Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Republican Senator JD Vance took the stage on Tuesday night for the vice presidential candidate debate.
CBS News hosted the event. The moderators were Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, hosts of CBS Evening News and Face the Nation, respectively. Both candidates’ microphones were unmuted—a contrast to both previous presidential debates. Unlike the September ABC debate, there was no fact checking from the anchors. The same was true with the July one, hosted by CNN. Like the other presidential candidate debates this year, it was held without a live audience.
The economy and housing
The economy is consistently ranked the most important issue among voters, and it was debated vigorously Tuesday night.
Walz asserted the necessity of making sure tax cuts go to the middle class.
“This is a philosophical difference between us,” Walz said. Trump cut taxes on the wealthy class during his term, leading to a deficit increase of over $3 trillion. Walz said he and Harris would pay for their policies by making the wealthy “pay their fair share.”
Trump and Vance’s plan would cut taxes for wealthy Americans and would compensate for this loss of revenue by unprecedentedly increasing tariffs. While Trump maintains that this will stop American jobs from moving overseas, economists agree that it will do little but increase the prices of goods.
Trump’s plan would increase the federal budget deficit by $5.8 trillion, to Harris’s $1.2 trillion, over the next 10 years.
In addition to inflation and economic policy, the candidates discussed the housing crisis. Walz introduced Harris’s plan of subsidizing new homeowners, while Vance proposed his plan of privatizing federal lands and using them to build houses.
American democracy
Vance defended skepticism of election results but emphasized peace, saying, “my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square.”
“We do have a threat to democracy in this country,” he continued. He believes that censorship poses this threat, including tech companies banning users and people casting aside friendships because of political differences.
He continued, “Rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, (Harris) would like to censor people who engage in misinformation.”
Walz asked Vance whether he would have certified the 2020 election results had he been in Mike Pence’s shoes. When Vance said he preferred to look toward the future and not engage with questions of the past, Walz saw an opening.
“That’s a damning non-answer,” he said in a rare moment of aggression. Vance said prior to the debate that he would not have certified the results.
The Middle East
The conflicts between Israel and its neighbors have been a defining issue of this election, and one where there is strong disagreement between the Biden-Harris administration, which supports Israel, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which supports Palestine.
“Let’s keep in mind where this started,” Walz said: with the October 7 attack. “The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States to have steady leadership there,” he continued.
When asked whether he would allow Israel’s missile attacks on Lebanon, Walz lambasted Trump for his reputation among his previous staff for being chaotic and irresponsible, and drove home the importance of steady leadership in times of international turmoil.
“We will protect our forces and our allied forces, and there will be consequences,” Walz said at the end of his comment on the matter.
“I want to try to convince you tonight over the next 90 minutes that if we get better leadership in the White House, if we get Donald Trump in the White House, the American dream will once again be attainable,” Vance said. He went on to say that Joe Biden is more of an agent of chaos than Trump.
“For people to fear the United States, you (need) peace through strength,” Vance said.
Vance said that Israel should determine its own future, but said that he would stand by America’s military allies in the decisions they make.
The senator also said, “Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration. What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they’re now launching against our allies and, God forbid, potentially, launching against the United States as well.” There is no evidence that the United States sent these assets to Iran during Biden’s term.
Immigration
Vance argued that the border crisis is because the Biden administration undid all of Trump’s border policies, ignoring the bipartisan border deal that Biden helped create and which Walz mentioned later. He also claimed that illegal immigrants are bringing fentanyl across the border, although in August the Cato Institute found that 80.2% of fentanyl traffickers crossing the US-Mexico border were American citizens.
When Vance was asked if he would separate citizen children from their undocumented parents, he did not answer and instead criticized Harris for the 320,000 children he claims the Department of Homeland Security have “lost.” This is based on a report filed by Homeland Security, although 90% of the children in question simply had not been served a notice to appear in immigration court at all. Only 32,000 had been given that notice and did not appear.
Walz took a different approach. “I don’t talk about my faith a lot, but Matthew 25:40 says ‘to the least amongst us you do unto me,’” he said, and argued that most Americans want to help the most needy among them.
