How Vance won: trial by fire

Sasha Stone: "America Finally Got to See the Real JD Vance - The media was caught out once again lying."

Vance has learned a thing or two from battling a hostile press. Walz has avoided them and it showed last night. He did what Biden did - he stared with a terrified look on his face as Vance spoke.

But for Vance, there isn’t a nasty question he hasn’t already had to answer at least ten times. If you’ve been watching his press conferences as I have, you already know he can handle them. He was born to do this. You can tell when he’s about to give a really good answer because he blinks very slowly to show he’s tolerating their terrible question as he locks and loads.

But it wasn’t so much how he batted the moderators around — always a fun thing to watch — but how he directed his message straight at us, those watching at home.

Vance soared in this debate because he absorbed the lesson that Trump did not in his debate: the mainstream media is your enemy.  At every campaign event, Vance invites questions from the press which is almost universally hostile to him and Trump.  And he answers them.  So when it came time for the debate, Vance was well-practiced and tempered by fire.

On the other hand, Democrats in general are so used to the kid-gloves treatment that the result is Walz's fumbling and bumbling performance.  Me?  Answer questions?  What is going on?