On October 1, 2024, the Vice Presidential debate between Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was held in New York, hosted by CBS News. The debate centered on the candidates’ views on immigration, abortion, foreign policy, and the facts surrounding former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. With both being relatively new to the national audience, they needed to introduce themselves to a wider audience and persuade viewers that they were up for the second-in-command job. The big question is, did this debate move the needle in any significant way for undecided voters?
The debate kicked off with the moderators asking the candidates about their opinion on foreign affairs and policies. Walz responded by explaining the need for strong leadership, one he believes Trump cannot provide, citing former members of his cabinet who claimed he was unfit for highest office. He questioned Trump’s leadership by contrasting Vice President Kamala Harris’ composed, professional demeanor with Trump’s erratic behavior and professed admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Il Jung, while also bringing attention to Trump’s fickleness regarding foreign affairs and domestic issues. In Vance’s response, he maintained that Mr. Trump had brought stability to the world. In regard to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, he said that Israel was the lone decider and that “we should support our allies wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys.”
When the questions turned to immigration, Vance talked about Harris’ intention to undo all of Mr. Trump’s border policies, “suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, and massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system that has opened the floodgates.” In Walz’s response, he talked about a bill crafted by republican and democrat senators that would install 1,500 more border patrol workers and put in more border agents to detect drugs, claiming it’s “just what America wants.” He criticized Trump for telling congress to not vote for the bill since it “gives him a campaign issue.” Walz said, “What would Donald Trump talk about if we actually did some of these things?”
Walz was questioned about his views on abortion and reproductive laws. He talked about how this issue is very pressing, and that Trump put the whole issue into motion. Walz then told stories about the consequences and tragic outcomes women experience due to abortion bans. He told of the tragic death of Amber Thurman, a woman located in Georgia, a restricted state, who had to travel out of the state for reproductive care and died on that journey. He said: “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?” Vance was then asked about his former support for a national abortion ban while running for Senate in 2022. He claimed that statement was incorrect and instead that he and Trump want to push “pro-family policies” and win back the people’s trust by making child care and fertility treatments more accessible claiming: “that’s what real leadership is.”
Vance was asked to comment on his claim that he would not have certified the 2020 election if asked. He said that there were problems in the past election and that these problems should peacefully be discussed in the public square. He then claims that the protest that Trump instigated was peaceful. Walz responded by saying that despite the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election, the former president continues to claim he did not.
He also claimed that the January 6th attack on the Capitol was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had never seen, and it manifested itself by Trump’s inability to say that he lost the election. He then went on to ask Vance whether or not Trump lost the election. Vance evaded the question, instead accusing Harris of censorship. In what was possibly the most dramatic moment of the debate, Mr. Walz turned the focus back on Senator Vance saying, “That is a, that is a damning non-answer.”
Most vice presidential debates are not consequential and are more an exercise in minimizing potential damage. The majority of post-debate commentators spoke of Vance’s calm demeanor and Walz’s initial nervousness that eventually settled into a disciplined defense of Harris’s platform. As Vance stated in the opening, one big goal was to introduce himself to the voters to gain a better understanding of what the candidates stood for. Circling back to the original question if this debate was enough to sway undecided voters, according to CBS News analysts, the debate won’t change much as they believed that there wasn’t a clear winner that could make a major shift in favor of one candidate over the other.
