Has Tim Walz broken out into a panic over his upcoming debate against J.D. Vance? Or has his team decided to lower expectations, or even engaged in a head-fake to trap Vance into overconfidence?

Beege had fun with the "spazzing" option this weekend in the Headlines, based on this CNN story, updated further yesterday morning. "Damn," she added to the Headline in the commentary box. "I'm about giddy."

Well, maaaaayyybeee. My skepticism reflex went into overdrive when reading this passage:

Talking to the aides who have coalesced around him in Minnesota and other supporters, Walz constantly comes back to how worried he is about letting Harris down, according to close to a dozen top campaign staffers and others who have been in touch with the governor and his team. He doesn’t want Donald Trump to win. He doesn’t want Harris to think she made the wrong choice.

He feels genuine contempt for and confusion over what he views as Vance’s abandonment of their common roots, and for flipping so many of his positions to fit with Trump. The digs he takes at Vance by saying he didn’t know many Midwesterners who went to Yale are a glimpse into his anxiety that his opponent learned to be a sharp debater there, according to people who know Walz.

This could cut both ways. It could frame a Walz loss as some kind of validation that Vance betrayed his roots by applying to Yale Law School, a very strange argument from someone who has spent his entire life grafted to Academia. If Vance somehow fumbles against Walz, would that make Vance more authentic in Walz' eyes, though? Somehow I doubt it, and I doubt that argument will sell in either direction with voters who are more concerned about issues than in debate scoring. 

Let's not forget too that Vance is the relative newcomer to politics; Walz has been doing this for almost two decades now, although certainly not at this level of visibility. The pressure is more on Vance to show he can compete after winning one election in his life, not on the man who has served several terms in Congress and won two gubernatorial elections. 

This claim from Team Walz made me laugh:

And aides insist this isn’t just about setting expectations.

Translation: It's all about setting expectations and lowering bars. That could also be part of a head-fake strategy that Walz might use if he felt confident about his prospects, but really, this does lean us toward "spazzing." Why bother doing a head fake if Walz and his team felt he can compete on stage? The outcome would make that clear. Managing expectations is an exercise based on a lack of confidence, so perhaps there is something to the Panic Mode report.

Walz then claimed that he was "trained as a teacher" rather than a debater:

CNN previews Timothy Walz's debate performance: Dodging the questions of the American people. pic.twitter.com/uJW3qWzYPE

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 30, 2024

Again ... so what? Walz has several runs for office under his belt, so he clearly understands how debates work. Vance may have gone to law school, but he's mainly pursued writing rather than litigation. People get "trained" for all sorts of things in school, but not politics. People go into electoral politics on their own volition -- and they don't tend to last long without being able to navigate through adversarial questioning, unless your name rhymes with Bomola Barris. 

Anyway, most of this is just shaping the political battleground and setting narratives, no matter what the motivation may be. Normally it wouldn't be necessary in a VP debate, since voters don't usually choose a ticket based on the running mate. Since this may well be the last debate in the cycle, though, the spin may matter more than usual. 

We'll be live blogging the debate tonight, so plan to be with us! The debate starts on CBS and its affiliated platforms at 9 pm ET, but we'll start live blogging around 8:45 or earlier.