On Tuesday, during Tim Walz’s raucous first appearance as Kamala Harris’s running mate, the Minnesota governor asserted that he was looking forward to debating his Republican counterpart, J.D. Vance — “if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” He added, knowingly, “See what I did there?”

If you’ve spent much time on social media in the past two weeks, you saw what he did there. A brief refresher: On July 24, an X user who has since made his account private wrote, of Vance:

This anecdote was wholly invented — “Let’s cut to the chase: J.D. Vance did not fuck a couch” — The Cut wrote in its explainer — but it became a running gag, thanks in part to a boost from a credulous Kathy Griffin, a misguided and later-deleted AP fact check on the matter, and the obligatory John Oliver segment. (“I think the reason it spread so fast might be that (a) nobody read that fucking book, and (b) it was incredibly easy to believe,” Oliver said.)

The couch gag was an amusing bit of internet esoterica that perfectly met the moment. Joe Biden’s senescence had given Donald Trump and his new authoritarian-leaning running mate free rein to bully their opponents; now, Democrats could push back without one hand tied behind their backs. They could also harness the internet in a way the famously offline Biden campaign struggled to do. And J.D. Vance, unlike Donald Trump, is a mostly blank slate, whose awkwardness on the stump and........

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