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(AP) — Vice presidential hopefuls Tim Walz and JD Vance focused their criticism on the top of the ticket on Tuesday as they engaged in a policy-heavy discussion that may be the last debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.
It was the first encounter between Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Ohio’s Republican senator, following last month’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. It comes just five weeks before Election Day and millions of voters are now able to cast early ballots.
Tuesday’s confrontation played out as the stakes of the contest rose again after Iran fired missiles into Israel, while a devastating hurricane and potentially debilitating port strike roiled the country at home. Over and again, Walz and Vance outlined the policy and character differences between their running-mates, while trying to introduce themselves to the country.
Here are some takeaways from Tuesday’s debate.
With the Mideast in turmoil, Walz promises ‘steady leadership” and Vance offers ’peace through strength’
Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel on Tuesday elicited a contrast between the Democratic and Republican tickets on foreign policy: Walz promised “steady leadership” under Harris while Vance pledged a return to “peace through strength” if Trump is returned to the White House.
The differing visions of what American leadership should look like overshadowed the sharp policy differences between the two tickets.
The Iranian threat to the region and U.S. interests worldwide opened the debate, with Walz pivoting the topic to criticism of Trump.
“What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter,” Walz said, then referenced the “nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes” and responding to global crises by tweet.
Vance, for his part, promised a return to “effective deterrence” under Trump against Iran, brushing back on Walz’s criticism of Trump by attacking Harris and her role in the Biden administration.
“Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years and the answer is your running mate, not mine,” he said. He pointedly noted that the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, happened “during the administration of Kamala Harris.”
Vance and Walz punch up rather than at each other
Vance and Walz trained the bulk of their attacks not on their on-stage rivals, but on the running mates who weren’t in the room.
Both vice presidential nominees sought to convey genial men as they lobbed criticism at Harris and Trump, respectively.
It was a reflection of the fact that most voters don’t cast a ballot based on the vice president, and on a vice presidential nominee’s historic role in serving as the attack dog for their running mates.
Walz pointedly attacked Trump for failing to meet his pledge of building a physical barrier across the entire U.S.-Mexico border at the country’s southern neighbor’s expense.
“Less than 2% of that wall got built and Mexico didn’t pay a dime,” Walz said.
Underscoring the focus on the top of the ticket, during a back-and-forth about immigration, Vance said to his opponent: “I think that you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.”
It was a wonky policy debate, with talk of risk pools, housing regulations and energy policy
In an age of world-class disses optimized for social media, Tuesday’s debate was a detour into substance. Both candidates took a low-key approach and both enthusiastically delved into the minutiae.
Walz dug into the drafting of the Affordable Care Act when he was in the House in 2009, and pushed Vance on the senator’s claim that Trump, who tried to eliminate the law, actually helped preserve it. Vance, defending his claim that illegal immigration pushes up housing prices, cited a Federal Reserve study to back himself up. Walz talked about how Minneapolis tinkered with local regulations to boost the housing supply. Both men talked about the overlap between energy policy, trade, and climate change.
It was a very different style than often seen in presidential debates over the past several election cycles.
Vance stays on the defensive on abortion
Walz pounced on Vance repeatedly over abortion access and reproductive rights as the Ohio senator tried to argue that a state-by-state matrix of abortion laws is the ideal approach for the United States. Walz countered that a “basic right” for a woman should not be determined “by geography.”
“This is a very simple proposition: These are women’s decisions,” Walz said. “We trust women. We trust doctors.”
Walz sought to personalize the issue by referencing the death of Amber Thurman, who waited more than 20 hours at the hospital for a routine medical procedure known as a D&C to clear out remaining tissue after taking abortion pills. She developed sepsis and died.
Rather than sidestep the reference, Vance at one point agreed with Walz that “Amber Thurman should still be alive.”
Vance steered the conversation to the GOP ticket’s proposals he said would help women and children economically, thus avoiding the need for terminating pregnancies. But Walz retorted that such policies -- tax credits, expanded childcare aid, a more even economy -- can be pursued while still allowing women to make their own decisions about abortion.
Both candidates put a domestic spin on climate change
In the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Helene, Vance took a question about climate change and gave an answer about jobs and manufacturing, taking a detour around Trump’s past claims that global warming is a “hoax.”
Vance contended that the best way to fight climate change was to move more manufacturing to the United States, because the country has the world’s cleanest energy economy. It was a distinctly domestic spin on a global crisis, especially after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the international Paris climate accords during his administration.
Walz also kept the climate change focus domestic, touting the Biden administration’s renewable energy investments as well as record levels of oil and natural gas production. “You can see us becoming an energy superpower in the future,” Walz said.
It was a decidedly optimistic take on a pervasive and grim global problem.
