Technical debating matters a LOT.
There’s a Malcolm Gladwell podcast (I know, I know) where he talks about him debating some top tier debater from Oxford University.
Gladwell clearly had the better argument and was right, but he got absolutely destroyed by the debate guy.
Walz won’t win on likeability and good policy. He might win but because he’s very very good at the verbal judo where he turns everything back to popular policy.
Whether that stacks up in a long form debate will be interesting
I don’t disagree that both he and his policies are unlikable. I just think of him as the maxed-out rendition of the “debate me, you coward” right-wing character on Twitter who is well-practiced in the sort of tangles that a debate presents. It’s the type of thing that doesn’t lend itself to full-on collapse on a debate stage. It’s the sort of thing where he could potentially win on points if it was competitive college debate or something, but where voters will find it too off-putting for it to actually result in a “win.”
I also don’t take it lightly that Walz apparently told Harris he was bad at debating during vetting. Granting that people are falsely humble sometimes, that would be an odd example of it.
Ultimately none of it is going to matter, VP debates never mean a damn thing and the best you can hope for is Admiral Stockdale chasing down a speeding car on foot in an SNL sketch afterward, but I just think that the satisfying experience people are imagining is less likely than they think.
Clarification: Vance asked why it was insulting to put Swiss cheese on a cheesesteak.
— Philadelphia Inquirer Politics (@PoliticsINQ) August 19, 2024
Yea JD is a fake fraud piece of shit but he is exactly the kind of douche who would excel at a debate while being utterly unappealing to every human watching
Assuming there were some reasonable way of actually determining winner I think I would put my bet on JD if he’s getting odds
I did competitive debate in both hs and college so I’ve seen ~ 1 million Vance types. He won’t come off as Mr. Wanna Have a Beer With, but he’ll be fine. He’s a smart, confident white dude in a suit which means the battle is already 60 % won. He’s good at yelling about the media which will let him fillibuster some of the tougher questions AND give good clips for social media folks to rt as they gush about him owning the libs. His ideas are weird, but at least he can cosplay as someone who thinks about policy and has takes (unlike Palin who just didn’t seem to think about politics much at all)
I predict Walz wins on points, but no knockout blow
“Got absolutely destroyed” is generally a subjective evaluation depending on who is watching. It’s why in the majority of debates, lots of people think their guy “clearly” beat the other guy, when it was mostly two guys rambling for an hour.
The other thing is that presidential debates bear little resemblance to actual academic debate. The kind most popular in the UK is different from the more common forms here, but the parliamentary style has become increasingly popular here as well. But in any case, the format of those debates are setup so that you are actually having an argument with the other party.
Presidential debates are just two guys doing speeches about various topics without the clash that defines a real debate. To call them debates is really kind of a stretch, but I suppose it’s as good a term as any.
So technical debating does matter, if you are having an actual debate and being judged by people who judge them. And for the most part, the criteria people use to judge are generally the same things that a reasonably intelligent open-minded person would use when listening to two people argue about something. But the audience is a highly polarized group of people with average intelligence. To do well in their eyes, “technical debating” is not unhelpful, as many of the skills transfer over, but it is also not critically important because a Presidential debate is only a debate in the loosest sense of the word.
Being unappealing is losing the debate. A formal debate and political debate are radically different things and why ted Cruz could be a champion college debater and lose to a random politician.
I mean other than that one debate they generally don’t matter, and they especially don’t matter when it’s the numbers 2s on the stage. It will barely get a full news cycle before it goes down the memory hole whether it’s terrible or great for Walz/Vance.
I think Vance will say some things that will scare people. And I don’t mean liberals. I think moderate people will come away wondering WTF
That’s the other thing, the “winner” of the debate will be decided by one or two things someone says.
Yea “to every human” was hyperbole, there are always going to be some that find him appealing
What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t going to be some one-sided blowout and that Vance likely has good enough technical debate skills that it’ll be one of those events where both sides think they won. He will do well enough to get a few idiots to write WSJ and NYT and WaPo opinion pieces about how well he did.
Walz just needs to tie one or two answers to taking a losing football team to state champs. Debate won.
It’s almost never a one-sided blowout. The closes thing to that would have been the last one and even that wasn’t a blowout where anyone could say Trump won in a technical sense.
It would be like if you had a debate and one guy makes terrible arguments in English and they second guy does the whole thing in Portuguese. The first guy didn’t “beat” the second guy. The second guy just DQ’d himself.
The best debate I ever saw was in the post debate between philosopher Shelly Kagan vs Christian apologist William Lane Craig on whether god is necessary for morality.
Craig wins the debates easily because he is well studied at how to win debates, but it was a different ballgame once they moved into a sit-down Q&A portion where they could speak directly to each other.
didn’t Kerry get roasted for ordering provolone on his? Swiss seems 4000x worse
Don’t know if it’s an unpopular opinion, but whiz is an abomination. So is American cheese.
Coastal elitist ITT
I like Swiss, but it doesn’t melt all that well. It’s more of a cold cuts cheese.
Whiz maybe. lol at hating cheeseburgers!
Provolone is an acceptable choice. Kerry, unfortunately, ordered Swiss on his.