.

What Harris didn’t do was take the opportunity to articulate anything about her worldview or policy positions on immigration, or point out that Springfield had welcomed immigrants as a way to combat the economic toll of decades of deindustrialization, which was itself the result of conservative trade policies that helped offshore manufacturing. Basking in the glow of the freshly checked fact, she forgot to outline a positive agenda, as though beating Trump were a game of whack-a-mole in which you win by smacking down all the fibs that pop up.

Does anyone really believe that the kind of voter who hears Trump blather about cat-barbecuing immigrants—and isn’t immediately disgusted—is likely to be moved by a CNN moderator tsk-tsking him and explaining that, actually, that isn’t true? Is any right-leaning swing voter or nose-holding Republican actually going to rethink their vote when they log on to the CBS website—if they even bother—and discover that Vance lied when he claimed that Harris is not invested in clean air or that she had been appointed “Border Czar”? For that matter, is any Harris-pilled Democrat going to rethink their vote when they find out that Walz lied about being in China during Tiananmen Square?

[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]

Arguably, CBS should have fact-checked the debate, because it is a news outlet, news outlets provide journalism, and journalists fact-check. But journalists should also be honest about the limits of the practice. Because calling out every falsehood is impossible, journalists are forced to make judgment calls about which lies are significant enough to merit dispelling. Republicans distrust that selection process, rolling their eyes at misinformation-wrangling, which they believe is unfairly directed at their co-partisans, while Democratic dishonesty is given a pass. And all too often, journalists call out brazen lies while committing lies of omission themselves. Many journalists spent months ignoring the truth that Joe Biden was deteriorating before their eyes, and had the audacity to tell the American public that videos of the octogenarian president looking visibly confused were something called “cheap fakes.”

Pinning political hopes on fact-checking isn’t just bad for journalism, which gets reduced to a partisan instrument. It’s also bad for Democrats, causing them to forget to make a clear case to the American public that they have better policies. Donald Trump remains a fixture in American life not because of insufficient fact-checking—everyone, including his supporters, knows that he’s a bullshit artist—but because politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, have failed to make a convincing case that they have truths on offer that are better than his lies.

Here’s what you could have had: That’s what I kept thinking throughout the vice-presidential debate. The head-to-head between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance was a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump—a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal.

How soon will that day come? The most surprising moment of the debate arrived right at the end, when it became clear that the outwardly subservient Vance is already plotting his post-Trump future. Don’t tell the mad old king, but his most loyal baron is looking at the crown and wondering how well it would fit his head.

More on that later, but first let’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. Onstage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, offered slick, coherent, and blessedly short answers to the CBS moderators’ questions. (The Bulwark compared him to a “smoother, 2016-vintage Marco Rubio.”) Tim Walz, the Democrat, started nervously, quickly discovering that being folksy in an empty room is hard—although he certainly didn’t go down in Dan Quayle–style flames. The debate was cordial—too cordial for many Democrats, who wondered why Walz was not delivering the smackdowns they longed to see.

Both candidates committed political sins well within the expected range: Vance freely ignored the first question on Iran, and instead recapped his appealing backstory for any viewers unfamiliar with Hillbilly Elegy. Walz dodged and weaved around a question about his inflated biography, before eventually conceding that he “misspoke” when he claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The two men also managed to have several substantive exchanges on policy, arguing over what we can learn from Finland’s approach to gun crime, and to what extent mental-health issues interact with mass shootings. All of that was a reminder of what American political debates used to be like in the distant past of, oh, the early 2010s.

The pundits have largely called this debate for Vance, who successfully downplayed his unpopular positions on abortion and health care, and took several opportunities to push his key ideological theme of protectionism. America needs to become more self-sufficient, and not just in heavy industry, he said, because “the pharmaceuticals that we put in the bodies of our children are manufactured by nations that hate us.” That line sounded less paranoid than it once might have, after former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed last week that, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, he had flirted with sending a commando team to recover vaccines held by the European Union.

The audience polls were closer, however. Walz recovered from his shaky start to deliver several punchy lines. On gun violence, he talked about his own teenage son witnessing a shooting, drawing an empathetic response from Vance, as well as his meeting with the parents of the pupils killed at Sandy Hook—realizing that he had a picture of his own child on the office wall, when the people in front of him had lost their own children. Asked to explain why he changed his mind and now supported a ban on assault weapons, Walz said simply: “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents.”

All very civil, sane, normal. Very demure. Every so often, though, an alternate reality began to bleed into the CBS studio. Or rather—our reality began to bleed in. The one where Donald Trump is the Republican candidate. The clearest signal was Vance’s frequent tic of referring to his running mate: Donald Trump’s energy policy, Donald Trump’s border policy, Donald Trump’s wisdom and courage. By contrast, Walz mentioned Kamala Harris more rarely.

