Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.

There was a key moment in last night’s vice presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, and I’ll get to it. But first I want to deal with the fact-checking, since that was the biggest issue going in.

Before the debate, word was that the CBS News moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not attempt to fact-check the candidates in real time, as David Muir and Linsey Davis did in last month’s encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — much to Trump’s detriment. Instead, television viewers who watched the debate on CBS would see a QR code on the screen that would take them to a fact-checking site where some 20 journalists were beavering away.

I thought it was something of a bust. The QR code wasn’t displayed often enough, and CBS’s fact-checkers seemed to be lagging behind similar teams at The New York Times and PolitiFact. (The CBS News fact-check today is robust.) Meanwhile, O’Donnell and Brennan did not sit there like potted plants. At one point they cut the mic. And not only did they ask some sharp, intelligent questions about issues such as climate change, abortion rights and, most important, democracy, but they pushed back gently on a couple of Vance’s howlers. For instance, here’s what happened when Vance lied about the legal status of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio:

Brennan provided a fact check on a comment Vance had made about the migrants in Springfield, saying, “just to clarify, for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status.”

“Well, well, well, Margaret, but, but, but —” Vance attempted to interject.

“Senator, we have so much to get to,” she replied, attempting to move on.

“We’re going to turn now to the economy,” said O’Donnell as Vance kept talking. “The economy –”

“The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” said Vance, bringing up an online application for illegal migrants to apply for asylum.

Vance was whining, and it wasn’t a good look. As independent media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote for his newsletter, Status: “By clearly — and authoritatively — stating the facts on issues such as climate change and immigration, O’Donnell and Brennan ensured that reality was not warped by Vance, much to the GOP candidate’s displeasure.” Columbia Journalism Review media columnist Jon Allsop observed that right-wing figures like Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump Jr. as well as Trump himself erupted in fury at O’Donnell and Brennan on social media.

Become a supporter of Media Nation for just $5 a month. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content, photography, a round-up of the week’s posts and a little music.

With that out of the way, let me work backwards and bring up the key moment. It took place in Vance’s answer to the final question of the night, when O’Donnell asked him about the “state of democracy” and continued (I’m quoting from the debate transcript): “Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last Presidential election and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every Governor certifies the results?”

Forced to choose between the truth and his fealty to the insurrectionist Trump, Vance chose the latter, and he wasn’t smooth about it, somehow managing to move from inflation to alleged internet censorship while praising Trump for leaving the White House on Inauguration Day 2021 under his own power rather than having to be pried out by the military.

“I think that we’re focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris’s policies. Make housing affordable, make groceries affordable, and that’s what we’re focused on,” Vance inartfully began his long, circuitous answer. Walz, who otherwise did not have a great debate, pounced and delivered an effective answer. Here’s part of it:

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.

The only problem was that it came at the end, and by then I can’t imagine too many people were watching it. But these debates mostly reach people in clips after the fact, and we can be sure that Harris will feature the exchange in ads. Still, national debate expert Alan Schroeder, a former colleague of mine at Northeastern, lamented on Twitter:

I wish this debate had begun with the discussion about the future of American democracy, rather than finished with it. That’s the central issue of this election, not merely a note to end on. And it generated the most revealing exchange of an otherwise lackluster debate.

David Graham of The Atlantic began this way (gift link):

For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.

And then things went off the rails.

Vance was indeed smooth and articulate, even as he was lying about issues such as abortion rights and his bizarre claim — echoing Trump — that Trump had actually saved the Affordable Care Act twice, even though we all know that Trump tried to kill it and that it remains the law of the land only because the late Sen. John McCain refused to go along.

Walz was obviously nervous and kind of scattered. He kept looking down, apparently to scribble notes. He gave a lousy answer to an early question about his false claim to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, even though he’d had time to rehearse it. In fact, he was in Hong Kong a couple of months later, so it shouldn’t have been too difficult to come up with a decent answer. Instead, he confessed that he was a “knucklehead.” Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

It almost certainly didn’t matter, though. A snap poll by CBS News found that viewers thought it was a draw. Harris is still ahead, if just barely. Five weeks to go.

Correction: Fixed a date. Because I have trouble with dates.