The vice presidential debate doesn’t matter. It never matters. And if you want proof, consider Lloyd Bentsen. In 1988, Bentsen scored the biggest knockout blow in the history of vice presidential debates, hitting Dan Quayle in a moment so vivid that it remains the most memorable moment of the entire campaign.
And what did Bentsen’s ticket get for it? Not only did Dukakis-Bentsen lose—they couldn’t even carry Bentsen’s home state.
So these things don’t matter. At all.
But in the Sagarin rankings of meaninglessness, tonight’s Mike Pence-Tim Kaine joust probably tops the list. Here’s why:
1) No one knows who they are. More than 40 percent of voters literally don’t know who these guys are. While 67 percent of voters say they don’t know enough about Kaine to have an opinion about him, 57 percent say the same about Pence.
2) Neither man has a future in national politics. This isn’t Bush-Ferraro, or Gore-Kemp, where the winner gets an eventual shot at the White House and the loser gets a set of steak knives. Not by a long shot.
If Clinton loses, Kaine goes back to the Senate and never ventures out any further, since he’s out of step with the national party. If Clinton wins, he’s her Joe Biden.
If Trump loses, Pence is a disgraced conservative who compromised himself on essentially every issue. If Trump wins, then he’s just keeping the VP seat warm until one of the Trump children are ready to inherit their father’s Oval Office.
Either way, this is the last stop for both of them.
3) They’re uninteresting, mostly-known quantities. With the Palin-Biden debate, anything could happen. Biden was Crazy Uncle Joe and no one had any idea if Palin could even string two sentences together.
Yet despite that fact that voters don’t know who Pence and Kaine are, people in politics do. Both of these guys have been around the block. There’s no suspense as to whether or not they’ll be vomit on their shoes and if either of them says something interesting, it’ll be a first.
They’re such stolid, medium-talent veterans that they’re incapable of surprise.
4) This was by design. Bill Clinton chose Al Gore in order to double-down on the proposition of young and vigorous New Democrats. Palin and Kemp were chosen to bring excitement to moribund campaigns. Dick Cheney was chosen to give gravitas. John Edwards was picked to bring the party together, since he finished second in the primaries. Sometimes veeps are picked to balance the ticket ideologically, or regionally.
Both Pence and Kaine were chosen to specifically for their ability to disappear and not obscure their principals. What that means for the debate is that the veep candidates themselves won’t be even minimally on trial—they’ll be acting entirely as proxies for Trump and Clinton.
5) The debate they have won’t even be interesting as an intellectual exercise because 2016 is not a campaign of ideas. The two presidential nominees are both left-of-center on nearly every issue—religious freedom, trade, entitlements. Instead, the entire campaign is about characterological disqualification. The real question being put to voters is whether Clinton is too corrupt and untrustworthy, or Trump is too corrupt and unstable, to be president. (Spoiler: The answer is “yes.”)
So don’t expect to tune into the debate to get a sense of the competing visions being offered to America from conservatives and progressives, like you got in 2000 when Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman staged what was probably the most edifying and intellectually serious exchange in the history of televised debates.
6) And even if there were a clash of ideas, both Pence and Kaine are crossways with their principals. Even if, for instance, the discussion of free trade does come up, what would Pence and Kaine say? Both are personally in favor it. But neither Trump nor Clinton do. So you’d witness the spectacle of two men who know better making arguments they don’t believe for positions they know to be wrong.
Which, come to think of it, is perfectly fitting for this campaign.
