Power Up: Pence and Harris debate faceoff turns into a (very polished) game of dodgeball

The dodges come at a critical time: President Trump continues to recover from the coronavirus after being hospitalized over the weekend. Yet Pence did not answer the question of whether he’s spoken with his 74-year-old running mate about procedures and safeguards regarding presidential disability and succession. 

And Harris, too, who would also be the second-in-command to the oldest president in history, did not touch the question about the line of succession with a ten-foot pole, using her time instead to offer up her own mini-biography as she recounted the day Biden asked her to join the ticket.

Attack or self-critique?: “’I just want the record to reflect, she never answered the question,’ said Pence [at one point], summoning the sort of righteous indignation that can only come with having dodged even more questions than Harris (D-Calif.), the target of his accusation,” our colleague Ashley Parker writes of the 90-minute debate. 

• “Both candidates ducked, bobbed and wove past questions they didn’t want to answer, segueing into their preplanned talking points and attacks and largely ignoring [moderator USA Today’s Susan] Page, as well as her best efforts to enforce time limits.”

Here are some of the night’s biggest ducks: 

ON A POTENTIAL TRANSFER OF POWER SHOULD THE WORST HAPPEN: Page asked directly whether Pence, 61, “had a conversation or reached an agreement” with Trump, who is still recovering from coronavirus, about what to do if he’s sidelined – and whether he thinks he should. 

• Pence instead used the time to address Harris’s previous response that she would not take a vaccine that was pushed by Trump but not scientists. He accused Harris of “undermin[ing] public confidence in a vaccine” and claimed that the U.S. will have a vaccine before the end of this year. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield testified last month that a vaccine would not be widely available until next spring or summer.)
• Another deflection – in that same response – that “took the cake, though,” according to our colleague Aaron Blake, was Pence using his time to call out the swine flu as an example of the Obama administration’s failure to manage a pandemic. 

Harris, 55, when asked the same question, used her two minutes to outline “one of the most memorable days of my life” – the day Biden called her on Zoom to join the ticket as “the first woman of color and Black woman to be elected attorney general of the state of California” and “only the second Black woman ever elected to the United States Senate.” Page did not follow up with either candidate.

ON PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: Trump has repeatedly promised that he would protect coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions. But he has yet to a concrete alternative health care plan as his administration continues to fight in court to overturn Affordable Care Act – the law that enacted those protections. 

• Early in the debate, Pence said he hoped to “have a chance to talk about healthcare because Obamacare was a disaster. The American people remember it well. President Trump and I have a plan to improve health care and to protect pre-existing conditions for every American.” 
• He did not ultimately share any specifics: “When asked specifically how the Trump administration would protect Americans with preexisting conditions if the Affordable Care Act were struck down, Pence first returned to the general topic of [an] abortion question he’d previously sidestepped — ‘I couldn’t be more proud to serve as vice president to a president who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life,’ he said — before quickly moving on to accuse Harris of wanting to pack the Supreme Court with more justices,” Ashley writes. “The words of the actual question — ‘preexisting conditions’ — did not once leave his lips.” 

ON ABORTION: Neither Pence nor Harris directly answered a question on what their home states of Indiana and California respectively should do if the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling were overturned in the Supreme Court. 

Pence decided to veer into a completely unrelated topic – how Trump ordered the killing of “Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general, was responsible for the death of hundreds of American service members” – before broadly praising Trump’s court pick Amy Coney Barrett and lamenting what he described as attacks on her Christian faith. Pence later circled back to insist he himself was unapologetically pro-life and said he would “never presume how Judge Amy Coney Barrett would rule” if confirmed. 

• Harris, too, avoided answering this question. She used her time to rebut Pence’s criticism (“it’s insulting to suggest that we would knock anyone for their faith, and in fact Joe, if elected, will be only the second practicing Catholic as President of the United States,” she said) and hammer home her points about the need to protect the Affordable Care Act and pre-existing conditions, especially in a pandemic. 
• Harris’s only nod to the question about abortion was this: “And to your point, Susan, the issues before us couldn’t be more serious. There’s the issue of choice, and I will always fight for a woman’s right to make a decision about her own body. It should be her decision and not that of Donald Trump and the vice president, Michael Pence.”

ON THE NUMBER OF COURT JUSTICES: Biden in the last presidential debate declined to answer whether he would heed the left’s called to add more justices to the Supreme Court. Pence had a question for Harris of his own: “Are you and Joe Biden going to pack the court if Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed? …Your party is actually openly advocating, adding seats to the Supreme Court, which has had nine seats for 150 years, if you don’t get your way.” 

Harris responded by criticizing the push to confirm Barrett so close to the election, implying that this was a form of court packing in itself, without ever directly addressing any future plans. “The American people deserve to make the decision about who will be the next president of the United States,” she said. “And then that person can select who will serve for a lifetime on the highest court of our land.” 

ON A PLAN FOR CORONAVIRUS: Overall, the two clashed over the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, “with Mr. Pence defending the White House’s record without addressing its fundamental failures, while Ms. Harris accused him and President Trump of presiding over a catastrophic failure in public-health policy,” the New York Times Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin write. 

• “On no topic was Ms. Harris more assertive in confronting Mr. Pence than the coronavirus: She opened the debate by calling the White House’s response to the disease ‘the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country” and saying Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump had “forfeited their right to re-election.’”
• But: “When Page asked [Harris] about what the Biden administration would do differently about the coronavirus come January, Harris mostly talked about the Trump administration’s failings,” our colleague Aaron Blake writes. Harris said only that there was a plan for “a national strategy for contact tracing, for testing, for administration of the vaccine and making sure that it will be free for all,” and as Aaron notes, “more detail on that would have been nice.” 

ON CLIMATE CHANGE: Pence was asked directly if he believes that climate change poses an existential threat. Instead, Pence sharply turned to the topic of taxes – and falsely accused Biden of planning to ban fracking. 

• “As I said, Susan, the climate is changing. We’ll follow the science,” Pence responded. “But once again, Senator Harris is denying the fact that they’re going to raise taxes on every American. Joe Biden said twice in the debate last week that on day one he was going to repeal the Trump tax cuts.” 

Harris’s reply: “All right, so first of all I will repeat, and the American people know that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact… I will repeat that Joe Biden has been very clear that he thinks about growing jobs, which is why he will not increase taxes for anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year.”

But Harris also did not directly answer Page’s question about how the Green New Deal informs their campaign’s climate policy, despite repeated attacks by Pence on the issue. Page noted that Harris herself cosponsored the sweeping plan to reduce emissions, but Biden said he doesn’t support it – even as their campaign website lists it as a “crucial framework.” 

• Harris insisted Biden’s plan would create millions of jobs, including in clean and renewable energy, and that the vice president understands the devastating impact of climate change.
• “We will achieve net zero emissions by 2050, carbon neutral by 2035. Joe has a plan,” she said. “This has been a lot of talk from the Trump administration and really it has been to go backward instead of forward. We will also reenter the [Paris] climate agreement with pride.”

ON WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE ELECTION: “The vice president also ignored a question near the end on what he would do if Biden is declared the winner of the election but Trump refuses, as he has threatened previously, to accept a peaceful transition of power. Declining to answer, Pence instead raised the prospect of how changes to the mail-in voting rules could create ‘massive opportunity for voter fraud,’ before repeatedly reasserting his confidence that he and Trump will prevail on Election Day,” Ashley reports. 

• “I think we’re going to win this election,” Pence added. “I believe in all my heart, the President Donald Trump is going to be reelected for four more years.”

• Swine flu and covid-19 are apples and oranges: Pence claimed that if the swine flu was as lethal as the coronavirus then 2 million Americans would have died in 2009, when Biden was vice president. “Because the swine flu was not nearly as lethal as the novel coronavirus, there was not nearly as much need to halt its spread,” our colleagues write. “Even with 60 million infections, there were an estimated 12,500 deaths.” That death toll comes from an ”after-the-fact report, based on statistical modeling of excess mortality. The death toll at the time was much lower,” they note. The coronavirus has already killed some 210,000 people in the United States. 
• The Paycheck Protection Program did not save 50 million jobs: Pence claimed PPP, a part of the historically massive Cares Act, helped save 50 million jobs during the pandemic. But that estimate is based on the total number of workers for companies who were approved for loans. Reuters concluded after talking with economists that the actual number is between one and 14 million jobs. Our own colleagues have further reported that the Small Business Administration incorrectly reported employment figures to begin with.
• CNN’s Daniel Dale on Pence’s claim that Biden wants to ban fracking:

• Trump did not say coronavirus was a “hoax”: “Harris is taking comments from Trump out of context,” our colleagues write. “The full quote shows Trump is criticizing Democratic talking points and the media’s coverage of his administration’s response to the coronavirus. He does not say that the virus itself is a hoax.”
• Biden cannot repeal the GOP-led tax law on Day 1: “Biden’s stated campaign plan proposes to repeal some, but not all, of the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017. The House and Senate would have to pass new tax legislation to accomplish that,” the New York Times’s Jim Tankersley reports.

