And then he opened his mouth.

Jesus Christ himself would hardly defend the disaster that was Harris’s tenure in the White House, and to his credit, Walz began his first response with, admittedly, the softball typical of CBS anchors, with a rather callous attachment to Israel’s right to defend itself against a barrage of rocket launches towards him by Iranian terrorists. Walz actually did as well as everyone expected him to.

But Walz, an identity politics staffer chosen specifically because he was an average white male from the Midwest, diminutive in size compared to Harris, did as well as could be expected from such a self-congratulatory amateur. He couldn’t remember the word Gaza and froze many times during his most rehearsed responses. Vance’s replies were spent either scribbling on his notebook like a senior struggling against Scantron, or watching desperately as the Ohio senator coldly delivered detailed answers straight to the camera. Not to mention that Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell even briefly dismissed Walz’s pathological lies about his past contacts with the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s almost as if Walz benefited from speaking to the press at some point in the last two months.

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Recall that since the Democratic Party quietly removed Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and replaced him with Harris, a candidate who did not receive a single national primary in either 2020 or 2024, Harris and Walz conducted a total of 21 unscripted interviews, including Harris talking to pollsters like Oprah Winfrey and Stephanie Ruhle, who outright endorsed her. At the same time, Vance and former President Donald Trump — who, you’ll recall, survived two assassination attempts — conducted three times as many unscripted interviews.

It didn’t have to be this way. Harris had a chance to choose Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate, a swing state leader who was so popular that Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick cut ads boasting about his association with him. But Harris didn’t want to be upstaged. She chose Walz not despite his painfully nervous energy and the “folk” and false façade that concealed it, but precisely Because he would dress up as the skinny and unimpressive Homer Simpson alongside her telegenic and fashionable face. Walz may get some entertaining headlines and favorable comparisons to a candidate as weak as Harris, but in the spotlight he has fallen flat, and in a race as close as this one, such a slight underperformance could come at a real cost to Harris.