Podcast / See How They Run / Oct 5, 2024

Did the Veep Debate Change Anything?

On this episode of See How They Run, Chris Lehmann and Jeet Heer discuss the Walz-Vance showdown.

The Nation Podcasts
The Nation Podcasts

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Did the Veep Debate Change Anything? | See How They Run
byThe Nation Magazine

On this episode of See How They Run, D.D. Guttenplan is joined by Chris Lehmann and Jeet Heer to discuss the Walz-Vance showdown.

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Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance (R-OH) and Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz greet each other ahead of a debate at the CBS Broadcast Center on October 1, 2024, in New York City.

Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance (R-OH) and Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz greet each other ahead of a debate at the CBS Broadcast Center on October 1, 2024, in New York City.

(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

This week’s election news was dominated by one thing: the vice presidential debate between Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance. The two met in New York on Tuesday for a surprisingly mild-mannered 90 minutes, and by the end of it, nobody could seem to agree on what it meant. Was Walz too soft? Did Vance let his extremist guard down? Did any of this even matter?

That’s where we come in. On this week’s See How They Run, we got our Washington bureau chief Chris Lehmann and our national affairs correspondent Jeet Heer on the line with D.D. Guttenplan to talk all things debate—what it signaled about the Harris and Trump campaigns, what impact it might have on the race, and what moments viewers will latch onto as we approach November. (One thing we did not discuss: whether Vance was wearing eyeliner. Some questions are made to be contemplated, not answered.)

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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D.D. Guttenplan

D.D. Guttenplan is a special correspondent for The Nation and the former host of The Nation Podcast. He served as editor of the magazine from 2019 to 2025 and, prior to that, as an editor at large and London correspondent. His books include American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, The Nation: A Biography, and The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority.

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