After what were arguably the two most consequential presidential debates since at least the Nixon-Kennedy debate (which launched the era of televised debates), last night's vice-presidential debate was pretty... well, normal. It harkened back to the age before Donald Trump entered the political scene, when two candidates would debate political issues without getting overly vicious or personal in their attacks, in the hopes of presenting themselves to the public as acceptable leaders of the country. That was really the striking takeaway from last night -- a return to normalcy, in the midst of yet another Trumpian rollercoaster of a presidential campaign. In fact, this normalcy stuck out as completely abnormal to the bizarre political landscape Trump has dragged us all into for the past nine years.

There was no playground-bully name-calling. Instead of viciousness, the dominating vibe was affability. It was all very Midwestern. Neither candidate pressed the attack on the other in a "go for the jugular" sort of way. They ignored opportunities to get the other candidate on the ropes, in favor of appearing to strive for bipartisan agreement. As I mentioned, this was all very weird, since it was so jarringly different from the entire rest of the campaign so far.

Last night did have its moments, though. The candidates' microphones were cut at one point, when the moderators were in danger of losing control of things (while JD Vance kept whining that they were fact-checking him when they promised they wouldn't... poor baby!). There were flashes of raw emotion from both candidates, at times. But because CBS had indeed announced before the debate took place that it would largely be up to the candidates to do the fact-checking, a lot of lies were allowed to skate by unchallenged.

Interestingly -- and in keeping with how tribal politics has become -- the debate was largely seen as a tie. Some pundits tried to make the case that JD Vance "won" and some wrote that Tim Walz "won," but unlike the Trump debates with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, there was really no clear winner at all -- neither candidate dominated the night in the way that Trump did against Biden or Harris did against Trump. Maybe it was the Midwestern "niceness" vibe.

By the numbers, both candidates did what vice-presidential candidates are supposed to do at their debates -- they focused on the opponent on top of the respective tickets rather than on each other. Vance attacked Harris and Walz attacked Trump a whole lot more than they attacked each other. Which is, once again, a very normal thing for any veep debate.

One reason the night was largely seen as a tie was that both candidates managed to achieve something, in the snap post-debate polling. They both improved their favorability ratings with the public by significant amounts. Vance had farther to go, in this respect, but Walz seems to have either matched or surpassed him in improving how the public sees the two men.

Vance's main goal, quite obviously, was to not appear to be such a creepy weirdo. He largely succeeded. He was allowed to get away with this redefinition of his character because Walz refused to remind everyone of all the creepy and weird things Vance has been saying and continues to say, about all sorts of subject.

Vance did a fairly good job of seeming agreeable, even I have to admit. It was striking, in fact, how many times the two candidates appeared to be if not on the same page at least close enough to some sort of bipartisan agreement on solutions to certain problems. Which is a big reason why the debate seemed a reversion to a pre-Trump normal affair.

There was one exchange in particular which showed this affability, and it was Vance's best moment of the night (at least in my opinion). When the subject of gun violence came up, Tim Walz began his remarks by recounting a story [I should mention here that all quotes have been taken from the official CBS transcript of last night's debate]:

Well, I think all the parents watching tonight, this is your biggest nightmare. Look, I got a, I got a 17-year-old, and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball. Those things don't leave you.

When Vance was given the chance to speak, he immediately started with some empathy: "Tim, first of all, I didn't know that your 17-year-old witnessed the shooting. And I'm sorry about that... Christ, have mercy. It is awful."

This -- more than anything else Vance said last night -- showed that he is a fundamentally different person than Donald Trump, who never would have said anything remotely as supportive to a political opponent about anything. But it wasn't just on a human level, on a policy level the two candidates left viewers with the feeling -- multiple times -- that they could just sit down and hash things out between them and come up with some sort of bipartisan plan that both sides could live with.

But it wasn't all holding hands and singing "Kumbaya," of course. If the affability was the best thing about the debate, the worst thing was that Vance was also allowed to skate on far too many of his blatant revisions of history. Neither the moderators nor Walz called him on some of his jaw-dropping "sane-washing" of Trump's worldview. On abortion, for instance, Vance insisted (wrongly) that he had never called for a national abortion ban, instead he had merely "talk[ed] about setting some sort of minimum standard," which sounds ever-so-much nicer, right? Vance spoke of his support for fertilization treatments as well.

Walz should have, at this point, asked Vance why he had voted against a bill which would have guaranteed access to all American women to I.V.F. -- and if he had had problems with the bill, why hadn't he introduced his own version? The last time it came up for debate, Vance didn't even bother to show up to vote, because he was out on the campaign trail. So much for being a supposed champion of family-friendly policies, eh?

On abortion, Walz should have challenged Vance's blithe "the states get to decide" attitude by asking: "So you're for states' rights on the issue -- what other issues of basic human rights do you think people in each state should be able to vote on? Civil rights, for instance? Would it be OK for certain states to go back to Jim Crow laws? These are basic human rights which should not be put up for a vote, but guaranteed to all women in America." What he said instead was weaker, but at least tried to make the same point: "[H]ow can we as a nation say that your life and your rights as basic as the right to control your own body is determined on geography?"

