Vance has plenty to work with, from Walz’s handling of the 2020 riots to his Covid policies to his support for gender-transition services for minors.
Moments after Donald Trump tapped freshman senator J. D. Vance as his 2024 running mate during this year’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, Republicans in the convention hall were already feeling giddy about the prospect of watching him debate Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I will personally set up a folding table to sell tickets to the debate,” Wisconsin GOP chairman Brian Schimming told National Review inside the arena that night.
A couple weeks later, everything changed. After a post-presidential debate switcheroo atop the ticket, Vance will now spar against a different liberal politician who is also 20 years his senior — Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Tonight’s 90-minute, 9 p.m. ET showdown is the first and only scheduled vice-presidential debate of the cycle and will be moderated by CBS anchors Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell.
As they aim to defend their bosses’ records and 2024 platforms, both vice-presidential candidates will try to keep one key objective in mind — avoid stepping on any landmines that may hurt their ticket in the final stretch.
Even though Vance has had his fair share of rocky news cycles since emerging as Trump’s running mate in mid July, the first-term senator is quick on his feet and comfortable in front of the camera. And as NR reported earlier this summer, the streamlined nature of Vance’s recent solo campaign stops has also brought into focus his stylistic differences from Trump, whose lengthy public remarks typically lack both message discipline and a consistent line of attack against his opponent.
Even Harris spokesman Ian Sams acknowledged in a Monday interview that Vance “is a slick guy.”
“He’s a Yale Law School graduate who did a best-selling book and toured the country and has done so many interviews about it and about his candidacy for vice president. He’s gonna be slick, he misdirects, he’s dishonest, he can play the game onstage pretty well,” Sams told MSNBC’s Anna Cabrera, contrasting Vance with Walz, whom he characterized as an “average guy, coach, school teacher who I think a lot of people in this country can relate to.”
For Republicans, tonight is an opportunity for Vance to tear into that caricature of Harris’s running mate as a “folksy” former schoolteacher, U.S. Army National Guardsman, and football coach who previously represented a red-leaning House district. Or put more simply, a small-town American everyman whom “you can count on to push you out of a snowbank,” as one of his former students put it onstage at this summer’s Democratic convention in Chicago.
The Yale-educated Marine veteran has experience debating this kind of Democrat. In his 2022 Senate race, Vance faced off against former representative Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), a smooth-talking, moderate-sounding Democrat with a very liberal voting record. In Walz, Vance has a buffet of ultra-progressive gubernatorial policies to poke fun at — from his botched handling of the Minneapolis riots in 2020 to his restrictive Covid policies, high tax policies, support for gender-transition services for minors in Minnesota, and decision to sign legislation granting illegal immigrants driver’s licenses. And when it comes to the 2024 campaign, Vance will push Walz to defend the Biden-Harris administration’s record on illegal immigration and the economy.
“No amount of ‘Minnesota Nice’ is going to make up for the fact that Walz embodies the same disastrous economic, open-border, and soft-on-crime policies Harris has inflicted on our country over the last four years,” House GOP whip Tom Emmer said on a Trump campaign press call with reporters Monday morning. A former House colleague of Walz’s, Emmer has spent the past month studying the Minnesota governor’s mannerisms and going through his old debate footage to role-play him in debate prep with Vance. The most difficult part of debate prep? “Learning how to tell lies with a straight face,” Emmer said.
“He likes to talk about freedom, but he set up a hotline encouraging neighbors to snitch on one another for violating Covid lockdown mandates,” Emmer added.
If the Trump campaign’s pre-debate press call is any indication, Vance will likely excoriate his opponent for mischaracterizing his military record on numerous occasions, as well as Walz’s decision to retire from the military after 24 years in the National Guard after learning that his unit would deploy to Iraq.
Meanwhile for Democrats, tonight is an opportunity for Walz to lean into Harris’s “we are not going back” shtick by characterizing the GOP ticket as “weird,” chaotic, and out of touch with the average American voter on abortion. He’s expected to remind the audience of Vance’s yearsold “childless cat ladies” comments and play up the GOP ticket’s obsession with rumors in Vance’s home state about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, allegedly stealing and eating residents’ pets. The Minnesota governor is also expected to try and crack the veneer of Vance’s hardscrabble childhood in Appalachia by poking fun at the GOP senator’s Ivy League education, brief venture-capitalist stint in Silicon Valley, and former disdain for the GOP nominee.
Will any of this matter? Flash back to the 2020 vice presidential debate, and few memorable moments come to mind beyond Harris’s “I’m speaking” comeback and the fly that sat on then–vice president Mike Pence’s head.
Far fewer Americans are expected to tune in to tonight’s event than to last month’s presidential debate, when Harris exceeded expectations — thanks in part to a pair of ABC moderators who made a point of only fact-checking an already undisciplined and off-message Trump in real time.
The rules of tonight’s debate will vary slightly from the rules set by CNN during the Trump-vs.-Biden debate in June and adopted by ABC’s Trump-vs.-Harris debate in September. In keeping with both of those debates, tonight’s showdown will not feature a live audience. But unlike those presidential debates, both vice-presidential candidates’ mics will not be muted onstage this evening, though CBS moderators reserve the right to cut a candidate’s mic if necessary.
As part of its expectations-setting strategy, the Trump campaign staffers are playing up their opponent’s debate skills.
“Walz is very good in debates,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said on a Monday morning call with reporters, echoing a similar strategy the campaign deployed ahead of the former president’s June match-up against Joe Biden. “I want to repeat that. Tim Walz is very good in debates — really good,” Miller added. “He’s been a politician for nearly 20 years. He’ll be very well-prepared for tomorrow night. He’s not going to be the wildly gesticulating, effeminate caricature we see at rallies pointing to Kamala Harris, dancing about on the stage. Walz is going to be buttoned up.”