Walz, and Vance each blame the opposing presidential candidate for the immigration stalemate
The two running mates agreed that the number of migrants in the U.S. illegally is a problem. But each laid the blame on the opposing presidential nominee.
Vance echoed Trump by repeatedly calling Harris the “border czar” and suggested that she, as vice president, single-handedly rolled back the immigration restrictions Trump had imposed as president. The result, in Vance’s telling, is an unchecked flow of fentanyl, strain on state and local resources, and increased housing prices around the country.
Harris was never asked to be the “border czar” and she was never specifically given the responsibility for security on the border. She was tasked by Biden in March 2021 with tackling the “root causes” of migration from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador and pushing leaders there and in Mexico to enforce immigration laws. Harris was not empowered to set U.S. immigration policy — only the president can sign executive orders and Harris was not empowered as Biden’s proxy in negotiations with Congress on immigration law.
Walz advanced Democrats’ arguments that Trump single-handedly killed a bipartisan Senate deal to tighten border security and boost the processing system for immigrants and asylum seekers. Republicans backed off the deal, Walz noted, only after Trump said it wasn’t good enough.
Both candidates leaned on tried-and-true debate tactics — including not answering tough questions
Asked directly whether Trump’s promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants would remove parents of U.S.-born children, Vance never answered the question. Instead, the senator tried to put his best spin on Trump’s plan to use the military to help with deportations and pivot to attacking Harris for a porous border. Asked to respond to Trump’s having called climate change a “hoax,” Vance also avoided a response.
The debate kicked off with Walz being asked if he’d support a preemptive strike by Israel against Iran. Walz praised Harris’ foreign policy leadership but never answered that question, either.
And at the end of the debate, Vance would not answer Walz’s direct question of whether Trump indeed lost the 2020 election.
Walz stumbles and lands a punch on an uneven night
Walz had several verbal stumbles on a night in which he admitted to “misspeaking” often. In the debate’s opening moments, he confused Iran and Israel when discussing the Middle East.
At one point he said he had “become friends with school shooters,” and he stumbled through an explanation of inaccurate remarks about whether he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. ( He was not.)
But the governor noticeably put Vance on the defensive over abortion and, near the end of the debate, with a pointed question about whether Trump won the 2020 election.
Vance stays on a limb on Jan. 6 insurrection
The candidates went out of their way to be polite to each other until the very end when Vance refused to back down from his statements that he wouldn’t have certified Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Vance tried to turn the issue to claims that the “much bigger threat to democracy” was Democrats trying to censor people on social media. But Walz wouldn’t let go.
“This one is troubling to me,” said Walz, noting that he’d just been praising some of Vance’s answers. He rattled off the ways Trump tried to overturn his 2020 loss and noted that the candidate still insists he won that contest. Then Walz asked Vance if Trump actually lost the election.
Vance responded by asking if Harris censored people.
“That is a damning non-answer,” said Walz, noting that Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, wasn’t on the debate stage because he stood up to Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, and presided over Congress’ certification of the former president’s loss.
“America,” Walz concluded, “I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”
In a debate that evoked a calmer era in American politics, Tim Walz and JD Vance on Tuesday went after each other’s running mates and sought to shore up their campaigns’ vulnerabilities at a time of renewed fears of a regional war in the Middle East and sadness over devastation from Hurricane Helene.
Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, focused many of their criticisms on the top of the ticket, as is traditional for vice presidential debates. They each pointed to the crises of the day as reasons for voters to choose Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.
The debate unfolded in the final weeks of a campaign that has been defined by harsh, personal attacks and historic convulsions, including a candidate dropping out and another facing two attempted assassinations. Polls have shown Harris and Trump locked in a close contest as early voting begins across the country, giving added weight to anything that can sway voters on the margins, including the impression left by the vice presidential candidates.
Despite the milder tone of the debate, there were still glimpses of the political fractures that threaten American democracy. Vance papered over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and echoed Trump’s election denial by refusing to acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the race in 2020.
But throughout much of the rest of the night, two Midwesterners struck a noticeably friendlier tone than the matchup between Trump and Harris — or, earlier this year, the showdown between Trump and Biden before he dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance.
In one raw moment when Walz said his teenage son had witnessed a shooting at a community center, Vance expressed empathy.
“I’m sorry about that. Christ have mercy,” Vance said.
“I appreciate that,” Walz said.
In other parts of the debate, Vance tried to soften his image, ratcheting down his typically forceful and aggressive delivery and acknowledging that people watching might not agree with him or Trump. He discussed Trump’s ideas with polish while avoiding being pinned down on the more controversial parts of the former president’s record. His performance immediately delighted the Trump campaign and many of its allies.