You and I both know why Vance name-dropped with the zest of an out-of-work actor. Trump is one of those people who picks up a political memoir and flicks to the index to see how often he is mentioned. Over the past eight years, the entire Republican Party has reshaped itself around his giant ego, and it is filled with many men much smarter than Trump—men like J. D. Vance, in fact—who believe they can manipulate him through flattery. The former president won’t have been paying attention to the finer details of Finnish policy, but instead listening for his name. Throughout the debate, the Trump campaign’s rapid-response team blasted out “fact-checks,” but the candidate’s own TruthSocial feed rambled through his usual obsessions: the CBS anchors’ low ratings; paeans to his own greatness and sagacity—“America was GREAT when I was President,” “I SAVED our Country from the China Virus,” “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN”—and praise for “a great defense of me” by Vance.

The big mystery of this moment in American politics is that Trump’s flaws—his self-obsession, his lack of self-control, his casual lies—are so obvious. And yet all attempts to replace him with a lab-grown alternative, with those flaws removed, have failed. (Had Vance run in the Republican primary, I suspect he would have done about as well as Ron DeSantis.) The Republican base loves the chaos and the drama and the darkness that Trump offers, and resists all attempts to replace those qualities with boring competence.

All the way through, the times Vance really seemed in trouble were when he had to defend Trump’s behavior, and his own switch from critic to sycophant. He gave an outrageous—but superficially convincing—explanation for how he went from thinking Trump was “America’s Hitler” to its last and only hope. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” he said. In the same way, the only real flash of the dislikable “childless cat ladies” version of Vance—familiar to me from edgy podcasts and cozy Fox News interviews—came when he had to defend Trump’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When the moderators noted that the Haitians in question were in America legally, Vance replied: “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check.” Not exactly the response of a man confident that he is telling the truth.

Right at the end, Vance was asked whether he would challenge the election results in ways that violated the law and the Constitution. “I think that we’re focused on the future,” he said, before jazz-hands-ing into standard Republican talking points about the threat of Big Tech censorship. (The two flagship cases of this in right-wing lore involve Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID discussions on Facebook and Spotify.) Harris, Vance said, would “like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.”

At this, Walz found a new gear. The Folksy Midwestern Dad was now not angry, but disappointed in his wayward son, who had returned long after curfew, smelling suspiciously of weed. Vance, Walz’s demeanor implied, had let himself down. “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” he began, before mounting a devastating attack of Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. “He lost this election, and he said he didn’t. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died.” As Walz moved into a riff about being a football coach, telling his team that playing fair was more important than winning at any cost, Vance reflexively began to nod slightly.  

In his response, Vance tried his best—pointing out that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Walz shot back: “January 6 was not Facebook ads.” (We might also note that, whatever her misgivings about the election, Clinton attended Trump’s inauguration, explicitly acknowledging the peaceful transfer of power to an opponent. By contrast, Trump did not stay in Washington, D.C., to watch Joe Biden get sworn in as president, but instead flew off to Florida in a huff.)

Walz then asked Vance flat out whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Again, the Republican could only offer a cop-out—“Tim, I’m focused on the future”—and a pivot back to Big Tech censorship, which allowed Walz to go in for the kill. “This is not a debate,” he said. “It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

The extraordinary part of Vance’s waffle here isn’t that he refused to tell the truth—to say the 2020 election was valid. The really remarkable thing is that the Republican vice-presidential nominee can’t bring himself to agree with his boss and say that the 2020 election was stolen. In the past four years, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to challenge the results, the candidate himself encouraged the crowds on January 6 to protest them—culminating in threats of violence to Congress and then–Vice President Pence—and his stump speeches regularly feature riffs about the issue. This year, he has suggested that he will lose only if the Democrats “cheat like hell.”

Vance did not echo this language, nor did he repeat his previous suggestion that he would not have done what Pence did in January 2021, which was to certify the results. On the most fundamental issue of this year’s contest—whether America is still a functioning democracy with free and fair elections—the Republican ticket is not entirely in sync.

Now, I’m beyond being surprised that Vance wouldn’t tell the truth. But I am intrigued that, when given the biggest platform of his career to date, he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either. After so many humiliating concessions, this is the point when Vance decided, to adapt the famous phrase of the poet E. E. Cummings, “There is some shit I will not eat.” He switched so deftly to his talking points about misinformation that much of the instant punditry missed his sleight of hand.

Why not agree with his boss about what happened in 2020? The inevitable conclusion must be that J. D. Vance—smart, ambitious, and only 40 years old—is already contemplating the post-Trump future. Once the former president is out of the picture, what will be the point of harping on his personal bitterness about being rejected by the American people? The voters of 2028 or 2032 will undoubtedly care more about gas prices and housing costs than an old man’s grievance. You might as well keep doing Trump’s crazy material about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

By any measure, Vance did quite well last night. But I wonder if Trump noticed that, amid all the name-drops and the flattery, his running mate is “focused on the future”—a future that doesn’t include him.