When Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz take the stage in New York City for Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, it will be their first in-person meeting.
But Vance and Walz have been nipping at each other from afar for weeks, playing the customary role of attack dog on opposing tickets.
The stakes for their 90-minute debate, hosted by CBS News and scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. ET, are unusually high for an undercard clash. The race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is tight nationally and in the battleground states, according to recent polling. Given that Trump hasn’t agreed to a second showdown with Harris, Vance vs. Walz could very well be the last debate before Election Day.
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Polls also indicate that Vance has some work to do after he made a rough first impression. In a recent NBC News national poll, 45% of registered voters said they viewed Vance negatively, compared with 32% who said they viewed him positively — making him one of the least-liked vice presidential candidates in the last 30 years. Walz, conversely, was viewed positively by 40% and negatively by 33%. And with his unsubstantiated claims about Haitian immigrants’ eating pets and his tendency to get ahead of Trump on policy, Vance already has drawn more scrutiny than any vice presidential candidate since another Republican, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, burst onto the scene in 2008.
With all that in mind, here are a few things to watch for as Vance and Walz face off in New York:
Does Walz win the expectations game?
When Harris tapped Walz at a rally in Philadelphia in early August, he sounded jazzed at the prospect of going up against Vance on a debate stage this fall.
“I can’t wait to debate the guy,” Walz said, before he alluded to a vulgar false claim made about Vance online. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Less than two months later, Walz and his allies have been seeking to temper expectations about his own performance while trying to raise them for his opponent, highlighting Vance’s Yale Law School pedigree.
“Look, he’s [a] Yale Law guy,” Walz said on MSNBC after the Trump-Harris debate last month. “I’m a public school teacher. So we know where he’s at on that.”
“I will work hard,” he added. “That’s what I do. I fully expect that Sen. Vance, as a United States senator, a Yale Law guy, he will come well-prepared.”
It’s a tale as old as time: Candidates and their campaigns seek to make their opponents sound more formidable ahead of debates, trying to boost the impact of great performances and blunt the force of disappointments. Case in point: The Trump team has been seeking to raise expectations for Walz’s performance, too.
“Walz is very good in debates,” Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said Monday on a call with reporters. “I want to repeat that. Tim Walz is very good in debates. Really good. He’s been a politician for nearly 20 years. He’ll be very well-prepared for tomorrow night.”
The race card
“Are you a racist?” Vance, pointing at the camera with a smirk, asked in an ad his campaign aired in the early days of his successful Senate bid two years ago.
The question was Vance’s attempt at rhetorical sarcasm — and it has framed a guiding thesis in his young political career: that you can be angry about U.S. immigration policy and border security without being a racist.
More recently, Vance has dabbled in the debunked rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. That raises the possibility that, onstage Tuesday, Walz will flip a variation of Vance’s question back on him: Is he a racist?
Vance is prepared for such a scenario.
His advisers frequently talk about how he handled a tense debate situation in 2022, when his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, then-Rep. Tim Ryan, accused him of embracing racist conspiracy theories. Vance quickly pivoted to his three biracial children — his wife, Usha, is Indian American. Vance bemoaned how his family had been “attacked by scumbags online and in person, because you are so desperate for political power that you’ll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism.”
Usha Vance was among the small group who helped Vance prepare for the debate.
The battle for men and a fight over the future of masculinity
Both the Trump and the Harris campaigns are targeting a group of voters who could make the difference in whether they win the White House in November: young men.
Both Walz and Vance have been at the forefront of this fight. For Walz, that has involved his and the Harris campaign’s heavily promoting his background as a high school football coach, hunter and Midwestern fixer-upper dad. For Vance, who would be the youngest man to serve as vice president in generations, it’s about his familiarity with many of the online spaces dominated by younger men.
They offer competing visions of masculinity, whether it’s Walz’s vision of a traditional masculinity combined with his support for LGBTQ rights and his comfort in talking about reproductive issues or Vance’s ideas around manhood as outlined in his memoir and in how he promotes family formation. It has been the subject of attacks on each of them. Vance has been tagged as weird, while Walz has been mocked for his mannerisms.
“He’s not going to be the wildly gesticulating, effeminate caricature we see at rallies pointing to Kamala Harris and dancing about on the stage,” Miller said on Monday’s call.
Expect the concept of manhood — and how Walz and Vance have different ideas of what that means — to be an undercurrent in their messaging.
The crossover appeals
Walz was known as a moderate congressman representing a swingy district before he carved out a more progressive identity as governor. As a candidate for vice president, he presents as a mainstream Midwesterner who enjoys Middle America pastimes. The Harris campaign clearly sees him as someone who can speak to heartland voters who have ditched the Democrats in recent cycles.
Vance isn’t far removed from his days as an anti-Trump pundit, but his hard-right turn toward Trump has been unbending. As Trump’s running mate, he has done little to court the voters who are fans of his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and, as Vance once was, are skeptical of Trump.
Walz is more likely to compete for the middle ground Tuesday night. Vance is more likely to cast aspersions on any such attempt.
Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who played Walz in Vance’s debate prep, has compared his state’s governor to the liberal governor of California.
“Americans,” Emmer told reporters on a Trump campaign call Monday, “will start to see what we’ve long known in Minnesota: that Tim Walz is nothing more than Gavin Newsom in a flannel shirt.”
Does Vance’s performance — good or bad — encourage Trump to change his mind about another debate?
Trump has said he won’t be doing any more debates with Harris, noting that early voting is already underway. Harris, meanwhile, has committed to a debate with CNN on Oct. 23.
But will Trump change his mind? Vance’s performance could play a big role in whether he does.
If Vance performs well and generates positive buzz for the campaign, a jealous Trump might decide he wants another crack at the debate spotlight. If Vance performs poorly, Trump might feel he has no choice but to debate again. Either way, it would be very un-Trumplike for him to be comfortable with his running mate’s having the last word.
And regardless of what, if anything, comes next, Trump announced Monday that he will offer play-by-play analysis of the debate from his Truth Social account, eager to soak up some of Vance’s spotlight.