Much like the 2024 presidential nominees former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, whether Republican running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and Democratic running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will actually debate each other is unclear—though the networks that have proposed to host such events have already penciled in specific dates on their calendar.
On Wednesday, Aug. 14, CBS News posted on X that it invited Vance and Walz to participate in a debate in New York City, offering four dates ahead of the Nov. 5 election to choose from: Sept. 17, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, and Oct. 8.
Walz reposted the invitation, adding: “See you on October 1, JD.”
But Vance has not yet publicly committed to taking part in the CBS-moderated debate.
“We just heard about this thing three hours ago so we’re going to talk to them and figure out when we can debate,” Vance said on Fox News on Wednesday night, adding that he wants to do more than one debate but not without first checking the conditions. “We want to look at the moderators, talk about the rules a little bit,” he said. “I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1st, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates where they don’t actually have an audience,” Vance said, echoing Trump’s call for a live audience that was absent in the first 2024 debate between Trump and then-candidate President Joe Biden.
“We’re not going to walk into a fake news media garbage debate,” Vance said. “We’re going to do a real debate, and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it.”
In mid-May, CBS News confirmed that the Biden campaign had accepted an offer for Harris to participate in a vice-presidential debate on either July 23 or Aug. 13. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign, which had not yet selected a running mate, accepted an invitation from Fox News to participate in a vice-presidential debate on the same dates.
However, when Vance was unveiled as Trump’s running mate during the Republican National Convention in mid-July, the Trump campaign said it couldn’t take part in any vice-presidential debate until after the Democratic National Convention in mid-August, because the Democratic Party hadn’t yet settled on its ticket.
“We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for Vice President is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” the Trump campaign said in a statement, referring at the time to rumors and pressure that Biden would drop out of the race, which he ended up doing on July 21.
For her running mate, Harris ultimately chose Walz, who had emerged among the frontrunners for the role after popularizing a campaign that labeled the Republican ticket and platform as “weird.” During his first rally as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on Aug. 6, Walz said that he “can’t wait to debate the guy,” referring to Vance. “That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Vance, who had previously said after Biden dropped out that he was upset he wouldn’t get the opportunity to debate Harris himself, said at a rally on Aug. 7 that he was willing to debate Harris but that he wouldn’t commit to debating Walz because he couldn’t be sure if the Democratic ticket was finalized. “We’ll see if the Democrats pull another bait and switch on Tim Walz or on Kamala Harris, just like they did with Joe Biden,” Vance said. (Harris and Walz were officially certified as the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees after a “virtual roll call” vote by delegates that concluded Aug. 6.)
During an interview on CNN on Aug. 11, Vance insisted he wants to debate Walz “of course,” adding: “We believe in talking to the media. We believe in answering questions. We believe in debating.”
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