Highlights from JD Vance and Tim Walz’s VP debate

The nation’s two potential candidates faced off in New York in a highly polished debate, unlikely to change a stubbornly close, and often far more vicious, presidential race six weeks before Election Day.

Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz presented two very different styles. Vance, a more refined and comfortable debater, landed several punches, while Walz, a former high school teacher and coach, stumbled at times but delivered several memorable moments without letting himself get too rattled.

Here are other takeaways from what was likely the final debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Walz stumbled, while Vance objected to fact-checking

The debate was always going to be a more comfortable space for Vance, a Yale graduate who is a frequent contributor to cable news and has done more interviews than Walz.

This showed during the debate. Vance launched a prepared offensive while still managing to appear civil on stage alongside a popular governor.

One of his weakest moments was not the exchange with Walz but with the moderators. After Vance referenced unfounded claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, moderator Margaret Brennan pointed out to viewers that many of the city’s Haitian residents are there legally under a protected status program temporary. Vance complained about this clarification.

“The rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check me, and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s really happening,” he said before CBS temporarily cut off his microphone.

Walz missed a few obvious opportunities to challenge Vance and his rapid-fire speech led to a few notable stumbles. In an emotional response on gun control, Walz mistakenly said, “I sat in this office with the parents at Sandy Hook. I became friends with school shooters. I saw it.

When asked about his comments that a trip he took to Hong Kong in 1989 coincided with the deadly Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, he called himself a “fool” and hesitated to answer: “I got there. summer and I misspoke about it… so I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests.

Still, there has been at least some discussion among political strategists on social media about whether Harris should have chosen a more fiery debater like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

But the impact of a vice presidential debate is probably minor, and part of Walz’s appeal is his popular, real-life charm.

Some of his strongest responses showed his empathy. He said Vance and Trump unfairly vilified and blamed migrants for the problems rather than seeking to solve them, using a bipartisan border security bill, which was ultimately defeated by Senate Republicans, to support his argument. keep our dignity in how we treat others,” Walz said.

And the governor of Minnesota pressed Vance to acknowledge that Trump lost the election, and Vance responded, “Tim, I’m focused on the future.” » Walz called the response “overwhelming.”

“When this is all over, we have to shake hands, this election, and the winner has to be the winner. This has to stop,” Walz said. “This is tearing our country apart.”

It was an extremely cordial affair.

But overall it was a pretty friendly competition. Walz and Vance shook hands twice – once when they first took the scene off-camera, and then again on-camera.

It was off to relatively nice guy racing from there.

There was very little talking about each other (and those mics remained hot) and few personal attacks. Walz and Vance — who frequently addressed each other by their official titles — repeatedly declared themselves to agree with the other, trading Midwestern niceties between political disagreements.

“If Tim Walz is the next vice president, he will have my prayers, he will have my best wishes and he will have my help whenever he wants it,” Vance said near the end of the debate.

When Walz mentioned that his 17-year-old son had witnessed a shooting, Vance said he was sorry he had to go through that.

The relative cordiality made for a more substantive debate than was often the case during last month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

“I enjoyed the debate tonight and I think there was a lot of common ground here,” Walz said at one point in the evening.

And after the debate ended, Vance and Walz spent a few minutes chatting while their wives, Usha Vance and Gwen Walz, joined them on stage and shook hands.

Vance weaved his personal journey as both tried to highlight their roots.

Both Vance and Walz were chosen as vice presidential candidates, at least in part, for their perceived appeal to rural America and the Rust Belt, and their personal stories were both brought into the debate.

The Ohio senator used his first opportunity to speak during the debate to discuss his upbringing in a working-class family, including his family’s reliance on food assistance and Social Security, as Vance’s grandmother raised him while his mother struggled with addiction during his childhood.

“And that is why I stand here asking to be your vice president with extraordinary gratitude for this country, for the American dream that has allowed me to live my dreams,” Vance said.

Although Walz didn’t spend much time discussing his background, he made sure to give a few nods to his rural roots, including the fact that he grew up in a “small rural town in the Nebraska – a town of 400 people – where you rode bikes with your buddy until the street lights came on.

When speaking about climate change, he aligned himself with farmers and spoke about their experiences. “My farmers know climate change is real,” Walz said.

“What they’re doing is adapting, and that’s allowed them to say to me, look, I’m harvesting corn, I’m harvesting soybeans, I’m harvesting wheat. We’re always producing more natural gas and more oil,” Walz said. “We are also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to keep moving forward. »

Vance tried to drive a wedge between Walz and Harris

On several occasions, Vance attempted to show the separation between Walz and Harris. During an exchange about the U.S.-Mexico border, Vance responded to Walz’s remarks by saying, “I think you want to resolve this issue.” I don’t think Kamala Harris does.

He later told Walz, “You have a tough job here because you have to play whack-a-mole.” We have to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t increase take-home pay, which of course he did. We must pretend that Donald Trump failed to bring down inflation, which he of course did, and at the same time we must defend the abominable economic record of Kamala Harris.”

Walz has the highest approval ratings of the four people on the presidential ticket, and Vance has rarely gone after Walz personally. He went after Harris, linking her to President Joe Biden.

“If Kamala Harris has such big plans for solving the problems of the middle class, then she should implement them now, not by asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her years ago three and a half years, and the fact that she doesn’t tell you much about how much you can trust her actual plans,” Vance said.

Walz tried to pit Harris against Trump

Walz spent much of the evening sharply contrasting Harris and Trump, highlighting the vice president as a stable leader while describing the former president as “fickle.”

In the face of current international crises, Walz said that “the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States to have stable leadership there.”

Walz blamed Trump’s foreign policy, saying “Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than before because of Donald Trump’s inconsistent leadership.”

Vance worked to push back on that narrative, however, emphasizing what he believed to be Trump’s strength on the world stage.

“Donald Trump recognized that for people to fear the United States, you had to achieve peace through strength,” Vance said. “They had to recognize that if they were derailed, U.S. global leadership would restore stability and peace to the world.”