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The last big set-piece of the 2024 US election cycle, the Vice-Presidential debate between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance, took place on October 1 and seems likely to have no impact on the electoral outcome.
That is the conclusion of most pundits and analysts, and the snap reaction of focus groups who watched the debate. Vance is judged to have performed better than Walz, but neither man made any major mistakes or landed devastating blows.
JD Vance came across as by far the more polished of the two, and better at thinking on his feet.
He clearly aimed to wrong-foot Walz from the start, by playing nice throughout the debate and displaying a human side, in order to undercut Walz’s image as the more likeable of the two.
Vance warmly shook Walz’s hand at the start, repeatedly agreed with points made by “Tim,” and peppered his remarks with references to his working-class background and love for his wife and children.
He also repeatedly expressed empathy, for example, for the victims of Hurricane Helene (“I’m sure Tim agrees with me, my heart goes out to them”), or for families struggling with the cost of living.
Vance was also clearly on a mission to soften some of the Republican party’s hardest edges on sensitive topics. When Walz said his teenage son had witnessed a school shooting, Vance was quick to express sympathy.
When Walz referred to a woman who had died because she had been unable to get an abortion in her home state of Georgia, Vance agreed it was wrong that anyone should lose their life this way.
He further finessed the issue of abortion by acknowledging that his party “needed to do a better job of earning back people’s trust on this”, for example by adopting a broader pro-family approach, including support for fertility treatment, child care, and affordable housing.
By contrast, Walz appeared nervous and uneasy, especially at the start. He spoke too quickly and many of his remarks were too convoluted to be easily understandable. Sometimes he struggled to find the right word for what he wanted to say.
Walz made an excruciating gaffe when he said he was friends with many “school shooters” when he meant to say the “parents” of victims of school shootings. Most viewers will know what he was trying to say, but MAGA types will have a field day gleefully playing this clip repeatedly on social media.
Walz also repeatedly failed to push home an advantage when Vance was on the defensive – for example, pinning down Vance’s role in spreading the false rumour that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, which had led to armed guards being required to escort Haitian kids going to school. He failed to call out Vance’s blatant lie about not supporting a national ban on abortion.
Vance was also more deft than Walz in deflecting awkward questions. For example, when Vance was challenged about his comments, long before becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, that he was unfit for office and a mini-Hitler, Vance glibly said “I was wrong” and instead blamed the media for allegedly peddling false narratives about Trump, and Congress for failing Trump by not doing its job properly.
When Walz was challenged on why he had erroneously claimed to have been in Hong Kong at the time of the Tiananmen Square repression of student protests in China, when he was there several months later, he waffled for several minutes before lamely saying that he was sometimes “a knucklehead”, and that he had misspoken.
However, Walz grew in confidence as the evening went on, while Vance’s veneer of charm and moderation began to wear thin, as he resorted to ever more outlandish claims about Trump’s alleged achievements, and Kamala Harris’s alleged failings.
On the economy, Walz pointed out that Trump’s mishandling of COVID-19 had devastated the economy, that his tax cuts had favoured the very wealthy, and that most economists agreed his plans for even more tariffs would cause the deficit to balloon, whilst Harris’ economic plans included tax credits for small businesses, support for the middle class, and help for first time home buyers.
Walz called out Trump for describing climate change as “a hoax”, insisted that there was not a false choice between tackling climate change and creating jobs, and challenged Vance to explain where he was going to find all this supposedly available federal land on which he planned to build new energy plants and housing.
“In Minnesota, we protect our lands. They are there for a reason. This is the problem with treating these things as commodities to make money.”
He also called out Vance for claiming that Trump had tried to preserve and improve the Affordable Care Act – Obama’s signature healthcare measure – noting it had only been saved in the Senate by the single vote of “the late, great, Senator John McCain”.
In a particularly withering put-down, Walz said that, as a school teacher, he found Trump’s claim that he had a “concept of a healthcare plan” not worthy of a fourth grader.
On immigration, supposedly the Trump campaign’s strongest suit, Vance dodged answering whether their mass deportation plans would involve family separations, while Walz was able to hammer Trump for blocking a bipartisan bill which would have allocated more resources for securing the border and processing asylum claims more quickly “because it gave him a campaign issue. What does Trump have to talk about if this is resolved?”
He also strongly criticised Republicans for demonising and dehumanising migrants, and blaming them for every ill in America.
Walz also made the better arguments on gun violence and abortion. On the former, Walz said the issue could not be entirely explained away by mental health – “sometimes, it really is just about the guns”.
He pointed out that other countries with high rates of gun ownership, such as Finland, were able to come up with workable solutions which did not involve curtailing gun rights.
On the latter, Walz repeatedly exposed the weakness in Vance’s argument that the matter was best left to the states, by arguing that the fate of women “should not be determined by geography”. He said it was wrong to accuse Democrats of being pro-abortion: “We’re pro-women.”
It’s harder to say who “won” when it came to foreign policy, which was the opening question of the debate against the backdrop of dangerous escalation in the Middle East. Neither side was willing to be specific about how far they would go in supporting Israel.