How did Tim Walz and JD Vance do in the vice presidential debate? 4 key moments from last night's cordial clash.
On Tuesday, Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz met in New York City for what’s likely to be the final debate of the 2024 campaign.
Usually, presidential candidates face off one or two more times after their running mates collide. But because former President Donald Trump has so far refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris again, Tuesday had the potential to be a lot more important than most vice presidential clashes: the last best chance for either ticket to connect with a national audience before Election Day — and change minds, for better or worse.
So who had a better debate? Here are four takeaways from Walz and Vance’s big night.
For one night only, ‘civility’ makes a comeback
“Weird” has been one of the watchwords of the 2024 campaign (thanks, in part, to Walz, who popularized it as a description of MAGA Republicans like Vance). But maybe the weirdest thing about Tuesday’s debate — at least in the context of how contentious U.S. politics has been in the Trump era — was how polite it was.
It’s not that the two vice presidential nominees saw eye to eye on the issues. They sparred — more substantively than their running mates, it should be said — on everything from the Middle East to climate change, from abortion to affordability. But they didn’t villainize each other while doing it; instead, both Vance and Walz seemed to go out of their way to give their opponent the benefit of the doubt.
“Tim… I actually think I agree with you,” Vance admitted while discussing the border. “I think you want to solve this problem, but I don't think that Kamala Harris does.”
“I agree with a lot of what Senator Vance said about what's happening,” Walz noted while discussing abortion. “His running mate, though, does not. And that's the problem.”
“Well, I've enjoyed tonight's debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” Walz said near the end of the evening
“Me too, man,” Vance replied.
It was an interesting strategy that both candidates seemed to settle on — criticizing the person atop the rival ticket while “agreeing” wherever possible with their vice presidential counterpart. The goal was to seem human and approachable, in line with their Midwestern origins. As such, comity probably benefited Vance more than Walz, if only because the former has spent the last couple of months criticizing Harris and others as “childless cat ladies” who don’t have a stake in the future of the country; falsely claiming that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets; and watching his favorable rating fall as a result. In comparison, “normal” is good — and it could help preserve Vance’s future in the GOP.
Whether Tuesday’s cordial dynamic actually affects the 2024 race is another story. The polls — which are effectively tied — have barely budged for weeks. One night of relative civility from the veep candidates is unlikely to change that.
A stark difference on Jan. 6
There was one confrontational moment, however, and it came near the end, when the CBS moderators asked Vance — who has said that if he had been vice president instead of Mike Pence he would not have certified the 2020 presidential election on the basis of Trump’s false claims of fraud — whether he would “again seek to challenge this year's election results.”
In response, Vance danced around the issue. He said he was “focused on the future” and “figur[ing] out how to solve the inflation crisis.” He claimed that “all that Donald Trump has said” is that Americans should be able to “debate those issues peacefully in the public square.” And he argued that the real “threat to democracy” wasn’t Trump’s effort to overturn his election loss but rather the “censorship” of “big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.”
“That, to me, is a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January the 6th,” Vance declared.
But Walz wasn’t having any of it. “January 6th was not Facebook ads,” he snapped. “I think there's [been] a lot of agreement [tonight]. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen, and it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say — he is still saying he didn't lose the election.”
With that, Walz turned to Vance and addressed him directly. “I would just ask that,” the governor said. “Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?”
Vance did not answer. “Tim, I'm focused on the future,” he repeated.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz pointed out. “So America, I think you've got a really clear choice [in] this election of who's going to honor that democracy — and who's going to honor Donald Trump.”
Vance tries to clean up Trump’s messaging mess
Before last month’s presidential debate, Trump’s advisers signaled to reporters that their candidate would spend the evening hammering one talking point over and over again: Harris talks a good game, but she’s been serving as vice president for the last three and a half years. Why hasn’t she solved these problems already?
The idea was to tie Harris to Biden’s (very unpopular) record, especially on the economy, and to counter criticisms of Trump’s own presidential paper trail. But Trump was so triggered by the traps Harris set for him — like the one about people leaving his rallies “early out of exhaustion and boredom” — that he never managed to deliver his central message.
Vance didn’t make the same mistake Tuesday night. Right out of the gate, when asked about this week’s escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran, Vance took exception to Walz’s claim that Tehran is closer than ever to building nuclear weapons because Trump scuttled the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 — and immediately pivoted to Harris. “Gov. Walz, you blame Donald Trump,” Vance said. “Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years? And the answer is your running mate, not mine.”
Vance pulled the same maneuver throughout the debate: He would admit that Harris’s proposals “are halfway decent” (housing) or “even sound pretty good” (lowering cost of living) before questioning why she hasn’t implemented them.
“Kamala Harris is not running as a newcomer to politics,” Vance said. “She is the sitting vice president. If she wants to enact all of these policies … I invite her to use the office that the American people already gave her.”
That line of reasoning is, of course, disingenuous; the vice president doesn’t tell the president or Congress what to do. But it did serve a political purpose for the GOP ticket — while demonstrating that Vance is a far more disciplined debater than his running mate.
Too slick on abortion?
Perhaps the most extreme example of Vance’s debating style was his answer on abortion. Asked about his past support for a national 15-week abortion ban, the Ohioan quickly pivoted to a carefully calibrated answer that evoked his hardscrabble roots — and aimed for empathy.
“I know a lot of Americans don't agree with everything that I've ever said on this topic,” Vance began. “I grew up in a working class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they felt like they didn't have any other options. And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me, and I know she's watching tonight — and I love you. And she told me something a couple of years ago: that she felt like if she hadn't had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.”
The lesson, Vance continued, was that Republicans need to “be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.”
“I want us to support fertility treatments,” he added. “I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family.”
What’s notable here is the way that Vance — a Yale-educated lawyer who wrote "Hillbilly Elegy," a bestselling memoir that endeavored to “explain” the white working class to coastal elites — was able to code-switch from his usual MAGA audience to more moderate swing voters concerned about the end of Roe v. Wade (and inclined to vote Democrat because of it).
The question is whether Vance’s effort was so slick as to seem deceptive. For Walz, it certainly was — and he went on to point out that it’s Harris who wants to strengthen the federal safety net for families, not Trump.
“Just mind your own business on this,” he said. “Things work[ed] best when Roe v. Wade was in place. When we do a restoration of Roe, that works best. … [Stop] hiding behind ‘we're going to do all these other things’ when you're not proposing them in your budget. Kamala Harris is proposing … all those things to make life easier for families.”