Vance also repeated a belly-whopper of a lie that Trump unveiled in his last debate -- that he somehow "saved" Obamacare in a "bipartisan" way. This is so divorced from reality it should make everyone's jaw drop, just for the sheer chutzpah of it all. Here's how Vance argued this last night:

I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump. Of course, you don't have to agree with everything that President Trump has ever said or ever done, but when Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and healthcare costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care. It's not perfect, of course, and there's so much more that we can do. But I think that Donald Trump has earned the right to put in place some better healthcare policies. He's earned it because he did it successfully the first time.

Um... no. Just: no. That is not what happened. It is not even remotely in the same ballpark as reality. Walz did push back on this one a bit more strongly, pointing out:

Now, Donald Trump all of a sudden wants you -- go back and remember this. He ran on, the first thing he was going to do on day one, was to repeal Obamacare. On Day One, he tried to sign an executive order to repeal the A.C.A. He signed onto a lawsuit to repeal the A.C.A., but lost at the Supreme Court. And he would have repealed the A.C.A. had it not been for the courage of John McCain to save that bill. [sic, he really meant "save us all from" or something similar]

But the biggest whopper of the night didn't happen until the end, where Vance was asked whether he would accept the results of this year's election, after stating that he would have challenged the 2020 results if he had been vice president at the time. Vance then told an absolute fairy tale of how the 2020 election played out:

Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that's all I've said. And that's all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, he said that on January 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House.

This is akin to telling the story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic as: "The ship left Europe and peacefully sailed for many hours. Later, many of the passengers arrived safely in America." What is omitted is key, in both instances, to understanding the full event.

Walz picked up on this, and tossed a cold bucket of reality on Vance's fairy tale:

[T]his one is troubling to me. And I say that because I think we need to tell the story. Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don't think we can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very clear. I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn't. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died.

And it wasn't just in there. In Minnesota, a group gathered on the state capitol grounds in St. Paul and said we're marching to the governor's residence and there may be casualties. The only person there was my son and his dog, who was rushed out crying by state police. That issue.

And Mike Pence standing there as they were chanting, "Hang Mike Pence." Mike Pence made the right decision. So, Senator, it was adjudicated over and over and over. I worked with kids long enough to know, and I said, as a football coach, sometimes you really want to win, but the democracy is bigger than winning an election. You shake hands and then you try and do everything you can to help the other side win. That's, that's what was at stake here. Now, the thing I'm most concerned about is the idea that imprisoning your political opponents already laying the groundwork for people not accepting this. And a president's words matter. A president's words matter. People hear that. So I think this issue of settling our differences at the ballot box, shaking hands when we lose, being honest about it, but to deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a president or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And here we are four years later in the same boat. I will tell you this, that when this is over, we need to shake hands, this election, and the winner needs to be the winner. This has got to stop. It's tearing our country apart.

Vance responded with some Grade-A "whataboutism," trying to paint Hillary Clinton and other Democrats as just as bad as Trump. Walz really hit his stride here, and flung a direct question at Vance, in what will probably be the most-remembered moment of the debate:

[T]his is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say -- he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?

Vance desperately tried to change the subject, saying: "Tim, I'm focused on the future," to which Walz shot back: "That is a damning non-answer."

Walz then turned to ask questions of the viewers at home:

I'm pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate. It's not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump's world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president's not going to stand to it. That's what we're asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn't? And I think Kamala Harris would agree. She wouldn't have picked me if she didn't think I would do that because, of course, that's what we would do. So, America, I think you've got a really clear choice on this election of who's going to honor that democracy and who's going to honor Donald Trump.

This was easily the best moment of the night for Tim Walz. But, to be scrupulously fair, I will end here with his worst moment of the night, which came when he was asked about a blatant lie he's been telling, apparently for quite some time now. According to the way Walz tells the story, he was in Hong Kong right when the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square was happening (in the first days of June, 1989). He was about to travel into China, because he was part of a cross-cultural teaching program. Friends of his told him not to go, that it was too dangerous, but he went anyway. Unfortunately for Walz, the timing doesn't work. He travelled to China months after the Tiananmen Square uprising had been brutally put down by the Chinese government -- not while it was happening. This story broke right before the debate happened, and so of course the moderators asked him about it.

Instead of owning up to it fully and apologizing, Walz tried to just brush it off, and he wound up repeating the lie (to a certain extent). In the middle of a long-winded discourse on his own modest upbringing and history, Walz said:

I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect. And I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years.

"I'm a knucklehead at times" isn't really fully 'fessing up, you will note. Later in this same answer Walz also (quite vaguely) said: "I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric."

The moderators tried again, asking Walz if he could "explain the discrepancy." Walz got close to admitting his mistake (with "misspoke"), but then he dug the hole a little deeper:

No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that's what I've said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest, went in, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.

But it wasn't "during the democracy protest" at all -- that was the whole point of asking him about it. Vance, straining to be affable, didn't hit Walz for his answer, but it was indeed the weakest answer Walz gave the entire evening.

Of course, none of any of this is likely to matter a whole lot to voters. Vice-presidential debates never really do, after all. Both of the candidates got the chance to re-introduce themselves to the American public, and both did a decent job of doing so. Neither one fell flat on his face, and there were no "going in for the kill" moments (unless you count Walz pressing Vance on his January 6th revisionism). Neither candidate emerged as the clear victor, but neither emerged as the clear loser either. That's about the best thing you can say to sum the evening up, really.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant