On October 1st, Republican JD Vance and his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, met for the first time at the 2024 Vice-Presidential Debate on CBS. Both men have Midwestern backgrounds and served in the military, but their policies and public personas could not be more different. Some pundits had predicted a “slugfest” due to both candidates’ willingness to go after each other on the campaign trail, but what we actually got was more of a respectful-disagreement-fest. As highlighted by moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan during their brief introduction to the debate, “the 2024 presidential election remains a race that either candidate could win.” The razor-thin closeness of the election adds enormous pressure to both candidates, who attempted to perform the primary political duty of any vice-presidential candidate: Don’t make the president look bad.
During roughly the first half of the night, Vance succeeded mightily in pursuit of that goal. The opening topic was American foreign policy in the Middle East. Walz seemed the most nervous, mixing up Iran and Israel in his first answer of the night, but eventually got his point across; he argued that the Harris administration offers steady leadership abroad, whereas the Trump administration would bring chaos. In response, Vance used the first minute of his reply time to reintroduce himself to the American people, highlighting his working-class Appalachian origin story, his mother’s struggles with addiction, and his service in the Iraq War–the three most normal things about him. He continued by arguing that President Trump delivered stability abroad by intimidating other nations, and that the Biden-Harris administration unfroze $100 billion in assets that Iran used to buy weapons, which are being used against Israel. This figure is completely exaggerated, as the Biden-Harris administration has only unfrozen around $16 billion in assets, with $10 billion unfrozen as an extension of a 2018 Trump administration deal, and $6 billion being directed towards humanitarian ends. This outlandish claim went unchecked, as Walz instead went on the offensive, attacking Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, his Twitter diplomacy, and his weakness for flattery. When Brennan asked Vance about Trump’s recent hypocritical arguments in favor of a diplomatic deal with Iran, Vance instead highlighted that October 7th happened under the Biden-Harris administration, while the United States wasn’t engaged in a major conflict during the Trump administration. As specious of a claim as that is, with Trump escalating major conflicts in Afghanistan and Yemen, it also went unchecked by Walz and the debate moderators.
The debate’s third topic was the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border, where Vance opened by staying on message and effectively communicated to the country on one of Republicans’ strongest issues. In response to Brennan’s probing about the Trump campaign’s mass-deportation policy, Vance blamed Vice President Harris for enabling the flow of fentanyl into the country through her border policies. Vance went on to allege that “20-25 million” undocumented immigrants are here in the country, expressing sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of children the Department of Homeland Security has lost track of. Most estimates place the number of undocumented immigrants in America closer to about half that, but as we all know by this point, Vance won’t sweat a little lie if it creates a more advantageous truth. Walz, in response, highlighted the decrease in opioid deaths in America over the last twelve months as well as Trump’s threatened dismantling of January’s bipartisan immigration legislation and his failure to build more than 2% of a border wall, or to have Mexico pay for any of it. Brennan then asked Vance directly if he would support separating migrant children and families at the border, a tough question and one he deftly slipped out of, instead reorienting the spotlight towards his position that Harris enabled the trafficking of drugs and children due to our border’s insecurity. Walz then explicitly called out the Trump-Vance ticket’s false allegations of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and their subsequent admitted willingness to “create stories” to push his own agenda. Walz said, “There’s consequences…We could come together and solve this if we didn’t let Donald Trump continue to make it an issue. And the consequences in Springfield were the Governor had to send state law enforcement to escort kindergarteners to school.” Vance then argued that hospitals and schools are being overrun by what Vance describes as “illegal” immigrants. And when Brennan fact-checked Vance, regarding Springfield’s Haitian migrants having temporary protected status, making them legal residents, Vance interjected with the following: “Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on. So there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.” Any candidate running for any office begging a debate moderator not to fact-check his claims is cause for concern. It’s as if he’s saying, “You guys said I could lie to the American people before, and that’s not fair! I should be allowed to lie to the American people whenever I want!”
Following that spicy exchange and the muting of both candidates’ mics, the debate shifted towards the economy, where things got wonky really fast. When O’Donnell asked Walz how he and Harris plan to pay for the billions in tax credits in their economic plan, Walz sidestepped the question and instead laid out an affirmative vision aimed at enticing middle-class voters, highlighting the Harris campaign’s housing, insulin, and child-tax-credit policies. When Vance was asked essentially the same question, he, too, sidestepped it, instead highlighting increases in inflation under the Biden administration. The back and forth between the two candidates during this section of the debate created some of the most substantive policy conversations we’ve had between two figures of this status in this election cycle.
