Trump aides believe a polished JD Vance has made the campaign more palatable | US elections 2024

Donald Trump’s senior advisers thought JD Vance put on a skillful debate over Tim Walz, people close to Trump say, making his campaign seem palatable despite the former president’s increasingly vitriolic threats, such as promising to kill his perceived enemies to prosecute.

Campaign aides also believed that Vance was shelving the narrative about his image and likely appeared in a more positive light to undecided voters after a few months of brutal criticism for making disparaging remarks about women as “childless cat ladies.”

Vance’s popularity problem was perhaps the main priority for Trump’s senior advisers because they saw it as potentially solvable and, if so, beneficial to the Trump campaign since it was less than five weeks until Election Day, making for a vanishingly close race against Kamala Harris has become.

Afterward, Trump predictably claimed that Vance had won the debate, but a CBS News poll confirmed that in close elections, vice-presidential debates always matter less than attempts to increase voter turnout.

In the post-debate poll, 42% of respondents said Vance won the debate, 41% gave Walz the win and 17% said it was a tie – suggesting that the key takeaway remains that it in which campaign is unlikely to play a significant role, winning each of the seven contested states in November.

By and large, Trump’s advisers were relieved that Vance seemed more polished in his answers than Walz and that Vance was largely able to deliver attack lines without interruption or immediate fact-checking by Walz from CBS News anchors Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan .

They were also relieved that Vance got away with Trump’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and led to a criminal prosecution , to sugarcoat.

Vance falsely claimed that Trump did not want to destroy Obamacare, but rather a bipartisan solution to affordable health care, when in reality Trump was thwarted in the Senate by Senator John McCain. As for the attack on the Capitol, Trump never called in the National Guard and refused to repel the rioters until the attack was already over.

Trump’s vice presidential nominee was taken to task on uncomfortable territory — namely abortion and gun violence, after which Vance once said his policy solution to preventing mass school shootings was to have stronger doors and windows.

But Trump aides said after the debate that Walz had enough of his own mistakes to distract from Vance’s shaky answers.

In particular, the Trump aides found that Walz misspoke about gun violence when he said he had befriended some of the school shooters — he clearly wanted to speak about the victims of the shooting — and then struggled to explain why He falsely claimed that he had visited Hong Kong at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

“Tonight, Senator Vance proved why President Trump chose him to be his running mate. Together, they form the strongest and most dynamic presidential candidate ever and will win on November 5,” Trump campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement.