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      Walz and Vance embrace an endangered US political species: agreement

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      There was a strange feeling as the vice-presidential debate got under way in the CBS News studios on Tuesday night that only intensified as 90 minutes of detailed policy discussion unfolded: was the United States in danger of regaining its sanity?After weeks and months of being assailed by Donald Trump’s dystopian evocation of a country on the verge of self-destruction, amplified by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s dire warnings of democracy in peril, here was something very different. The two vice-presidential nominees were embracing that most endangered of American political species: agreement.“Tim, I actually think I agree with you,” said JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, addressing his opposite number Tim Walz during the discussion on immigration.“Much of what the senator said right there, I’m in agreement with him,” said Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, as they turned to trade policy.It wasn’t true, of course. The two men were no closer to agreement than their bosses, who in their own presidential debate last month showed themselves to be worlds apart.But on Tuesday it was as if the CBS News studio in midtown Manhattan had been transported back to a prelapsarian – or at least, pre-Maga – times. To an era when politicians could be civil, and to get on you didn’t have to castigate your opponent as an enemy of the people.For Vance the metamorphosis was especially striking. He is, after all, running mate to the architect of “American carnage”.For his own part, the senator from Ohio has spread malicious untruths about legal-resident Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people’s cats and dogs. Not to mention that he’s the “childless cat-ladies” guy.An unrecognisable Vance emerged on the New York stage. This one listened respectfully to his debating partner, spoke in whole and largely measured sentences, and went so far as to admit his own fallibility – three qualities that the former president rarely emulates.Vance had reason to present himself differently from Trump, perhaps. At 40, to Trump’s 78, he has the future to think about – his own future.But his affable demeanor was also artifice. When it came to the content of what he said, the Republican vice-presidential nominee was as economical with the truth as his overseer.He lied with abandon, in fact. He just did it with a silken tongue.He talked about the vice-president presiding over an “open border” with Mexico when numbers of border-crossers are actually at a four-year low. He claimed he had not supported a national abortion ban – oh yes he did, repeatedly during his 2022 senatorial race.On the Middle East crisis, he accused the “Kamala Harris administration” of handing Iran $100bn in the form of unfrozen assets – not true. It was $55bn, and it was negotiated under Barack Obama.Perhaps most egregiously, he said Trump had “salvaged” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obama’s wildly popular healthcare insurance scheme commonly known as Obamacare. “Salvaged” was an interesting choice of word to apply to Trump, who tried 60 times to destroy the ACA without offering any alternative.Yet it would have taken an attentive viewer to see behind Vance’s smooth comportment to the lies he was purveying. The former tech investor and bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy looked comfortable on stage and in his own skin, presenting himself as the reasonable Trump, a Maga lion in sheep’s clothing.Walz by contrast had moments in which he came across as tense and uneasy, the pre-debate nerves that had been reported by CNN appearing to have been genuine. While Vance beamed his piercingly-blue eyes direct to camera, the Minnesota governor frequently looked down at his notes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe folksy, aw-shucks “Coach Walz” who has taken the US by storm since he was plucked out of Minnesota obscurity to be Harris’s running mate was largely absent.He stumbled on occasion, garbling his words to refer to having become “friends” with school shooters rather than their victims’ families. And he mishandled a question about why he had wrongly claimed to have visited China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, woodenly trying to dodge the issue by calling himself a “knucklehead”.But when push came to shove, Walz came through. On the subjects that matter most to Harris in her bid to become the first female president, and the first woman of color in the Oval Office, he hit Vance hard – civilly, but hard.On abortion he followed his running mate’s lead and spoke movingly about the personal impact of Trump’s effective evisceration of Roe v Wade. He invoked the story of Amber Thurman, who died as she traveled in search of reproductive care from Georgia to North Carolina.That even extracted one of the most surprising “I agree” remarks of the evening from the staunchly anti-abortion Vance: “Governor, I agree with you, Amber Thurman should still be alive … and I certainly wish that she was.”There was only one point in the evening when the kid gloves came off, and the cod display of gentility was discarded by both parties. It came when Vance had the audacity to claim – silkenly, naturally – that Harris’s attempts to “censor” misinformation in public discourse posed a far greater threat to democracy than Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election on January 6.“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance deflected when Walz asked him directly whether Trump had lost that contest. “That is a damning non-answer,” the Democrat shot back, his face pained.In the last analysis, both men were only there playing the role of side-kick. They may have raised hopes that civility could make a comeback to US politics, but let Trump have the last word.“Walz was a Low IQ Disaster – Very much like Kamala,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site shortly after the debate had ended. And just like that, it was business as usual. More

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      JD Vance’s slick performance can’t change the danger of another Trump presidency | Margaret Sullivan

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      Tim Walz has said he’s an unskilled debater, and he didn’t disprove that on Tuesday night in the first and only 2024 vice-presidential debate.Kamala Harris’s running mate came out looking nervous, slightly deer-in-the-headlights, and far less glossy than his rival, Ohio senator JD Vance.“[Democrats] are fortunate presidential debates tend to matter a lot more than VP debates,” aptly observed Dave Wasserman, senior editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.Walz, the governor of Minnesota, had an especially bad moment when asked to explain his repeated falsehoods about having been in China during the Tiananmen Square student-led protests in 1989. (Walz did spend a lot of time in China, but starting a few months later.)The Minnesota governor’s attempt at an answer was bumbling and unsatisfactory. He finally blurted: “I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times.” He should have been prepared to answer that, probably by stating that he misspoke about something that happened 35 years ago and that he regrets the screwup.The self-assured and smooth Vance, by contrast, may have won the debate on points, although his constant addressing the female moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, by their first names grated on more than a few women’s nerves. (“I need JD Vance to stop saying ‘Margaret’ in that creepy way,” posted the writer Sophie Vershbow on X.)He seemed eager to come off as a nice guy, fast-talking about his humble Appalachian roots, all while showing off his Ivy League polish. Leaning hard into the Hillbilly Elegy persona – and away from his crazy talk about the misery of childless cat ladies and the need to monitor menstrual cycles – he probably helped his own chances to be president someday.But none of that should matter one iota in the presidential election that is only five weeks away. It’s far from the heart of what matters: that Trump has proven himself a danger to America and to the world, thoroughly unfit to be elected president again.Asked to explain how he could have criticized Trump in the past, and now be ready to stand loyally at his side, Vance claimed he’d been deluded by media lies. Utter nonsense.By late in the debate, Walz had found his footing, especially when the CBS News moderators belatedly raised the subject that should have begun the debate, instead of their initial question about the growing conflicts in the Middle East.But many Americans, no doubt, had tuned out and gone to bed by the time Vance started spreading revisionist history – actually consequential lies – about Trump’s role in the January 6 riot and his desire to overturn the 2020 election. A role, let’s recall, for which he was justifiably impeached.Vance tried to portray Trump as urging only peaceful demonstrations when in fact the then president incited the riot at the Capitol.Now Walz was ready to pounce.“Mike Pence made the right decision,” Walz said, making the obvious point about the former vice-president who refused to do Trump’s bidding that day. “This was a threat to our democracy in a way we had not seen.”Walz added a glaring truth: “And that’s why Pence is not on this stage.”That, of course, is the real issue – that Trump’s vice-president, after the 2020 election, did the right thing and his boss sided with the people who wanted him hanged for it. The two are done with each other. Vance is a late-coming opportunist.In the closing minutes of the debate, Walz had his best moment when he challenged his rival with this essential question:“Trump is still saying he didn’t lose the election. Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance tried a non-sequitur comeback: “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans?”To which Walz shot back: “That is a damning non-answer.”He was right about that. Trump’s lies and his destructive refusal to peacefully transfer power are the very reason JD Vance was standing on that stage.Vance may have prevailed on tone and presentation. But Walz is on the side of democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. I call that a win.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Walz asks America to ‘stand up’ for democracy – as it happened

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      Here are some of the key lines from the debate between the Democratic and Republican vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance:On the Middle East:

      Both candidates were asked whether they would support a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran. Walz said: “Israel’s ability to defend itself is absolutely fundamental” after the Hamas attacks on 7 October. He said Trump’s own national security advisers have said it’s dangerous for Trump to be in charge. “When our allies see Donald Trump turn towards Vladimir Putin, turn towards North Korea, when we start to see that type of fickleness about holding the coalitions together – we will stay committed,” Walz said.

      Vance said it was up to Israel to decide what it needs to do. He said Trump “consistently made the world more secure”.
      On the climate crisis:

      Vance said he and Trump “support clean air, clean water” when asked what responsibility the Trump administration would have to reduce the impact of climate change. “If we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people,” he said. He did not answer when asked whether he agreed with Trump that climate change is a hoax.

      Walz praised the Biden administration for the Inflation Reduction Act, and criticized Trump for calling climate change a “hoax”. “My farmers know climate change is real,” he said.
      On immigration:

      Walz criticized Trump for derailing a legislative package that he described as “the fairest and the toughest bill on immigration that this nation’s seen”.

      Walz accused Vance of having “vilified a large number of people who worked legally in the community of Springfield”, adding that those immigrants had been “dehumanized”. “This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it,” he said. “You demonize it.”

      Vance said the people he was most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, “are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border”.

      At one point, CBS News muted the microphones for both candidates as the moderators tried to turn the debate to the economy.
      On the economy:

      Walz said presidents should seek advice from advisers around them. “If you’re going to be president, you don’t have all the answers. Donald Trump believes he does,” he said. “My pro-tip is this: if you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump.”
      On abortion:

      Vance said he “never supported a national ban”. He said that Ohio had passed an amendment protecting the right to an abortion, and that it taught him that his Republican party “have got to do a better job of winning back people’s trust”.

      Walz rejected Trump’s claim that he supports abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy, saying the accusation “wasn’t true”. He said that under Project 2025, there would a “registry of pregnancies” and that it would “get more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments”.
      On mass shootings:

      Walz said his 17-year-old son had witnessed a shooting at a community center. He referred to his record in Minnesota, where there are enhanced background checks and red-flag laws in place. “We understand that the second amendment is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out,” he said.

      Vance said that the country needs to buckle down on border security, and strengthen safety in schools. “We have to make the doors lock better, we have to make the doors stronger,” he said.
      On the candidates’ previous comments:

      Walz stumbled when asked about his misleading claims that he made about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen protests. “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times,” he initially said. When pushed for an answer, he conceded that he “misspoke”.

      Vance said he was “wrong about Donald Trump” when asked about his previous criticisms of his running mate. He accused the media of spreading false stories about Trump that he believed, and said he supports Trump because he “delivered for the American people”.
      On healthcare:

      Vance, when asked how a Trump administration would protect Americans with pre-existing conditions who were able to secure health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, said there were laws and regulations on the books that should be kept in place. He said the functionality of the health insurance marketplace also needed to be improved.
      On paid family leave:

      Walz did not give a definitive answer when asked how long employers should be required to pay workers for parental leave. He said paid family leave is beneficial for families because it “gets the child off to a better start”.

      Vance said the nation should “have a family care model that makes choice possible”. He said the issue was important to him because he is married to a “beautiful woman” and “incredible mother” who is also a “very brilliant corporate litigator”.
      On the January 6 attack on the Capitol:

      Walz said democracy is “bigger than winning an election”, and that a “president’s words matter”. He said the January 6 attack “was a threat to our democracy in a way that we have not seen” and that it manifested itself because of Trump’s inability to accept that he had lost the 2020 election.

      Vance claimed that Trump wanted protesters to remain peaceful on January 6. He said he believes the biggest threat to democracy is “the threat of censorship”.

      Walz directly asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance declined to answer, instead saying that he was “focused on the future”. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
      Closing remarks:

      Walz said he was as “surprised as anybody” at the broad coalition of support that Harris had built, including progressives like Bernie Sanders and Republicans like Dick Cheney. He said Vance had made it clear that he would stand with Trump’s agenda, adding that Harris is “bringing us a politics of joy”.

      Vance said that Harris’s polices were to blame for key needs like heat, housing and food being harder to afford. Harris has proposed a lot of things that she wants to accomplish on day one, Vance said, but he noted that Harris has been vice-president for three-and-a-half years and that “day one was 1,400 days ago”.
      With that, this blog is closing. Thank you for following along. Here is our full story on the vice-presidential debate:As the Middle East spiraled towards full-scale war, the US vice presidential debate focused largely on domestic issues, like school shootings and the cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare.The CBS News debate moderators largely declined to fact-check JD Vance or Tim Walz, asking them instead to respond to each other.Here are some key takeaways from the debate between the Republican senator from Ohio who wrote a bestselling memoir about poverty in Appalachia and the Democratic football-coach-turned-governor of Minnesota:The topics of abortion and the likelihood of Trump accepting this year’s result if he loses led to the most interesting moments during the debate.Walz demanded that Vance agree to abide by the results of the election and commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And he asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election.“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied.“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz shot back.Walz noted that Vance was only on the stage because Trump cut ties with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, for certifying the results of the last election.Vance did not answer the question about whether Trump, who continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud, lost four years ago. The exchange served as a reminder of one of Trump’s biggest vulnerabilities heading into the election, one that the Harris campaign will continue to highlight in the coming weeks.Reuters has this interesting bit of analysis of Vance’s performance tonight, writing that the Vance on stage was the one the Trump campaign had in mind when Trump selected him as his number two in July.” The idea then was that the 40-year-old first-term senator and best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” could serve as an articulate and rational voice for Trump’s Make American Great Again movement as well as perhaps one day become a generational torchbearer.But instead Vance had a rocky rollout on the campaign trail, becoming the target of online scorn and mockery while most often serving as Trump’s attack dog. The headlines were mostly negative, and his approval ratings suffered.On Tuesday, Vance largely kept his message positive, while taking every opportunity to advocate for Trump.Vance seemed to be succeeding at a vice-presidential running mate’s primary task: Making the candidate at the top of the ticket more palatable to the viewers at home.It was clear as the evening progressed, that it was this, rather than trying to smear Walz, that was the goal of the Trump campaign in this debate.More from the CNN poll – and as expected – the debate did not shift the polled voters’ views much. Just 1% of them changed their minds:Here is what the Guardian’s panellists made of the debate:When Harris was considering Walz as her vice-presidential candidate, he reportedly told her that he was a bad debater, and at the outset Vance, wearing a sharp blue suit, a pink tie, plenty of make-up and hair gel, looked the more polished performer. Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, cut a more bustling figure in a loose black suit.Vance, the Ohio senator who has been a regular on rightwing news channels for years, was polished from the off, comfortably dodging a question about whether he believes the climate crisis is a “hoax” to lament how much money has been spent on solar panels.Walz rose to the vice-presidential nomination, in part, through his confident appearances on cable news – it was from there that his famous “weird” characterization of Vance and Trump was born – but appeared initially nervous, and did not reprise his searing critique of his opponents.Both men also frequently referenced their upbringing in the midwest.Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour-and-a-half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance refuted.Both candidates were seen more favourably after the debate than before it, according to CNN:
      Following the debate, 59% of debate watchers said they had a favorable view of Walz, with just 22% viewing him unfavorably – an improvement from his already positive numbers among the same voters pre-debate (46% favorable, 32% unfavorable).
      Debate watchers came away with roughly net neutral views of Vance following the debate: 41% rated him favorably and 44% unfavorably. That’s also an improvement from their image of Vance pre-debate, when his ratings among this group were deeply underwater (30% favorable, 52% unfavorable).
      That is the closest of the last five VP debates, according to CNN snap polls:CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins.The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win.CNN adds this caveat: “The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 3 points likelier to be Democratic-aligned than Republican-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 5 percentage points more Democratic-leaning than all registered voters nationally.” More

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      Vance or Walz: who won the VP debate? Our panel responds | Panelists

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      Moustafa Bayoumi: ‘A civil encounter with no overwhelming winner’The first question the vice-presidential candidates were asked in their debate was, frankly speaking, bonkers: “Would you support or oppose a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran?” The vast majority of the globe is waiting for the United States to exercise real global leadership and bring, at a bare minimum, temporary calm to the eastern Mediterranean region. But CBS apparently felt it wiser to ask the candidates whether they supported escalating the war now or escalating the war later.The candidates slung arrows of blame at each other before settling on essentially the same answer. And that was basically the leitmotif of this rather odd debate: we, two diametrically opposed candidates standing before you, actually agree on a lot, including how completely different we are.This debate will likely be recorded as a mostly civil encounter with no overwhelming winner. Over the course of the contest, Republican JD Vance was as slick as a CEO’s lawyer, emitting almost snake-oil salesman energy, while Democrat Tim Walz was predictably folksy, exuding an overly talkative teddy bear vibe. But on substance, both men tended to agree on a number of points ranging from the need to fortify our border crossings (at the expense of legitimate asylum seekers) to promoting affordable housing to protecting the Affordable Care Act.Significant differences nevertheless did emerge, the most important of which was about reproductive health. While Walz spoke powerfully about the need to protect the right to abortion, Vance found ways to quietly blame immigrants for gun violence, border insecurity and the housing shortage.But the debate will be forgotten by next week, if only because the world is currently a powder keg, and no one seems ready to challenge these two candidates about finding a real path to peace, justice and security for all.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
      Ben Davis: ‘Vance made extremist Trumpism sound moderate and reasonable’Vice-presidential debates rarely affect the election or move voters. Even by those standards, this one was a non-event. Vance and Walz seemed to be competing with each other regarding how friendly and agreeable they could be, and each avoided taking shots where they could have obviously landed. Vance was nimble, if smarmy, showing his background as a debater and a lawyer. Walz was nervous at the start but settled in once the questions got to areas he focuses on as governor, like housing and agriculture.One of the most notable aspects of the debate was the framing by the moderators, accepted dutifully by the candidates. It was taken as a given that Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon and its expansionist ambitions are morally just. It was taken as a given that the United States should have a bellicose foreign policy in the Middle East. It was taken as a given that immigrants are hurting the economy and spreading crime. The moderators even framed a question around the notion that building new housing could harm the economy. That these ideas are considered unbiased and non-partisan is an extremely bleak sign for the country’s near future.The second notable thing is what Vance’s positioning and rhetoric says about the Republican party. Vance saw his primary task as shaping Trump’s often nonsensical and entirely personally motivated ideas into a coherent, explicable political program. But Vance went beyond explaining away Trump’s comments, into introducing Trumpism as an full-scale ideology, and not just one explicated by the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation and aimed at the dark corners of the internet.This project – nationalism, protectionism, welfare chauvinism and a sort of communitarian-sounding social conservatism – floundered two years ago with candidates like Blake Masters or Vance himself. Vance was able to maneuver it to sound almost moderate and reasonable. There was no talk of birth rates or skull shapes. Even his outrageous defense of Trump’s attempted coup was couched in soft, compromise-oriented language. This is insidious, because in nearly every answer he gave, the core premise was still that white Americans are under attack by a nebulous other.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC
      Lloyd Green: ‘90 minutes that won’t move the needle’Walz and Vance clashed for 90 forgettable minutes. The debate likely won’t move the needle but may leave Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both feeling vindicated in their selection of running mates. Vance channeled a smarter and more disciplined version of his would-be boss. He whitewashed January 6 and the absence of Mike Pence from the stage. Once upon a time, the senator from Ohio compared his running mate to Hitler – not anymore.Walz was clearest and most impassioned when it came to abortion and healthcare. On that score, he wisely framed abortion as a matter of personal autonomy, one between a woman and her physician. Vance couldn’t run from the supreme court’s decision in Dobbs. On election day, the end of Roe v Wade may cost the Republican party a win.When it came to healthcare, Trump’s line on “concepts of a plan” won’t die. Walz also reminded Vance that he once dinged the 45th president as unsuitable for office. Regardless, Vance’s thumbnail biography likely appealed to blue-collar voters without four-year degrees. He also spun his mother’s history of substance addiction into a story of upward arc and personal redemption. Betting markets pegged Vance as the winner of the evening.In the end, Walz and Vance delivered little material for late-night talk shows or SNL to spoof. Their debate was more about policies than personas. The race is a dead heat with about 35 days to go.

      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      Arwa Mahdawi: ‘Trump and Vance may have the last laugh’The night started off with a uranium-enriched bang, with the CBS moderators asking the candidates whether they would commit to a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran. As an opening question, it speaks volumes about how war-mongering even “reasonable” sections of American society are. Why not ask how the candidates would de-escalate the crisis? Why jump straight into baiting both candidates into endorsing a catastrophic nuclear war?Vance and Walz both did their best to avoid answering this question and rattled off their favorite talking points instead; Vance started waxing lyrical about his mother, who had a drug addiction. Trump, meanwhile, started going nuclear on Truth Social. “Both young ladies have been extremely biased Anchors!” Trump wrote on his social network two minutes into the debate.While Trump was being his usual unhinged and sexist self, Vance was being surprisingly normal. On superficial optics alone, he was the clear winner of the night. There has (quite rightly) been a lot of emphasis on Vance’s weird and incel-like viewpoints. Amid all that, one can forget how slick and polished he can be – and he certainly reminded us of that in this debate.Walz, on the other hand? Oh, dear. The media training the governor of Minnesota obviously had managed to train all the midwestern charm out of him. This wasn’t the lovable and empathetic high school coach we have come to know. Walz got better later into the night – particularly when he pushed Vance on whether Trump lost the 2020 election, a question that Vance dodged – but he was largely robotic and charmless, a man out of his depth.Look, VP debates don’t tend to have much impact on elections. But this was something of a wake-up call. The Trump-Vance campaign may seem like a joke but there is a very real chance they could have the last laugh in November.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Vance gave a slightly stronger performance’We’ve come a long way from the libertarian 1990s, when both Bill Clinton’s new Democrats and Bob Dole’s Republican party were firm believers in free trade, couldn’t care less about manufacturing jobs, and found bipartisan agreement on shrinking the welfare state.Instead, we just had a vice-presidential debate where both candidates brought up social-democratic Finland as a positive example; Walz declared himself a “union man”; and Vance foregrounded the bread-and-butter concerns of millions of Americans. The candidates repeatedly went out of their way to identify areas of agreement on issues like housing and childcare.Of course, there was also a lot of bipartisanship not to like in the debate: war-mongering towards Iran, sycophantic support for Israel, the unwillingness of candidates to say that America is a nation of immigrants who create far more value for our nation than they take away.Still, both hopefuls were at their best talking about domestic issues. Vance spoke about the fraying American dream, economic anger and the loss of hope in many communities. But his solutions – industrial policy, manufacturing, domestic energy production – sounded close to the program Joe Biden embarked on in office. Vance praised the “blue-collar Democrats” who raised him – implying that Republicans are now the true party of the working class – but almost every Democrat stood with Biden’s union-backed agenda, and almost no Republicans.The biggest problem for Vance, who overall gave a slightly stronger performance, with fewer stumbles than Walz, is he has to tie his ideas to the contradictions of Trump’s economic program and his legacy of billionaire tax cuts. When Trump first ran for office, Vance hyperbolically called him “America’s Hitler”. When Trump left office, Vance was closer to the mark, privately calling him a “fake populist”.Tying himself to a potential administration bound to offer nothing but deregulation, mismanagement, and handouts for the rich makes Vance that kind of populist, too.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
      LaTosha Brown: ‘Vance was a chameleon’The debate underscored a stark contrast between Waltz and Vance. Walz played the role of “the coach”, bringing receipts, sharing practical solutions and demonstrating real experience in addressing pressing issues. Walz showed that he knows how to govern – standing firmly with Kamala Harris’s vision and focusing on delivering tangible benefits to everyday Americans. His grounded explanations and proven record painted him as a steady, trustworthy leader ready to solve problems, not just win arguments.On the other hand, JD Vance lived up to his reputation as a bit of a chameleon. He shifted positions throughout the debate to make himself more palatable. At one point, he flat-out lied about never supporting an abortion ban, a claim contradicted by his past actions. He refused to give a clear answer about who won the 2020 election and downplayed the January 6 insurrection as merely a protest. As Walz put it, Vance’s response was a “damning non-answer”.Vance appeared cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump – willing to say anything to win, regardless of the truth. The debate made clear that voters face a choice: between Walz, whose authenticity and steady leadership reflect readiness to govern, and Vance, whose evasiveness shows a fixation on power over principle.

      LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter More

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      Vance refuses to say Trump lost the 2020 election in Walz debate

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      JD Vance refused to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and continued to sidestep questions over whether he would certify a Trump loss this fall during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.The exchange brought out some of the sharpest attacks from Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor, in what was otherwise a muted and civil back-and-forth with the Ohio senator.Walz asked Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance responded: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Walz then cut in with one of his most aggressive attack lines of the evening: “That is a damning non-answer.”Vance has previously said that he would have asked states to submit alternative slates of electors to Congress to continue to debate allegations of election irregularities in 2020. By the time Congress met during the last election to consider electoral votes, courts, state officials and the US supreme court had all turned away efforts to block legitimate slates of electors from being sent to Congress.Pressed by the CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell on whether he would again refuse to certify the vote this year, Vance declined to answer.“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square,” Vance said. “And that’s all I’ve said and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.” He later said that if Walz won the election with Harris, Walz would have his support.Trump has warned of a “bloodbath” if he does not win the election. He has also said supporters will not have to vote anymore if he wins in November. Both the Trump campaign and Republican allies are seeding the ground to contest a possible election loss in November.Vance tried to pivot away from the issue by suggesting January 6 was not as much of a threat to democracy as limiting discussion of Covid on Facebook. He also equated January 6 with Democrats protesting the 2016 election because of Russian interference on Facebook.Walz did not let those comments go unnoticed. “January 6 was not Facebook ads,” he said in one of his bluntest responses in the debate. “This is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say, he is still saying, he didn’t lose the election.”A Harris campaign official said the moment stood out in a focus group of undecided voters in battleground states. Walz earned the group’s highest support of the evening while Vance saw some of his lowest ratings for defending Trump. More

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      The leaked dossier on JD Vance is revealing in all the things it doesn’t say | Moira Donegan

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      The public got a peek into the inner workings of the Trump campaign last week, when the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein did what major news outlets refused to: he published the opposition research dossier on JD Vance’s electoral vulnerabilities that was written by the Trump campaign in the lead-up to the VP announcement.The dossier, which was obtained in a hack thought to have been perpetrated by Iranian state interests, would have been compiled by Donald Trump’s camp as part of a routine vetting process as the Republican campaign surveilled possible VP picks and assessed their strengths and weaknesses. It is thorough: at 271 pages, it contains a robust and factual accounting of the vice-presidential candidate’s public statements and associations going back years. As such, it offers a unique perspective into how the Trump campaign views the race – and how they understand the controversial man who is now in their No 2 spot.But the document, a litany of everything the Trump camp thinks is wrong with Vance, is maybe most revealing for what it omits: there is almost nothing about his comments on women, and nothing at all about his extensive, repeated and impassioned hatred for childless women, including the “cat ladies” comment that has been Vance’s stickiest scandal and perhaps his greatest contribution to the campaign thus far. The comments that provoked the ire of thousands of women – including no less influential a figure than Taylor Swift – and turned the race partly into a referendum on the purpose and value of women’s lives were nowhere to be found in the document.Instead, the dossier was largely focused on comments by Vance that make him vulnerable with an audience of one: that is, his past negative statements about Trump.The mainstream news organizations that declined to publish this hacked document justified this decision by saying that much of the information was not newsworthy. If this is their standard, it seems to be a new one: in 2016, when Russian-backed hackers obtained emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, one of the disclosures included risotto cooking tips from campaign chair John Podesta. (He says that adding the liquid slowly helps the rice become creamier, in case you’re interested.) But the Vance dossier is newsworthy, though not because of what it reveals about Vance. What the document says about Vance himself is largely a matter of public record. What is newsworthy, instead, is what the document exposes about the Trump campaign’s priorities.The dossier concerns many worries that Vance is not conservative enough. It also seems preoccupied with how the Ohio senator has wounded Trump’s ego. The absence of Vance’s extreme gender views from the document suggests that the Trump campaign did not understand his comments on women to even be controversial: they don’t seem to have thought that it would come up.Maybe the Trump campaign is staffed with people, including the apparatchiks who do its vetting, who have so little exposure to feminism (or, perhaps, to women more broadly) that it simply did not occur to them that anyone would find Vance’s ravings about women offensive. Maybe the Trump camp made the calculation – one certainly not exclusive to the political right – that women’s investment in their own rights is partial and unserious, and that they would not be moved by gendered insults to their dignity in anything like meaningful numbers. Maybe they assumed that gender politics is now a man’s game, and that appeals to masculine woundedness and grievance now carry much more sway than appeals to women’s rights do. If this is what they think – that misogyny can be an asset for them but never a liability – it would certainly explain some of their actions.But the salience of the comments also signals something else that has changed this election: Trump no longer solely sets the terms of the conversation. Trump’s ability to command attention and to dictate the news cycle has noticeably waned this term – think, for instance, of how quickly and decisively each of his not one but two assassination attempts disappeared from the front pages, and how little an impact they seem to have ultimately had on his support. Trump has been unable to get a nickname to stick to Kamala; he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to generate vulgar distractions about her sexual history or the authenticity of her racial identity.So far, all he has managed to do is spread lurid and racist lies that have made life hell for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s vulgarity, his hysterics, his domineering indifference to the truth – all these used to fascinate voters, or at least the national media. But Trump has lost his juice.Which brings us to the other reason why the dossier may not have contained many of Vance’s most potent vulnerabilities: perhaps Trump’s staff overlooked them because they assumed that they would be able to generate the narrative on their own, assuming that it was they, and they alone, who would dictate what the media covered and what the public cared about. Those days are over. Just ask your local cat lady.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US elections: Tim Walz and JD Vance to face off in VP debate – live updates

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      My colleague Rachel Leingang took a look at what we know so far about Vance and Walz’s debate style. She writes:
      Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, have been honing their public speaking skills – and their pointed barbs at each other – in TV appearances and at events around the country in the past few months.
      Their experiences in electoral debates haven’t reached the levels or notoriety that come along with a presidential campaign, but both have faced opponents in public debates in past elections.
      And given the tightness of the presidential race, and how poorly the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump went, there will probably be more people tuned in to the vice presidential debate than in past cycles.
      While VP debates don’t usually tip the scales much, they could matter in a close race – and they build profiles for lower-profile politicians who will probably stay on the national scene for years to come.
      You can read the full story here:Good morning, US politics readers.It’s the day of the vice-presidential debate and Tim Walz and JD Vance are preparing to go head to head in New York City.The debate will start at 9pm ET and, like the Harris-Trump debate, it will be held in a studio without an audience. Unlike the main presidential debate, the candidates’ microphones will not be muted when it is not their turn to speak – but moderators can mute mics throughout the event.To practice before Tuesday’s VP debate, Walz has used Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary and frequent TV news interviewee, as a Vance stand-in – both Buttigieg and Vance are Ivy Leaguers from the midwest and roughly the same age.Vance has been preparing for the debate with Minnesota Republican senator Tom Emmer as a stand-in for Walz. On Monday, Emmer gave an insight into how debate practice has been going, telling reporters about portraying Walz: “Quite frankly it’s tough because he is really good on the debate stage.”Republicans are seeking to frame Walz, the folksy Minnesota governor who has proved to be the most popular figure in the presidential race, as a mean-spirited, ogreish figure. Emmer, who ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota governor in 2010, said: “[Walz] is going to stand there and he lies with conviction, and he has these little mannerisms where he’s just, hey, I’m the nice guy, but he’s not nice at all.” More

