LARRY KUDLOW: Sen. JD Vance 'clobbered' Gov. Tim Walz in the debate

Sen. JD Vance clobbered Gov. Tim Walz in last night's vice presidential debate.  

Mr. Vance had grace, style, humility, relentless messaging and even a religious grounding. He showed how to make crucial policy issues easy to understand for the average viewer.

Vance was so good that I think it's quite possible he moved the needle for the Trump team. Maybe that's unusual for a vice presidential debate, but I suspect Vance's clarity and repetition could do it. With 34 days to go before the election, it is clear that the economy and borderless illegal immigration are the two issues that will decide this election.  

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So, Mr. Vance, on 11 separate occasions during the debate, talked about high take-home pay and low inflation during the Trump years. Take-home pay — that was Ronald Reagan's easy-to-understand phrase aimed at average, working-class families, what real money is left in your wallet or pocket book after taxes and inflation. 

Vance said this key point 11 times. Take a listen: 

SEN. JD VANCE: I think he got a tough job here because you've got to play whack-a-mole. You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver rising take-home pay, which, of course, he did. You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver lower inflation, which, of course, he did, and then you've simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris' atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries and housing unaffordable for American citizens. | We can get back to an America that's affordable again. We've just got to get back to common sense economic principles.

Simplicity is the most elegant form of messaging, and repetition is crucial in politics. Meanwhile, Gov. Tim Walz was tying himself up in knots, desperately trying to remember all the things his team crammed into his head. Much of the time he just fell back on meaningless word salads.   

He even bungled the abortion law from his own state, where a new Minnesota law allows abortion at any stage of pregnancy if a doctor approves. JD Vance actually tried to help Walz understand his own state's law, but there's more. Vance reminded people of the Biden-Harris affordability crisis. 

Everyone has suffered because consumer prices have risen much faster than typical working-class wages during the Biden-Harris term. During the Trump years, real average weekly wages went up 9%. During the Harris years, real average weekly wages fell over 4%.  

Under Trump, median family income rose roughly $6,000, nearly five-times the poultry — $1,300 gain under Biden. That's the affordability crisis, and people know it. Personal borrowing costs for mortgages, cars, credit cards sky-rocketed — even though they're not part of the CPI.  

This is a huge kitchen table issue — affordability, a crisis! Vance mentioned this six times during the debate. Every time Tim Walz started throwing out some complicated, big government spending plan, JD Vance would gracefully acknowledge that there might be something good someplace in one of those plans, but they had over three-and-a-half years to do it. 

Why didn't they do it? Including immigration. Vance mentioned illegal immigration 15 times. While Walz supported a Senate bill that would have allowed millions of illegals to continue to come over the border. Illegal immigration and crime: Nothing hard to understand. 

Vance made it easy and he was polite. He occasionally agreed on something with Gov. Walz, but he would remind that day one of any Harris idea was 1,400 days ago, and this went along with the seven times he mentioned three-and-half-years.  

All of this is so effective. A few key points repeated a number of times with good humor and friendliness, and anyone could see that Mr. Vance is a very smart young man who knows a lot about all kinds of policies, as he ran circles around Gov. Walz. Take a listen to Vance's closing statement:  

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VANCE: We have the greatest country, the most beautiful country, the most incredible people anywhere in the world, but they're not going to be able to achieve their full dreams with the broken leadership that we have in Washington. They're not going to be able to live their American dream if we do the same thing that we've been doing for the last three-and-a-half years.

Of course, he won the debate, and for those of us who watched it, we saw — dare I say it — presidential timber. 

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the Oct. 2, 2024, edition of "Kudlow."