Vice presidential debates don’t matter, we have been assured over and over. No one votes for vice president or a presidential nominee for her or his choice of running mate. You can go back and look at snap polls taken after past vice presidential debates and find basically zero correlation with the final election results.

All that said, the debate between Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) may turn out to matter. There’s no question, certainly, about who came out ahead. As Joe Klein, a heartfelt opponent of former President Donald Trump, led off, “Well, we saw the high school studies teacher destroyed by a professional politician last night. This wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close.”