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      The attack dog and the folk hero: Vance and Walz gear up for debate showdown

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      Tim Walz and JD Vance, the US Democratic and Republican candidates for vice-president, will face off on Tuesday in what is likely to be the last debate showdown between the two parties’ election tickets before polling day in exactly five weeks’ time.The pair – who have had sharp words for each other at a distance – will engage in verbal combat in close quarters at a CBS-hosted event in New York, with the stakes raised by polling evidence that shows the contest between the two presidential nominees, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, poised on a knife edge.With Trump, the Republican nominee, continuing to refuse demands from Harris, his Democratic opponent, for a second presidential debate, much may ride on how the clash between Walz and Vance unfolds.The 90-minute duel will have added piquancy after Walz, the 60-year-old governor of Minnesota, memorably described Vance as “weird” while casting him as a key architect of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a radical shake-up of American government and society that would crack down intensely on immigration, vanquish LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, diminish environmental protections, overhaul financial policy and take aggressive action against China.Vance, 40, a senator for Ohio who has reinvented himself as a political attack dog for Trump despite disparaging him before entering politics, has hit back by depicting his opponent as a far-left liberal and accusing him of serially misrepresenting aspects of his military service in the national guard.He has also thrown the “weird” jibe back at Walz after the Democratic vice-presidential nominee said his children had been born with the help of IVF – which Vance once voted as a senator to oppose – before it emerged that he and his wife had used a different form of fertility treatment.The potential for fireworks could be further raised by the fact that CBS’s rules of engagement preclude its moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, from fact-checking the candidates in real time – as happened at last month’s ABC debate between Harris and Trump in Philadelphia. Instead, the two men will be expected to fact-check each other.Vance enters the debate with arguably more to gain. Since his selection as Trump’s running mate, his approval figures have been consistently in the negatives amid a string of disclosures over derogatory comments about childless women, whom he branded “childless cat ladies”.He has also drawn fire for his role in promoting a debunked rumour about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, before later telling CNN – unapologetically – that the story had been “created” for the purpose of calling attention to “the suffering of the American people”.Amid the opprobrium, the Yale-educated Vance – who has prepared for the debate by holding rehearsals with a small team that includes the House Republican whip, Tom Emmer, playing the role of Walz, and his wife, Usha, as an adviser – has gained a high profile by embracing the role of articulator of Trump’s fiercely anti-immigrant America-first populism.Walz, by contrast, has achieved more encouraging polling numbers yet has adopted a low-key posture since Harris chose him as her running-mate after being promoted to the top of the Democratic ticket following Joe Biden’s decision to step aside in July.He has given few media interviews and had settled for a lower profile following the acerbic attacks on Vance and other Maga Republicans that were first brought to national attention in the summer – and prompted Harris to select him.Walz, who projects an image of folksiness, has admitted to nervousness about Tuesday’s debate while preparing with the help of Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. He has voiced fears to associates that he may let Harris down and reportedly warned her when she chose him that he was a poor debater.While there is little evidence historically of vice-presidential debates affecting the outcome of presidential elections, past encounters have been notable for producing memorable moments and soundbites.In 2020, Harris herself was the source of one when she told Mike Pence – Vance’s predecessor as Trump’s running mate and, at the time, the vice president – after he interrupted her. She siad: “Mr Vice President, I’m speaking.”In the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Lloyd Bentsen, running mate to the Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, had a ready rejoinder when Dan Quayle, the Republican nominee behind George HW Bush, when quizzed, at age 41 – a year older than Vance – about his relative youth, responded by invoking John F Kennedy.“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy,” replied Bentsen. “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” More