KEEP Donald Trump off stage and wash this presidential campaign’s mouth out with soap, and American politics is still broken. That is the result that emerged from a controlled experiment in political science conducted on October 4th—more formally known as the first and only vice-presidential debate of 2016.
... (trivial scene setting by the magazine and the two men, nothing notable to Americans, e.g. "... the pair bragged, competitively, about their Middle American credentials") ...
The vice-presidential debate provided the answer to a very specific question: what happens when a centrist Democrat with minimal political baggage is pitted against a fairly conventional, Reagan-quoting Republican from the Christian conservative wing of the party? Many conditions for a successful experiment were met. It seems safe to assume that the encounter ... will have had millions of Democrats and Republicans nodding along as their party’s nominee spoke. That is because the two hewed closely to positions that, polls show, are seen as no more than common sense by each party’s respective partisans. ...
On issue after issue Mr Kaine and Mr Pence represented the mainstream views of their parties, while avoiding the deeply personal attacks that so blight the Clinton-Trump contest. And yet the results from this experiment should give Americans pause. For
the debate revealed vanishingly little common ground between the two men—to the point that it is hard to see how a government divided between their two parties would work. And if Mrs Clinton wins the White House in November, she will face a familiar division: Republicans will keep control of the House of Representatives, and could well hold the Senate too.
Press headlines after the debate focused on Mr Pence’s greater fluency and air of authority, on Mr Kaine’s nervousness, and on the theory that Democrats could console themselves that, at least, the Republican on stage spent much of his time being invited to defend Mr Trump’s nastiest insults. ...
But the debate also revealed something that will matter long after this election:
America’s two parties struggle to agree even on a common set of facts about the state of the nation. Squabbling about whether the economy under Mr Obama has been a disaster or a stirring success, Mr Pence retorted that because voters in mostly white, working-class rust-belt cities are flocking to Mr Trump’s populist banner, that is what counts. Or as he put it: “Honestly, Senator, you can roll out the numbers and the sunny side, but I got to tell you, people in Scranton know different. People in Fort Wayne, Indiana, know different.”
For sure, Mr Trump’s demagoguery and Mrs Clinton’s unpopularity go a long way towards explaining this horrible election. But to extend the laboratory analogy rather far, Mr Trump is like a powerful electrical charge, catalysing a reaction already under way. Take Mrs Clinton off stage, and
even a generic Democrat as amiable as Mr Kaine struggles to defend the status quo in a time of voter rage. This crisis is structural.
