Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota spent most of their only debate aiming not at each other but at their running mates, relitigating the last two administrations and eight years as each promised his ticket would deliver a new direction for the nation.
It was a substantive and mostly civil debate between two Midwestern men that laid bare the policy chasm between the two parties on immigration, abortion and foreign policy. But no issue made clearer the size and stakes of the country’s current political divide than the final topic of the night, when Mr. Vance refused to concede that former President Donald J. Trump had lost the 2020 election.
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Mr. Vance said, trying to move on. “That is a damning nonanswer,” Mr. Walz replied.
Mr. Vance looked polished throughout. Mr. Walz spoke haltingly, especially at the start, taking a series of verbal stutter-steps before getting to his point.
Vice-presidential debates rarely reshape presidential elections, and neither man appeared to suffer a race-defining stumble. But this one, uniquely, is scheduled — for now — to be the final debate of 2024. Here are seven takeaways from the debate:
Vance had no answer for a basic question: Did Trump lose the 2020 election?
Mr. Vance spent much of the night offering explanations for Mr. Trump’s policies that sounded accessible. But in one of the debate’s final exchanges, Mr. Vance found himself without an explanation for Mr. Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election. Mr. Vance tried, making the eyebrow-raising argument that Mr. Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.”
“Did he lose the 2020 election?” Mr. Walz questioned Mr. Vance.
Mr. Vance dodged and pivoted. He argued that the Democrats were the real threat to democracy and claimed that Ms. Harris censored Americans, citing old Facebook policies. He had no answer to the question itself. The exchange showed both the limits and requirements of serving as Mr. Trump’s running mate. “That’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” Mr. Walz said.
By the end of the evening, the Harris campaign said it was making an ad off the Jan. 6 moment.
A smooth Vance sought to cast Harris as the status quo.
Mr. Vance used a subtle phrase in the early minutes: “the administration of Kamala Harris.”
It was a sign of what was to come. He hardly ever mentioned President Biden’s name. Instead, he blamed Ms. Harris for all manner of ills. For the border, for higher gas prices, for inflation and even for fentanyl.
The Harris-Walz ticket has adopted “A New Way Forward” as its tagline. But Mr. Vance was having none of that on Tuesday. He insisted the vice president was not a newcomer and said she should use the powers she already has.
Running as a change agent has consistently been one of the most powerful forces in American politics. And with Republicans out of power, Mr. Vance tried not to cede it. “Day 1,” Mr. Vance said in his closing statement, “was 1,400 days ago.”
Walz began unsteadily, but found his footing on abortion.
Mr. Walz looked uncomfortable when the first question was about foreign affairs and the clash between Israel and Iran. He looked far more comfortable halfway through the debate when abortion — long the strongest issue for Ms. Harris — finally came up. Mr. Walz spoke forcefully about the need to protect abortion rights now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned with the help of justices Mr. Trump appointed.
When Mr. Vance echoed Mr. Trump’s position that abortion should be left to the states, Mr. Walz spoke about women who had died or suffered severe health problems because their states had banned or passed restrictions on abortion.
“The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?” Mr. Walz asked.
Vance tried to reframe Trump as the candidate of stability.
For years, Democrats have labeled Mr. Trump as the candidate of chaos. Mr. Vance tried to turn that on its head. He sold the former president as presiding over a period of normalcy and economic growth — and blamed Ms. Harris for the current unrest in the world.
Mr. Vance sanded down some of the rougher edges of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and tried over and over to tap into some of the nostalgia that polls have shown for the early years of the Trump White House. At times he seemed to offer a revisionist history. Mr. Trump, for instance, tried repeatedly to repeal and dismantle Obamacare. But not in Mr. Vance’s telling. He said he “salvaged” it.
But he argued that the real chaos agent was Ms. Harris. “Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years?” Mr. Vance said. “And the answer is your running mate, not mine.”
Walz called himself ‘a knucklehead’ for misrepresenting his past.
Mr. Walz had to know the question was coming about his repeated past statements that he had been in Hong Kong during the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, after reports surfaced this week that he had in fact been home in Nebraska.
Asked to explain the discrepancy, he spoke of his biography, criticized Mr. Trump’s China policy and called himself “a knucklehead at times.” But he did not answer the question.
So the moderator, Margaret Brennan, tried again. This time she got Mr. Walz to acknowledge he “misspoke on this.”
This was not the ebullient and optimistic Mr. Walz who had become the most popular of the four major candidates for national office. He skipped a chance at candor and contrition. Instead, he seemed to slink away from an uncomfortable line of questioning by suggesting that his time in China later in the summer of the Tianamen protests had informed his theory of American democracy.
Vance sought to go from ‘weird’ to relatable.
Mr. Walz burst onto the national scene by calling Mr. Vance — and the Republican Party — “weird.” But the only man to use the word on Tuesday was Mr. Vance, who first said Democrats were following “weird science” when it came to climate change.
From his opening answer, Mr. Vance set out to systematically dismantle the weird label. He framed his life story — first made famous in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy” — as living the American dream. Mr. Vance mentioned his wife, his three young children (ages 7, 4 and 2) and even offered an aside that he hoped they were already sleeping midway through the debate. He spoke about his own mom’s drug addiction, his family’s early financial struggles and his grandmother’s reliance on Social Security.
As Democrats have hammered Mr. Trump as an out-of-touch billionaire who wants to cut taxes for crony friends, Mr. Vance presented a more Middle America face for the ticket. “I grew up in a working-class family,” he said.
The mics were hot until they were not.
Much was made about the debate rules in advance. Unlike in Mr. Trump’s debates with Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden, the microphones were set to be on the entire time.
Most of the asides between Mr. Walz and Mr. Vance were civil. That changed, briefly, at the end of a long discussion about immigration policy. One of the moderators, Ms. Brennan, offered an addendum that the Haitian migrants that Mr. Vance has been complaining about in Springfield, Ohio, are in the country legally.
She then tried to turn to the economy — only Mr. Vance refused to yield the point. He tried to fact-check the fact-check. Mr. Walz joined in. They both talked. And then CBS decided enough was enough.
“Gentlemen, the audience can’t hear you,” Ms. Brennan said. “Because your mics are cut.”
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