NEW YORK (TIP): U.S. Vice Presidential Candidates – Minnesota’s Democrat Governor Tim Walz and Republican Senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance – argued over the 2020 election results, foreign policy, the economy, immigration, gun control, abortion rights and the presidential candidates’ records, at their first and only televised debate as the U.S. heads towards a general election on November 5. The 90-minute debate, hosted by CBS News in New York, was markedly civil given the bitterly polarized context and heated presidential debate last month between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump.
In the context of Tuesday’s Iranian missile strike on Israel, Mr. Walz emphasized the importance of alliances and the need for “steady“ leadership, which he said Ms. Harris would provide. Mr. Vance spoke of “peace through strength” and no major war breaking during the Trump presidency.
Mr. Vance, who has been lagging behind his fellow Midwesterner, Mr. Walz, went into damage-control mode on reproductive rights, with the GOP vulnerable to losing the support of women in significant numbers due to its position on reproductive issues and the overturning of Roe v Wade (a legal precedent which, broadly, protected a woman’s right to an abortion) in 2022, by a Supreme Court with three judges appointed by Mr. Trump when he was President.
“We’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue…,” said Mr. Vance, who had earlier expressed support for a “national standard” on abortion. The Yale Law School educated Ohio Senator, whose remarks over the years have included references to the U.S. being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” sought to rehabilitate and polish his image, measuring his words on Tuesday night. Mr. Walz pushed back against Democrats being defined as “pro-abortion” .
“We are pro-freedoms for women to make their choices,” he said, emphasizing also that Ms. Harris had planned a $6,000 child tax credit for parents, if elected.
During the final minutes of the debate, Mr. Vance equivocated and did not agree that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 elections, saying that he believed “we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square” and that he was “focused on the future”. He also said Ms. Harris was engaged in censorship.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Mr. Walz responded, in perhaps one of the governor’s strongest moments during the debate.
On the other hand, Mr. Walz floundered when he was asked to clarify his whereabouts during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The governor, who used to organize educational trips to China, deflected the conversation to his gubernatorial record, before calling himself a “knucklehead” and admitting he “misspoke” when he had earlier said he was in Hong Kong in 1989.
Mr. Vance dismissed economists’ relatively favorable assessment of Ms. Harris’s plan, saying the academics “have PhDs, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom”. Throughout the debate, Mr. Vance repeatedly pivoted to illegal migration into the U.S., blaming Ms. Harris, who has been serving as U.S. President Joe Biden’s ‘border czar’, for the record high number of undocumented migrants in the country. Mr. Walz blamed Mr. Trump for derailing a border security Bill in Congress.
Referring to immigration at one point, Mr Vance told his opponent, “I think that you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.”