Walz depicted Trump as wrong on the issues and a chaotic leader. He occasionally stumbled over his words, even saying “I’ve become friends with school shooters” when he was talking about meeting with survivors. He did deliver several points sure to please Democrats, including on abortion rights and democracy — even if he never used the word “weird,” the branding he attached to Trump and Vance that brought him to national prominence.
The debate began with a discussion of the Middle East, where Israeli forces are fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran has fired missiles at Israel. In Gaza, Israeli forces continue to fight Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack.
“What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter,” said Walz. “And the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need at this moment.”
Vance, in his reply, argued that Trump is an intimidating figure whose presence on the international stage is its own deterrent.
“Gov. Walz can criticize Donald Trump’s tweets, but effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world,” he said.
A sharper turn on immigration
The debate in New York hosted by CBS News opened with a sober tone that reflected growing domestic and international concerns about safety and security. But it gave way to sharper attacks from both Walz and Vance — and a moment in which the moderators stopped the discussion by cutting the two men’s mics.
Walz accused Vance and Trump of villainizing legal immigrants in Vance’s home state. He pointed to the fact that Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had to send in extra law enforcement to provide security to the city’s schools after Vance tweeted about and Trump amplified false claims about Haitians eating pets.
“This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it, you demonize it,” Walz said, saying not doing so would allow people to “come together.”
Vance said the 15,000 Haitians in the city had caused housing, economic, and other issues that the Biden-Harris administration was ignoring.
When the debate moderators pointed out that the Haitians living there had legal status, Vance protested that CBS News had said its moderators would not be fact-checking, leaving the onus to the candidates. As Vance continued and the moderators tried to move on, his microphone was cut and neither man could be heard.
A heavier focus on policy
The senator and the governor, both picked for their ability to communicate their party’s points, seemed to spend more time talking about policy than the presidential candidates have in their matchups.
On abortion, both men shared personal stories of women. Walz talked about Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who was denied an abortion despite developing a life-threatening infection, and Hadley Duvall, who was a 12-year-old girl when she was raped and impregnated by her stepfather.
Vance spoke of a close friend who, he said, “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 senator also said he never supported a national ban when running for the Senate in 2022 even though he had suggested as much, saying instead that he wanted a “minimum national standard.” Trump, meanwhile, posted on his social media site during the debate that he would veto a national abortion ban, though he has also taken credit for the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and clearing the way for conservative-led states to ban or restrict the procedure.
Walz and Vance also talked about housing policy, the economy and climate change in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated several states and caused at least 160 deaths.
“I’m sure Gov. Walz joins me in saying our hearts go out to those innocent people. Our prayers go out to them,” Vance said, giving a far different answer than his running mate, who has accused Biden and Harris of politicizing the hurricane response. “And we want as robust and aggressive as a federal response as we can get to save as many lives as possible.”
The debate ran longer than the allotted 90 minutes, but there were still some key topics left unaddressed by the moderators and the candidates. Vance was not asked about Ukraine, although he’s among the Republican Party’s leading opponents of U.S. aid to the besieged country. No one talked about Trump’s criminal cases, including his conviction in a New York case related to hush money payments.
Vance downplays Jan. 6
Vance downplayed Trump’s assault on the 2020 election, saying Trump had told people to “peacefully” march on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The subsequent violence by Trump’s supporters disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
The real threat to democracy, Vance claimed, was censorship of the opposition.
“We ought to debate our differences. We ought to argue about them. Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship on an industrial scale,” Vance said.
Walz said Vance was helping to deny “the first time in American history that a president or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power.”
He also asked Vance if Trump won the election in 2020.
“I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
Both men acknowledged past missteps
The role of a presidential running mate is typically to serve as an attack dog for the person at the top of the ticket, arguing against the opposing presidential candidate and their proxy on stage. Both Vance and Walz have embraced that role.
But in a political era where apologies are rare, Walz and Vance each admitted missteps and vulnerabilities Tuesday.
Vance was asked to address his past biting criticisms of the former president, including once suggesting Trump would be “America’s Hitler.”
“When you get something wrong and you change your mind, you ought to be honest with the American people,” he said Tuesday.
Walz, meanwhile, was pressed on his misleading claim, which was investigated this week by Minnesota Public Radio and other outlets, that he was in Hong Kong during the turbulence surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, part of a broader pattern of inaccuracies that Republicans hope to exploit.
Confronted with his misstatements about his travels to China years ago, Walz defended himself by saying, “I’ve not been perfect.” In fact, he said, “I’m a knucklehead at times.” Eventually, he acknowledged he misspoke about his history.
Aside from the contentious exchange surrounding the attack on the Capitol, the debate featured more moments of good feeling than might have been expected. Walz said he’d “enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here” before noting that he’s “sympathetic to misspeaking on things and I think I might have with the senator.”