“(Harris) is the only person in the race who prosecuted transnational gangs,” he said, a reference to her time as a California prosecutor. The governor also mentioned Trump’s opposition to the bipartisan border bill, backed by the border patrol union, and lambasted the former president for his inability to solve the border crisis and fulfill his promise to build a border wall.
“We could come together and solve this if we didn’t let Donald Trump continue to make it an issue,” Walz said. He went on to criticize Trump’s false statements about pets being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
The debate on immigration raged on so intensely that both candidates’ microphones were cut after Vance repeatedly ignored moderators’ requests to change topics.
Climate change
Vance accused Harris of driving a “dirty” economy by offshoring American jobs to places with substandard environmental practices.
He did not outright acknowledge that climate change was caused by human carbon emissions but granted it for the sake of the discussion because he wanted to avoid “arguing about weird science.”
Walz invoked his Midwestern record and said that his farmers had seen the effects of climate change firsthand.
“We are producing more natural gas and more oil,” he said, “we are also producing more clean energy.” He painted a bright future for the United States’ role in global energy production, and criticized Trump for taking oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and using them to fund his campaign.
Vance said that America is falling behind in generating energy, lamenting that only one nuclear plant has been built in the last 40 years. In reality, the US produces 30% of the world’s nuclear energy, with 54 commercially operating reactors.
Vance quoted Trump, saying, “‘drill, baby, drill,’” highlighting the GOP’s contradictory record on climate.
Reproductive rights and healthcare
Moderators dedicated several questions to the topic of abortion, an issue for which the Democrats have a large majority of the public’s support.
Walz criticized Trump’s state-based approach to deciding reproductive rights. “‘What’s right for Texas might not be right for Washington’—that’s not how this works. This is human rights,” Walz said, bringing up the stories of people who are in abortion-restrictive states.
He told the story Hadley Duvall, a Kentuckian who spoke at the DNC and has become an activist for abortion rights after she was raped and impregnated by her stepfather at age 12. She was one of three cases that Walz mentioned of women who he claims deserve the right to an abortion. One of the women in question died because she could not receive the procedure, and the other may not be able to have children again due to sepsis.
Vance said that Democrats have taken a “radical pro-abortion stance” which included abortions in the ninth month. Walz denied that, and responded that Democrats are not pro-abortion.
“We’re pro-women. We’re pro-freedom,” Walz said, “We know that the options need to be available, and we make that true.” Minnesota has, as Walz mentioned, restored Roe v. Wade in its state law.
Vance repeatedly acknowledged that the GOP needs to improve its trust with the public regarding abortion.
“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz claimed. While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, he did work with the architects of the plan and in 2022 praised it at a fundraising dinner. Even so, the plan does not mention such a registry.
The candidates briefly discussed healthcare in general. Vance claimed that Trump preserved the Affordable Care Act (ACA) while cutting down on its bureaucracy. In reality, a Trump-backed repeal of the entire ACA was only stopped because of a nay vote from the late Republican senator John McCain, whom Trump famously criticized for being a prisoner of war in Korea.
Gun violence
“We do have to do better,” said Vance of the gun violence epidemic. “Close to 90% of the gun violence in this country is committed due to illegally obtained firearms.” In reality, of the mass shootings in the US between 1982 and 2024, 100 were perpetrated with legally obtained firearms, to only 16 with illegally obtained ones.
Vance acknowledged that school shootings need to end, and proposed a solution.
“I don’t love the answer,” said Vance, “but I unfortunately think we have to increase security in our schools.” This included school resource officers, although experts disagree that such officers prevent this violence.
“In Minnesota, we’ve enacted enhanced red flag laws, enhanced background checks,” said Walz. Walz, a hunter and gun-owner, said that there are “common sense” gun laws that can be enacted while still ensuring the security of the Second Amendment.
The debate came to a close, with both candidates delivering forward-looking closing statements. They shook hands afterward and lingered on the stage with their wives for over a minute, talking with each other.
Previous debates in the 2024 presidential race
The debate came after a series of promising polls for the Harris campaign, including leads in the Rust Belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin and a small advantage in Nevada. Trump holds leads in North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.
The Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Harris favored Harris in the polls. This was a marked difference from the July debate, which skewed the previously neck-and-neck race strongly in Trump’s favor with a three-point national poll advantage, spelling the beginning of the end of the Biden presidency.
