Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.
Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour-and-a-half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.
But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.
In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.
Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.
“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance refuted.
Walz also criticized the Trump-Vance position that states should decide whether women have access to abortion.
“That’s not how this works. This is basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world,” he said.
When Harris was considering Walz as her vice-presidential candidate, he reportedly told her that he was a bad debater, and at the outset Vance, wearing a sharp blue suit, a pink tie, plenty of make-up and hair gel, looked the more polished performer. Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, cut a more bustling figure in a loose black suit.
Vance, the Ohio senator who has been a regular on rightwing news channels for years, was polished from the off, comfortably dodging a question about whether he believes the climate crisis is a “hoax” to lament how much money has been spent on solar panels.
Walz rose to the vice-presidential nomination, in part, through his confident appearances on cable news – it was from there that his famous “weird” characterization of Vance and Trump was born – but appeared initially nervous, and did not reprise his searing critique of his opponents.
Both men also frequently referenced their upbringing in the midwest.
“I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community, trying to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect and I’m a knucklehead at times,” Walz said, while attempting to navigate a question about his time in China. “But [Minnesotans] elected me to Congress for 12 years.”
Walz also criticized Trump and Vance for demonizing immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – the two have falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, actions which have led to bomb threats and children in the city having to be escorted to school by police.
Asked about immigration, one of the key issues in November, Walz discussed Harris’s history in California, demonstrating that the real goal here was for both he and Vance to talk up their bosses’ records rather than sell their own.
“Kamala Harris was the attorney general of the largest border state in California. She’s the only person in this race who prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug interventions,” Walz said.
Vance blamed Harris for the number of people who have crossed the border under the Biden administration, which prompted Walz to raise the issue of a bipartisan border bill, endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council, which was torpedoed by Trump earlier this year.
“As soon as that was getting ready to pass and actually tackle this, Trump said ‘no’, told them to vote against it, because it gives them a campaign issue,” Walz said.
The immigration conversation led to an uncomfortable moment for Vance. Trump has said that if he is elected he will carry out “the largest deportation in the history of our country”, but in a country where some families’ children may be US citizens born to non-citizen parents, he has failed to explain how that would work.
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Asked whether a Trump administration would separate immigrant parents from their US-citizen children, Vance twice refused to answer.
Walz’s missteps, meanwhile, were largely style not substance but could prove fodder for the rightwing in coming days. He was asked about his false claim that he was in Hong Kong “when Tiananmen happened”, referring to the anti-government protests that culminated in the massacre of hundreds of people in June 1989. It emerged this week that Walz had traveled to China in August, two months later.
“Look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies until the street lights come on, and I’m proud of that service,” Walz’s answer began, as he attempted to avoid the question entirely.
Pressed further, Walz said: “I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I will just … that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests. And from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”
As the debate drew towards a close, both men were asked about the issue of school shootings, and whether AR-15 style guns, which have been used in several mass shootings, should be banned.
Vance called school shootings “terrible stuff” before he sought to blame Harris for gun violence. He claimed there has been a “a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels” – although in the majority of school shootings the weapons used have been legally purchased. Democrats have pushed for stricter gun controls to curb mass shootings, but Vance took a different approach.
“What do we do to protect our kids? And I think the answer is, and I say this not loving the answer, because I don’t want my kids to go to school in a school that feels unsafe or there are visible signs of security, but I unfortunately think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the door stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger,” Vance said.
Walz was more forthright. He said he had met with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, and said “our first responsibility is to our kids,” detailing his red flag policies in Minnesota.
“I ask all of you out there: your schools hardened to look like a fort – is that, is that what we have to go through?” he said.
“I think what we end up doing is we start looking for a scapegoat. Sometimes it’s just the guns.”
But his strong answer on gun reform was eclipsed on social media when he accidentally said he “befriended school shooters” rather than victims.
Vice-presidents, and their debates, have typically been viewed as unimportant, and it remains to be seen how much impact this debate will have. But with the election expected to be extremely close, if either Vance or Walz managed to convince a few voters, then the hour-and-a-half of scrutiny, and even the gaffes, will have been worth it.