The debate’s focus then shifted to past statements made by both men that have proven to be politically contentious. Walz was pressed about his claim of being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, when reports show he didn’t travel to Asia until later that year. Walz eventually admitted to “misspeaking,” but not before dishing out a two-minute word salad nobody ordered, so dense in its language that Brennan was forced to ask Walz to clarify his mistake again–drawing even more attention to his piss-poor response. I refuse to believe Walz’s debate prep didn’t include the possibility a question like this could be asked, so I think his misstep here comes down to a lack of experience on the national stage. Either way, such mistakes are inexcusable. Vance, in contrast, was prepared to be confronted with his past criticism of Donald Trump, as he answered similar questions in interviews for months leading up to the debate. Vance acknowledged his previous comments, but concluded he had been wrong about Trump due to the influence of the mainstream media. He then neatly wrapped up his seemingly logical justification of his ideological shifts by praising Trump’s record on the economy and the border, as well as criticizing Harris.
Following his worst moment on stage, it was during the next debate section on reproductive rights that Walz stayed on message and was at his most effective as a campaign surrogate. He immediately refocused the conversation on the real-life consequences of restrictive abortion policies, bringing up the stories of women who were directly harmed by them, like Amanda Zurawski or Hadley Duvall. Walz continued by arguing that an incoming Trump administration would likely make it harder to access reproductive care or infertility treatments, two notable aspects of Project 2025. His argument was straightforward but empathetic, and Democrats betting big on abortion motivating would-be voters must have loved a moment like this. Vance, in contrast to his normally aggressively pro-life stance, attempted to play the moderate. Vance acknowledged that Republicans need to gain back voters’ trust surrounding reproductive policy, but also argued that each state should be able to vote on its own abortion policy. Vance went on to argue that the Republican Party will be pro-family: “I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.” This is a far-cry from the J.D Vance who supported a 15-week federal abortion ban in 2022, and when pressed on this fact by O’Donnell, Vance denied that he ever supported a ban. (He did.) He continued, “ut, Norah, you know, one of the things that changed is in the state of Ohio, we had a referendum in 2023, and the people of Ohio voted overwhelmingly, by the way, against my position. And I think that what I learned from that, Norah, is that we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust.” It’s unlikely that this shapeshifting from Vance will convince too many voters that they can trust the Republican Party to protect reproductive freedoms, but I do think that many moderate voters were surprised at how reasonable he came off in this exchange.
Vance continued to play this new, more appealing, moderate version of himself, and I think he performed this role extremely well–that is, until the topic of democracy came up. When O’Donnell asked Vance specifically if he would contest the 2024 general election results, even if all governors certified their respective states’ votes, his well-rehearsed centrist veneer started to unravel. Instead of directly addressing the question, he answered that he was “focused on the future.” He then ridiculously attempted to assert that because Trump left office on January 20th, he wasn’t a threat to Democracy, as if January 6th, or the entire “Stop The Steal” movement didn’t happen. Walz heard Vance’s attempted reframing of the discussion and lurched at the opportunity to demystify Trump’s election denialism. Walz argued, “One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died. And it wasn’t just in there. In Minnesota, a group gathered on the state capitol grounds in St. Paul and said we’re marching to the Governor’s residence and there may be casualties. The only person there was my son and his dog, who was rushed out crying by state police. That issue. And Mike Pence standing there as they were chanting, hang Mike Pence. Mike Pence made the right decision. So, Senator, it was adjudicated over and over and over. I worked with kids long enough to know, and I said, as a football coach, sometimes you really want to win, but democracy is bigger than winning an election. You shake hands and then you try and do everything you can to help the other side win. That’s what was at stake here. Now, the thing I’m most concerned about is the idea that imprisoning your political opponents already laying the groundwork for people not accepting this. And a president’s words matter. A president’s words matter. People hear that. So I think this issue of settling our differences at the ballot box, shaking hands when we lose, being honest about it, but to deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a president or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power.” Vance responded by attempting to conflate Trump’s election denialism with Hilary Clinton blaming foreign influence for her loss to Trump in 2016. Walz countered by saying simply, “January 6th was not Facebook ads.” He then went on to ask Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election, to which Vance again repeated that he was focusing on the future. Walz said in reply, “That is a damning nonanswer.” Despite his earlier missteps, Walz did a fantastic job in the last section of the debate of painting Vance as nothing more than a Trump stooge; according to Walz, Vance was only standing where he was because of Mike Pence’s willingness to stand up for democracy.
What I saw as Vance’s slimy political maneuvering seemed to work well for him, at least according to the majority of viewers. When people are constantly being told by the media that Vance is some radical cat-lady-hating extremist, and then he spends 80% of the debate coming across as reasoned and intelligent, it’s bound to have a positive impact on his favorability (which had been historically low, and now remains only slightly underwater in the wake of the debate). As for Walz, while I think he stumbled early on, he did manage to find his footing–especially on issues where Democrats consistently outperform Republicans, like abortion and democracy. That said, the lack of media exposure and interviews leading up to the debate really affected his ability to confidently handle tough questions on stage.
See? Debates can be chock-full of wonky policy discussion and respectful disagreement…but unfortunately, nobody wants to see that.
The opinions expressed within this piece represent the views of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jefferson Independent.
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