Harris, Trump stick by running mates as their campaigns spin vice-presidential debate performances

(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump praised their respective running mates — Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance — as their campaigns worked to spin how well they performed at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate.

Despite several missteps from both candidates over the course of the debate, Harris said in a fundraising email Wednesday morning that Walz “offered a powerful showcase of the kind of leadership we deserve,” and Trump said in an interview Wednesday there was “brilliance” in Vance’s debate performance.

With just over 30 days until Election Day, the debate stage offered both candidates an opportunity to appeal to undecided voters and share their running mates’ visions for America — and now the Harris and Trump campaigns and surrogates are working to smooth over any moments where the vice-presidential candidates stumbled.

Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler told CNN Wednesday morning that the campaign is “excited” by Walz’s performance.

“I think Vice President Harris’ reaction is the same as voters across the country, independent voters in particular, and those undecideds who saw Gov. Walz lay out a very clear vision for where he and the vice president want to take this country,” Tyler said.

Tyler called Vance a “slick debater,” but said “Gov. Walz clearly articulated the case in a plain-spoken way.”

But Walz struggled to explain why he had in the past “misspoke” about being in Hong Kong and witnessing the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, despite the weekslong protest concluding in June, months before he traveled there.

Walz argued “my community knows who I am” and that he’s “not been perfect” and can be “a knucklehead at times.”

“No, I think he was pretty clear,” Tyler said when asked if Walz needed to go further than his comments during the debate in clearing up his misstatement on the protests.

“He said he misspoke. He was there in August. I think he’d earlier said it was June. This is a matter of months, 35 years ago. He was there during the summer of protests,” Tyler added.

In a play-by-play live commentary on social media, Trump painted Walz as appearing “nervous,” incompetent and even “weird.” Trump in particular seized on Walz struggling to answer for the alleged discrepancy in his visit to Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests, portraying him as a liar.

Walz’s performance at times was shaky, with some suggesting if Walz did more news interviews since becoming the vice-presidential pick, he’d have been better prepared. When pressed on that, Tyler said “no,” it would not have helped, before pointing to a more aggressive strategy in campaign’s final weeks.

“I think what you will see him and the vice president continue to do over the course of the final month of this stretch is use every tool that we have at our disposal to continue to reach the voters,” Tyler said. “Yes, that will be inclusive of more media appearances, more interviews.”

On the campaign trail on Wednesday, Walz graded his debate performance: “Not bad for a football coach,” he said at a York, Pennsylvania, rally.

“I did not underestimate Sen. Vance as a slick talker,” Walz said. “But I also called out there — you can’t rewrite history. You can’t rewrite history.”

Trump, who said in a video posted before the debate that he planned to call out his own running mate if he made a “mistake,” praised Vance’s performance throughout Tuesday night.

“JD crushed it!” Trump posted on his social media following the conclusion of the debate.

And on Wednesday morning, in a phone call with Fox News Digital, Trump doubled down on his praise, saying Vance’s performance “reconfirmed” his choice of vice-presidential candidate.

“JD was fantastic last night — it just reconfirmed my choice,” Trump told Fox News Digital. “There was a brilliance to what he did.”

Trump campaign’s senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita immediately claimed victory following the debate, saying in a statement that Vance “unequivocally won tonight’s debate in dominating fashion,” and claimed “it was the best debate performance from any vice-presidential candidate in history.”

Walking into the spin room right Tuesday night, the former president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., who had strongly supported Vance as Trump’s running mate, told reporters that “there’s nothing to spin.”

Asked about the moment when Vance refused to say if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump Jr. insisted that the American public are “not worried about that.”

Yet the Harris campaign was quick to zero in on the exchange.

A Harris campaign official claimed a focus group of undecided battleground-state voters they conducted said this back-and forth was the “biggest gap” between the two candidates. The campaign clipped the exchange for a new ad released Wednesday morning.

Jason Miller, senior Trump campaign adviser, in the spin room Tuesday night said, “JD’s a very likable guy. I think his life experience connects with voters.”

“I think Sen. Vance helped us win today because he had a tremendous performance,” Miller said.