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.

Tim Walz stumbled and struggled on the debate stage in New York last night, while J. D. Vance spoke smoothly and effectively.

I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction. Yet theater reviews aside, three issues of substance stayed with me.

The first is that Vance truly is no friend of Israel’s.

The evening opened with a question about yesterday’s Iranian missile barrage. This question presented Vance with a trap. On the one hand, Vance’s party wants to criticize the Biden-Harris administration as weak on defense, soft on Iran. On the other hand, Vance is himself intensely hostile to U.S. alliances. He has led the fight to deny aid to Ukraine. He keeps company with conspiracy theorists who promote anti-Semitism. Vance managed that contradiction in the debate mostly by evading the question about what the U.S. might do to support Israel. Israel’s actions, he said, were a matter for Israel to decide; beyond that, he had nothing to say.

[Read: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

But the trick in evading a question is that the evasion works only if it goes unnoticed. This evasion does not. If you care about Israel, what you heard was nothing where there needed to be something. He offered no solidarity with the Israeli families who had spent the evening in bomb shelters because of the most massive country-to-country ballistic-missile attack in the history of the world. No friendship, no sympathy, for the state of Israel. Above all, what Vance delivered—Israel will do what Israel will do—was a message of abandonment, not a message of support. If you wondered what kind of voice Vance would be in the Situation Room when Israel is under threat, now you know: not a friend.

The second enduring impression is that Vance has thoroughly analyzed the Republican problem on abortion and decided that the only option is to lie his way out.

When the Trump Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, it opened the door to a new regime of state-level policing and punishment of American women. After this year’s election, Republicans may or may not have the votes in Congress to pass a national abortion ban. That’s not the most important question, however. The most important question is: Will a Republican administration use executive power to aid Republican states in their surveillance of American women? Vance’s own record on that is emphatic: Yes, he will, and, yes, he has.

Onstage, Vance disavowed his record. He professed support for generous investment in maternal health and child nutrition. But his record has not disappeared because he denied it. Vance’s actual preferred health policy is to restore to health insurers the right to treat people with preexisting conditions differently—to do less risk-sharing, not more, even if that leaves many Americans without affordable insurance. Women and children face more health risks than able-bodied men. Vance’s policies are the direct opposite of Vance’s slogans.

American women have had their privacy and autonomy ripped away from them—and Vance offered nothing to protect them. He was able to purr his way past his own cat-lady comments. But if American women were wondering, What happens to us under a Trump-Vance administration?, they have their answer: Your sex life and reproductive rights will be subject to government control in a way it has not been for half a century.

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

The third enduring impression is that Vance remains all in on Trump plots to overthrow the election. At the podium last night, Vance refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. That’s not just a lie about history. It’s a threat to the future.

Right now, Republicans in key states are working to bend the law to convert voting defeats into Electoral College victories. They hope to disenfranchise unwanted voters, to disqualify unwanted votes, to use a bag of old Jim Crow tricks and some new ones to defeat the people’s verdict in 2024. Vance’s answer about Trump’s violent coup after the last election expresses his willingness to support and assist his party’s stealthier subversion of the coming election.

You have been warned.

For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.

And then things went off the rails.

In the final question of the debate, moderators asked the Ohio senator about threats to democracy, and in particular his statement that as vice president he would not have certified the 2020 election. In his response, Vance tried to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, riot and Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the election, revealing why he would be a dangerous vice president.

Vance claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20” and said, “I believe we do have a threat to democracy in this country, but it’s not the threat that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It’s the threat of censorship.” This strange misdirection requires Americans to disbelieve what they saw and what Trump said in favor of an extremely online conservative talking point.

[David A. Graham: Don’t let them pretend this didn’t happen]

Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, sniffed blood and asked Vance point-blank whether he believed Trump had lost the 2020 election. Vance refused to answer, and instead rambled again about censorship. “You guys wanted to kick people off Facebook,” he said, as though that allegation was worse than stealing an election.

A vice-presidential debate is important not because it is likely to shift the polls—it isn’t—but because it tells voters something about the policies of the two people who could become president. Although both candidates dodged the moderators’ direct questions, voters may well have gained a more complete understanding of the two parties’ platforms on climate change, the economy, and immigration, and how widely they diverge. Both candidates were civil, even polite. But Vance’s answer on fundamental issues of democracy—or rather, his refusal to commit to it—suggested that such a basic question should have arisen far earlier in the night.

[David Frum: How Harris roped a dope]

For most of the 90 minutes, Walz was clearly struggling. Ahead of the debate, both sides tried to set expectations, with Democrats warning that Walz was historically a shaky debater and the Trump campaign insisting he was great at it. The Democrats were closer to the mark. Walz came out seeming nervous, and though he calmed down, he never looked comfortable. He frequently sounded like he was spinning his wheels, with none of the casual conversationalism that has been his trademark in his brief time in the national spotlight. He was somber and effortful.

The Minnesota governor’s worst moment came when he was asked why he’d said he was in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when in fact he’d arrived later that summer. Vance gave a circuitous answer about his personal biography, copping to occasionally being a “knucklehead.” Only when pressed in a follow-up did he finally just admit he’d misspoken, falling short of the image of the plainspoken plainsman he’s cultivated so carefully. Walz’s best moments came when he was most personal, such as when he talked about Minnesota farmers experiencing the effects of climate change or how meeting the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting shaped his views on gun control.

[Mark Leibovich: Tim Walz is too good at this]

The best evidence of Walz’s poor performance was the fact that Vance, who has been a gaffe machine and can seem wooden and impersonal—“weird,” in Walz’s parlance—came across well by comparison. He seemed relatively smooth and competent even though he tried to change the subject or twist the context when asked to defend Trump’s past actions. For example, rather than defend Trump’s family-separation policy at the border, Vance said that “the real family-separation policy in our country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s open southern border.” (You would never have known from Vance’s answers that Harris is vice president or that Joe Biden even exists.) Pressed on Trump’s bogus claim that climate change is a “hoax,” Vance gave a misleading answer about Harris’s energy policy. When moderators clarified details about legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance complained that debate rules banned fact-checking.

On subjects such as abortion, where Vance’s past statements have been controversial, he was able to appear thoughtful and reasonable. Explaining why he had supported a national ban on abortion in the past but no longer did, he cited the results of a 2023 referendum in Ohio that supported abortion rights. “What I learned from that, Nora, is that we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust,” Vance said. Notably, this isn’t the same as taking a clear position on abortion. Trump has waffled on his position, but has boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade.

[Read: The next Republican leader]

This kind of spin, however misleading, is a bit of a throwback to politics the way they used to be practiced. For much of the night, the debate was strikingly boring, in the best way—unlike the NASCAR vibe that we’ve become accustomed to since 2016, where viewers are watching to see if there’s a fiery crash. Vance’s final, appalling answer about January 6, though, was a reminder that Trump is a destructive force, which his running-mate, of all people, can’t hope to escape.