Vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance took part in a good-natured spar, covering abortion, climate change and immigration as they both tooted their respective bosses’ trumpets during their one and only debate before the November election.
The CBS showdown, just 35 days before the general election, was a chance for the vice presidential picks to prove that they’re qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The candidates tangled over issues like abortion, immigration, gun violence, climate change, the state of the economy and the Middle East. The two also took plenty of chances to present each other as extreme or ‘weird’.
They also bigged up their bosses, Trump and Kamala Harris, in the final campaign sprint of what could be one of the closest elections in decades.
But it was Vance who left the best impression with viewers, after a strong start against a nervy opponent and despite dodging a question on if Trump lost the 2020 election.
According to the DailyMail.com/J.L Partners poll of 801 likely voters, 50 percent said Vance won the debate compared to just 43 percent who said Walz was the victor. Meanwhile, seven percent of the respondents were unsure who came out on top.
Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance outperformed his Democratic rival Tim Walz in their one and only debate of the 2024 race, according to DailyMail.com’s snap poll
Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan (pictured) moderated the CBS debate
The pair were seen exchanging pleasantries with each other with their wives before the live debate
Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel on Tuesday catalysed a stark contrast between how a Democratic and Republican administration may deal with the rising tensions in the Middle East.
Walz promised ‘steady leadership’ under Harris while Vance pledged a return to ‘peace through strength’ if Trump is returned to the White House.
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.’
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.
Walz, meanwhile, 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.
The Minnesota Governor was visibly nervous in the first exchanges while Vance delivered more poised and polished responses
J.D. Vance takes his wife Usha’s hand on the stage after his one and only vice presidential debate with Tim Walz
Asked directly whether Trump’s promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants would remove parents of American-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.
Vance also avoided questions regarding the January 6 insurrection. After Walz asked his opposite number ‘Did [Trump] lose the election’, Vance sidestepped by saying: ‘Tim, I’m focused on the future.’
Walz, seeing his opportunity, said to the audience: ‘That is a damning nonanswer.’
‘The democracy is bigger than winning an election,’ Walz said. ‘You shake hands and then you try and do everything you can to help the other side win.’
The governor added that when this election is over ‘we need to shake hands’ and ‘the winner needs to be the winner.’
Walz also repeatedly pounced on Vance 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 personalise the hot button 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 tragically died.
Vance and Walz had a largely civilized and substantive debate about policies ranging from immigration to health care, the economy and taxes, abortion rights and more
Walz had a jittery start when asked if he would launch a preemptive strike on Iran in response to its ballistic missile attack on Israel
Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his wife Gwen Walz walk from stage after a vice presidential debate
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.
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.
During an exchange on gun violence, he recalled how his 17-year-old son Gus had witnessed a school shooting.
It is unclear why Walz claimed to be friends with shooters
Gus Walz, son of Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, cries during the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago, as his mother Gwen Walz watches
In an unfortunate slip of the tongue he then said: ‘I’ve become friends with school shooters’.
It’s unclear what he meant to say.
In a moment of brutal honesty – with the folksy attitude that has dominated his campaign – he admitted: ‘I’m a knucklehead sometimes.
‘I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric.’
He also was tripped up by a question about his claims he was in Hong Kong teaching during the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in China in 1989.
Local media reports from the time put him in his home state of Nebraska, and had him planning to China months after the demonstrations.
‘I got there that summer and misspoke,’ Walz said. ‘That’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, went in, and from that I learned a lot.’
Vance sidestepped a question over whether Trump lost the 2020 election
Vance repeatedly referred to the ‘Kamala Harris administration’, trying to tie the vice president to President Joe Biden’s policies.
‘When did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris,’ Vance said early on in the debate.
‘So 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’.
Vance also claimed that Harris, not Biden, signed the executive order that undid most of Trump’s immigration policies.
James Johnson, co-Founder of J.L. Partners and DailyMail.com pollster, said it’s clear J.D. Vance pulled off the best performance of the night.
But whether it will have an impact on the general election is a different matter.
‘JD Vance can take a bow after his debate performance, with likely voters saying he did the best,’ Johnson said.
‘This was no self-destruction moment for Walz, whose approval rating improved in viewers’ minds after the debate, and is seen as being the right pick by Harris.
‘What is perhaps most striking in the data is how little this looks set to matter.
‘Despite handing Vance the win, voters did not change their preference for vice president, or how they would vote in November.’
Of the poll respondents, 46 percent said before the debate they were planning to vote for Trump and Vance. This was the same by the end of the night.
Half (50 percent) said they intended to back Harris and Walz. That figure went down by one percent as a result of the debate.
‘Vance had a good night, but it might end up having more impact on his own personal political brand than on whether Trump ends up in the White House on January 20th.’
One viewer who was full of praise for Vance was the former president, who spent the night commentating on every development on the New York stage.
‘JD crushed it! Walz was a Low IQ Disaster – Very much like Kamala,’ Trump said in one of his many Truth Social posts during the evening.
He added: ‘Our Country would never be able to recover from an Administration of these two. Can you imagine them representing us with sharp, fierce Foreign Leaders? I can’t!
The Republican nominee hurled insults at Walz, by calling him ‘Tampon Tim’ and mocking his frantic note-taking.
He also tore into CBS moderators Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell by calling them ‘young ladies’ and claiming they were ‘biased’ against his vice presidential pick.
Trump disparagingly called the CBS moderators ‘young ladies’
Norah O’Donnell (pictured) was one of the two moderators of the debate
J.D. Vance gets fact-checked
Trump’s running mate ended up being fact-checked by moderators during the debate even though CBS News signaled it would not be fact checking the candidates.
Brennan fact-checked Vance, noting that the Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio are in the country legally.
That prompted an angry response Vance and ended with candidates’ mics getting cut.
During a back-and-forth on immigration, Vance talked about how the Haitians were overwhelming resources in the Ohio community.
‘Thank you governor, and just to clarify, for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,’ Brennan inserted.
‘Thank you, 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,’ Vance said.
When Vance and Walz kept speaking on the subject, their mics were cut.
A very civil debate with handshakes and embraces between their wives
Vance and Walz had a largely civilized and substantive debate about policies ranging from immigration to health care, the economy and taxes, abortion rights and more.
Right off the bat, both candidates shook hands before the debate even started. It was different from when Harris had to walk over and address Trump at the top of their presidential debate last month.
During the debate, both candidates even acknowledged their agreement at times.
In a focus group on CNN afterwards, one undecided voter called it an unexpectedly ‘warm and fuzzy’ debate.