A TUSSLE OVER RACE AND POLICING AFTER A SUMMER OF PROTESTS: Harris said justice was not done in Breonna Taylor’s case, after a Kentucky grand jury declined to charge any Louisville police officers directly in connection with her death. The state’s Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is viewed as a rising star in the GOP, later disclosed that he did not present homicide charges to the grand jury.

• “I’ve talked with Breonna’s mother, Tamika Palmer and her family, and her family deserves justice,” Harris said.
• Pence later responded by saying “our heart breaks for the loss of any soul,” but expressed shock that Harris, a former prosecutor, would question the findings of a grand jury.

Pence teed off on the Democratic ticket’s condemnation of systemic racism: “This presumption that you hear consistently from [Biden] and [Harris] that America is systemically racist, that as [Biden] said that he believes that law enforcement has an implicit bias against minorities is a great insult to the men and women who serve in law enforcement,” the vice president said.

• Harris, the first Black woman and Asian American on a major party ticket, responded that she refused to lectured about law enforcement: “I am the only one on this stage who has personally prosecuted everything from child sexual assault to homicide. I am the only one on this stage who has prosecuted the big banks for taking advantage of America’s homeowners,” she said. “I am the only one on this stage who prosecuted for-profit colleges for taking advantage of our veterans.”

She then attacked Trump for refusing to condemn white supremacists during the presidential debate: “The reality of this is that we are talking about an election in 27 days, where last week the president of the United States took a debate stage in front of 70 million Americans and refused to condemn white supremacists,” Harris said.

• Pence insisted it was “not true” Trump hadn’t condemned white supremacists: Moderator Chris Wallace offered the president multiple opportunities to do so and then, when pressed by Biden to condemn the Proud Boys, Trump told the group to “stand back and stand by.”

SO, WHO WON?: “For all the high Democratic expectations around Harris and her past debate performances, she did not eviscerate Mr. Pence. As for Pence, he turned in an effective, dutiful, conservative case for Trump, the likes of which the president rarely articulates himself,” the Times’s Shane Goldmacher writes.

• “More Americans said [Harris] did the best job in the vice-presidential debate Wednesday night, according to a CNN Instant Poll of registered voters who watched. About 6 in 10 (59 percent) said Harris won, while 38 percent said [Pence] had the better night,” CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta reports. CNN’s sample did lean Democratic, but respondents to similar poll four years ago gave Pence the edge over Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).

Let us dis-Pence with the time limits: The debate never veered into the fracas of just a week ago, but many noted how Pence repeatedly bulldozed Page in a bid to squeeze a few more words.

But did it make a difference?: Measuring speaking time in debates is no fine science, especially when candidates speak over each other or the moderator. But by CNN’s measure the two candidates ended up roughly the same.

“I’m speaking”: Harris repeatedly responded with that phrase when Pence tried to interrupt her time. 

• The image of a man talking over a woman struck a chord with many viewers to the point that “the phrase was all over merchandise being sold on the online marketplace Etsy. Variations of it showed up on T-shirts, mugs, face masks and laptop decals,” the Times’s Tiffany Hsu writes.

On Page’s turn: “[She] repeatedly allowed [Harris] and [Pence] to interrupt each other as well as her throughout the debate. And while she posed probing questions during the 90 minutes, she often declined to pose follow-ups when they dodged the substance of the questions,” Politico’s Lara Seligman writes of the early reviews of the Page’s performance as moderator. 

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

The White House reversed itself on pulling out of stimulus talks: “The White House’s ever-shifting economic relief agenda lurched in a new direction as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to make a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to rescue the airline industry, just a day after Trump abruptly cut off talks on a broader stimulus bill,” Jeff Stein and Erica Werner report.

Trump returned to the Oval but we still don’t know a lot about his health: “The White House again refused on to say when Trump last tested negative for the coronavirus, leaving open the possibility that he potentially exposed dozens of people to the deadly virus before the announcement of his positive test early Friday,” Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker report.

Some Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from the White House: “Vulnerable Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from Trump’s dismissive response to the coronavirus pandemic and his dramatic termination of negotiations with congressional Democrats over federal economic relief, with the latest cracks carrying enormous implications for Trump and the party with just four weeks until Election Day,” Robert Costa reports.

• Yikes: “One senior GOP official close to Trump, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, compared this crossroads to when the ‘Access Hollywood’ story broke in October 2016 and many Republicans distanced themselves from Trump, who on tape had bragged in vulgar terms about groping women.”

WATCH ME FLY: An intrepid insect only stayed on Pence’s head for two minutes, but Twitter was abuzz about the bug that gave a brief respite to a zapped nation. 

We went through some of the best jokes to find ones we larva the most.

Even a few Republicans got in on the act:

The Biden campaign has this merch now, apparently:

Time really, well you know. See you tomorrow.