Republican Sen. JD Vance and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz clashed Tuesday in their only 2024 vice presidential debate on everything from economic and gun policy to immigration and school shootings.
The Ohio senator and Minnesota governor have kept things personal, even saying they might work with each other at times. However, they repeatedly attacked each other’s candidates and defended their party policies and tickets.
The debate, hosted by CBS News in New York, could be the last event featuring candidates from both campaigns. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump no renegotiation is currently planned.
Here are five key takeaways from the discussions.
It wasn’t really about Vance or Walz
It was immediately clear that the two prominent politicians on stage were merely proxies for their running mates, using the questions as a vehicle to attack their best rivals, and in many cases going out of their way to avoid attacking each other personally.
Walz used his first question about Iran’s strikes on Israel to age Trump: “Donald Trump, who is almost 80 years old, talking about the size of the crowd is not what we need at this point.” He went on to attack the “volatile leadership of Donald Trump” around the world.
Vance responded, “Who has been vice president for the last three and a half years? The answer is not mine, but your running mate. Donald Trump has consistently made the world safer.”
In the next piece on climate change, Walz took another shot at Trump: “Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would create more waterfront property to invest in.”
On immigration, Vance deflected when asked how he would follow through on Trump’s promise of mass deportations, repeatedly attacking Harris: “I’ve been on the southern border more than Kamala Harris, our border czar.”
Notably, both men said they believed their rivals on stage wanted to resolve the border issue as well as other political differences.
“I believe Senator Vance wants to resolve this, but by not standing with Donald Trump and working together to find a solution, it’s becoming a conversation piece,” Walz said.
Vance replied, “I think I agree with you. I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think Kamala Harris will.”
The most tense between them came to an end, Walz asked Vance if Trump would lose the 2020 election. Vance didn’t answer directly, instead asking Walz about Facebook’s censorship of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Walz admits that he told the story of Tiananmen Square
Waltz then gave a nervous response before breaking into a beat. But he stumbled several times in the spring of 1989 when he falsely claimed to have visited Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests. report Minnesota Public Radio said he was actually there later in the year.
Walz initially dodged the question: “I haven’t been perfect, and I’m blunt sometimes,” he said, as he gave a long and difficult answer about his upbringing and his commitment to Minnesotans throughout his career.
When pressed by the moderator, Walz admitted, “I came in that summer and I misspoke.”
It’s the kind of question probing past statements that national political candidates get a lot of — but Walz largely avoids media interviews and thus hasn’t dealt with many questions since becoming the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
Vance defends Trump’s past criticisms
Vance was well-prepared with a response when asked to explain his past criticisms of Trump, including by saying it can be “America’s Hitler” and his He criticizes Trump’s economic performance as president.
“Sometimes, of course, I don’t agree with the president, but I’ve also been very open about being wrong about Donald Trump. “First of all, I was wrong because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” Vance said, walking through the territory he and his campaign have covered in media interviews and responses to the stories.
Vance continued, “But most of all, Donald Trump is for the American people, raising wages, increasing take-home pay, a working economy for normal Americans, a secure southern border… When you lose your head, when you say the wrong thing, If something goes wrong and you change your mind, You have to be honest with the American people.
He also partly blamed Congress, saying “there was a lot at the border, about tariffs,” saying that “if the Republican Congress and the Democrats in Congress were a little better about how they ran the country, they could have done a lot more.”
Walz and Vance pick apart the economic records of their fellow runners
Walz was equipped with an argument to attack Trump on the economy, one of the GOP candidate’s strongest issues, according to polls asking voters if they trust him more.
“Kamala Harris’s First Day was Donald Trump’s failure on Covid that caused our economy to collapse. We were already in a manufacturing recession before Covid – about 10 million people were out of work, the largest percentage since the Great Depression,” Walz said.
Vance responded by calling Biden-Harris’ economic record “wild” and defending Trump.
“Honestly, Tim, I think you’ve got a tough job here because you have to play Whac-A-Mole,” he said, challenging Walz to “pretend” Trump’s economy is improving wages and low inflation.
Walz also attacked Trump on his tax and trade policies.
“If you’re listening tonight and you want billionaires to get tax cuts, Trump is your candidate,” Walz told voters as he watched a television screen. “How is it fair that you pay your taxes every year and Donald Trump has paid no federal taxes for the past 15 years?”
Vance’s revisionist history of Trump’s repeal of Obamacare
Vance rewrote history Instead of years of efforts to destroy Trump’s Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, he reiterated the campaign’s claim that Trump saved it.
“Donald Trump could destroy the program. Instead, he worked bipartisanly to ensure Americans had access to affordable care,” Vance said in response to a question about Trump.plan concepts” to replace the 2010 health law.
The claim misrepresents the facts. Trump as President worked in a partisan manner Working with Republicans to destroy the ACA, approve legislation that would repeal the law’s ban on insurance subsidies and higher prices for people with pre-existing conditions; The push fell one vote short in the Senate. He used executive actions to cut funding for programs to sign people up to light up the legal markets. He also asked the Supreme Court to repeal the ACA entirely in 2020—a case that failed.