Highlights from the VP debate from JD Vance and Tim Walz

The country’s two potential running mates squared off in New York City in a decidedly civil debate that would do little to change a stubbornly close and often much more heated presidential race six weeks before Election Day.

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

Here are more insights from what is likely the final debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Walz stumbled while Vance objected to fact-checking

For Vance, a Yale graduate who is a frequent contributor to cable news and has given more interviews than Walz, the debate was always a more comfortable place.

This became apparent during the debate. Vance launched a prepared offensive and still managed to appear polite on stage next to a popular governor.

One of his weakest moments was not an exchange with Walz, but with the moderators. After Vance referenced unfounded claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, host Margaret Brennan clarified to viewers that many of the city’s Haitian residents are there legally under a Temporary Protected Status program. Vance complained about the clarification.

“The rules were you 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,” he said before CBS temporarily muted his microphone.

Walz missed a few obvious opportunities to challenge Vance, and his fast-talking led to some notable stumbles. In an emotional response on the issue of gun control, Walz incorrectly said, “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I became friends with school shooters. I saw it.”

When asked about his comments that a trip to Hong Kong in 1989 coincided with the deadly Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, he described himself as a “knucklehead” and responded: “I got that there.” .” Summer and got it wrong… so I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests.”

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

But the impact of a vice presidential debate is likely to be small, and part of Walz’s appeal is his folksy, authentic charm.

Some of his strongest reactions showed his empathy. He said Vance and Trump “unfairly vilified and blamed migrants for problems rather than solving them by using a bipartisan border security bill that was ultimately rejected by Senate Republicans as fodder for his point of view.”[The border security bill] “Let us maintain our dignity when dealing with other people,” said Walz.

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

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

It was an extremely cordial affair

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

From there it was on to the relatively nice guy races.

There was very little persuasion (and those mics stayed hot) and few personal attacks. Walz and Vance – who often addressed each other by their official titles – said several times that they agreed with each other and traded Midwestern intricacies between policy disagreements.

“If Tim Walz becomes the next vice president, he will answer 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 at last month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

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

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

Vance added his personal background as both tried to emphasize their roots

Vance and Walz were selected to run at least in part because of their appeal to rural and rural America, and both of their personal stories were brought into the debate.

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

“And so 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.

While Walz didn’t spend much time discussing his background, he made sure to drop a few nods to his rural roots, including growing up in a “small, rural town in Nebraska – town of 400 people – where you could ride a bike “Mate, until the street lights come on.”

When speaking about climate change, he joined farmers and shared their experiences. “My farmers know that climate change is real,” Walz said.

“They’re adapting, and that’s allowed them to tell me, ‘I’m harvesting corn, I’m harvesting soybeans, I’m harvesting wheat.’ We are producing more natural gas and more oil at all times,” 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

Vance tried several times to portray the separation between Walz and Harris. During an exchange about the U.S.-Mexico border, Vance responded to Walz’s comments by saying, “I think you want to solve this problem. I don’t think Kamala Harris is doing that.”

He later told Walz, “You have a tough job here because you have to play Whack-a-Mole. You have to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver rising take-home pay, which of course he did. You have to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t lower inflation, which of course he did, and then at the same time you have to defend Kamala Harris’ terrible economic record.”

Walz has the highest approval ratings of the four presidential candidates, and Vance rarely took personal action against Walz. He actually went after Harris and linked her to President Joe Biden.

“If Kamala Harris has such big plans to address the problems of the middle class, then she should implement them now, not when she asks for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago, “That she isn’t says a lot about how much you can trust her actual plans,” Vance said.

Walz tried to compare Harris to Trump

Walz spent a significant portion of the evening drawing sharp contrasts between Harris and Trump, highlighting the vice president as a stable leader and calling the former president “fickle.”

Given the ongoing international crises, Walz said, “The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute 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 capricious leadership.”

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

“Donald Trump recognized that you need peace through strength to make people fear the United States,” Vance said. “They had to recognize that if they stepped out of line, U.S. global leadership would bring stability and peace back to the world.”