Five weeks from today, Election Day finally arrives. There are no more debates on tap between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, but tonight, Vice-Presidential hopefuls J.D. Vance and Tim Walz will try to sway undecided voters, as they take center stage on a CBS sound stage in New York. WOR White House correspondent Jon Decker and ABC News correspondent Steve Portnoy appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to offer their perspectives on the race as the calendar flips to October.
Decker feels the Harris team dropped the ball by not appearing in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina to project empathy going into the debate. “There is only one Vice-Presidential debate this cycle,” Decker told Berman and Riedel, “but this is a really close election, so every little bit counts. It’s an opportunity to step up, and clearly that’s not what they’ve done, and that’s an opportunity missed. It’s an opportunity missed, not only in North Carolina, a swing state, but in Georgia as well, also hit extremely hard by Hurricane Helene, and that’s not a good thing when you’re in a race that’s essentially a coin flip right now.”
Portnoy feels the Vance camp might have an edge going into the debate, if Walz gets a sudden dose of stage fright. “In all the years I’ve been covering national politics, and it’s been a while, I’ve never known a candidate to be telegraphing through his aides that he’s nervous ahead of a debate, but that’s what we’re seeing on the Democratic side. The word is that Walz is nervous. In fact, we’ve confirmed through a source that Walz told Kamala Harris before she picked him that he’s a bad debater. Now that’s setting expectations as low as they could possibly be set- and it may be a bit of jiu-jitsu or some sort of strategery, whatever you want to call it- and the Trump campaign is just shrugging its shoulders and laughing it off.”
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