“Me too, man,” Vance responded.
Multiple news reports indicate that Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz misleadingly claimed he was in Hong Kong during the turbulence surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, part of a broader pattern of inaccuracies that Republicans hope to exploit.
At Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Walz was asked about misleading people and he ultimately when pressed said he “misspoke.” But Walz said that he can “get caught up in rhetoric” and that “I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times.” He then added that former President Donald Trump should have come on one of his trips to China, and if he had done so, then the Republican nominee would know better than to compliment Chinese President Xi Jinping on his handling of the 2020 pandemic.
On Tuesday, CNN posted a 2019 radio interview in which Walz stated he was in Hong Kong on the day of the massacre when publicly available evidence suggests he was not.
After a seven-week demonstration in Beijing led by pro-democracy students, China’s military fired heavily on the group on June 4, 1989, and left at least 500 people dead.
Minnesota Public Radio reported Monday that publicly available accounts contradict a 2014 statement made by Walz, then a member of the U.S. House, during a hearing that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the massacre. Walz suggested that he was in the then-British colony of Hong Kong in May 1989, but he appears to have been in Nebraska. Public records suggest he left for Hong Kong and China in August of that year.
The Associated Press found a 2009 congressional transcript about Tiananmen Square in which Walz seemed to insinuate that he was in Hong Kong during the day of the massacre.
The vice presidential candidate also has made statements in which he misrepresented the type of infertility treatment received by his family, and there have been conflicting accounts of his 1995 arrest for drunk driving and misleading information about his rank in the National Guard. Walz and his campaign have also given different versions of the story of his 1995 arrest for drunken driving.
Walz has also claimed that he has traveled to China more than 30 times, but his campaign said that the actual number was “closer to 15.”
Minnesota Public Radio on Monday revealed that a photo published on May 16, 1989, showed that Walz was working in the National Guard Armory in Alliance, Neb., at the time and that an August 1989 story said Walz was to leave for China.
During the 2014 hearing on Tiananmen Square, Walz testified: “As a young man I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong province and was in Hong Kong in May 1989. As the events were unfolding, several of us went in. I still remember the train station in Hong Kong. There was a large number of people — especially Europeans, I think — very angry that we would still go after what had happened.”
“But it was my belief at that time,” Walz continued, “that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people, and the opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”
Minnesota Public Radio said the evidence shows that Walz, then a 25-year-old teacher, was still in Nebraska in May 1989. He went to China that year through WorldTeach, a small nonprofit based at Harvard University.
The news organization found a newspaper photograph published on May 16, 1989, of Walz working at a National Guard Armory. A separate story from a Nebraska newspaper on August 11 of that year said Walz would “leave Sunday en route to China” and that he had nearly “given up” participating in the program after student revolts that summer in China.
Some Republicans have criticized Walz for his longstanding interest in China. Besides teaching there, he went back for his honeymoon and several times after with American exchange students.
Kyle Jaros, an associate professor of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, told The Associated Press that it’s become “a well-worn tactic to attack opponents simply for having a China line in their resumes.”
Voters who watched the VP debate rendered a split decision in a flash poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov.
Roughly equal shares of debate-watchers scored JD Vance (42 percent) and Tim Walz (41 percent) the winner, the poll showed. The remaining 17 percent called it a tie.
That stands in contrast to the two presidential debates earlier this year. In flash polls conducted by CNN, Donald Trump was seen as a clear victor over Joe Biden in their June debate, while Kamala Harris clearly beat out Trump in last month’s meeting between the two nominees.
And in another turnabout from the top of the ticket, the vast majority of debate-watchers, 88 percent, described the tone of the VP debate as “generally positive.” Only 12 percent said it was “generally negative.”
Both running mates improved their image ratings among voters who watched the debate. Walz entered the night with 52 percent of this sample holding a favorable opinion of him; 60 percent said they did after it was over. Among the same group, Vance's favorable rating improved by roughly the same margin, from 40 percent to 49 percent.
A reminder: Polls of voters who watched the debate are not representative of the broader electorate. The CBS News/YouGov poll was conducted online among voters who said in advance they planned to watch the debate and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
On issues, debate-watchers said Walz gave the better answers on abortion (62 percent to 38 percent) and health care (59 percent to 41 percent). The two candidates were roughly even on the conflict in the Middle East, the economy and immigration.
And a majority of debate-watchers said Walz spent most of his time explaining his own views (54 percent) as opposed to attacking the other side (46 percent). Those results were flipped for Vance: 55 percent said he spent most of his time attacking the other side.
Moderator: Just to clarify, Springfield’s Haitian migrants have legal status
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 2, 2024
Vance: The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check pic.twitter.com/zo5W3i9HIt