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      JD Vance takes victory lap and mocks Tim Walz over debate gaffe

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      JD Vance took a self-proclaimed victory lap after his vice-presidential debate against the Democrat Tim Walz, appearing on Wednesday at a campaign rally in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.Vance told supporters in Auburn Hills that he thought the debate went “pretty well” on Tuesday, as snap polls showed viewers considered it to be a tie between the two vice-presidential candidates.Departing from the generally civil tone of the debate, Vance mocked Walz over his biggest gaffe of the night, in which the Democratic governor said he was friends with school shooters. (Walz seemingly meant to say he was friends with victims of school shootings.)“That was probably only the third or fourth dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel a little bad for Governor Walz. And the reason I feel bad for him is because he has to defend the indefensible, and that is the record of Kamala Harris.”In his prepared remarks, Vance did not touch on his weakest moment in the debate, when he refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race. But when Vance took questions from the media after his speech, a reporter did ask him about the exchange, and he again sidestepped the question.“The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to commonsense economic policies,” Vance said.Vance then pivoted to discussing the issue of non-citizen voting, which has become a rallying cry among Trump and his supporters. Research has uncovered little evidence to substantiate Republicans’ concerns, as voting in a federal election is already illegal for non-citizens.“We’re going to talk about election integrity because I believe that every vote ought to count, but only the legally cast votes, and that’s why we fight for election integrity,” Vance said in Michigan.Vance focused most of his remarks on attacking Harris over her economic policy proposals, blaming her for the high inflation seen earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency and accusing her of avoiding tough questions about her record. Echoing comments he made during the debate, Vance referenced his background growing up in a low-income family in Ohio to relate to Americans struggling to pay their bills.“She’s afraid of interviews, so she doesn’t talk to people, and she doesn’t realize that her economic policies are making it harder on American families,” Vance said. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to afford a good life for your family, and that’s what Donald Trump and I are going to fight for every single day for the next four years.”Vance then linked Trump’s economic policies to his proposals on immigration, as the former president has called for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. An analysis released on Wednesday by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, concluded that Trump’s mass deportation program could cost the federal government as much as $88bn a year on average.“The American media – and especially Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – they don’t want to talk about how this illegal immigration crisis is a theft of the American dream from American citizens,” Vance said. “Here’s the Donald Trump plan, and here’s the Donald Trump message to illegal aliens in this country: in six months, pack your bags because you’re going home.”Despite rehashing some of Trump’s most divisive talking points, Vance made a point to reach out to Democrats who may still be undecided in the election. Trump will probably need some of those voters’ support to carry Michigan, a state that Biden won by 3 points in 2020.“As a person who was raised by a couple of working-class, blue-collar Democrats, I want to say to every Democrat who’s watching at home [and] every Democrat who’s in this room: you are more than welcome in Donald Trump’s Republican party,” Vance said. “We’re the party of common sense. We’ve got a big tent, and you’re welcome in our movement.”And yet, when asked by a reporter how he and Trump would work to unite Americans in the face of political division if they win the election in November, Vance again lashed out against Harris.“Why do we have so much division, and why do we have so much rancor in this country’s political debate? It’s because Kamala Harris and her allies are trying to silence the American people rather than engage with them,” Vance said. “When you try to censor your fellow citizens, when you try to shut them up, you breed division and hatred.”Given Trump’s tendency to deploy personal insults and degrading nicknames against his political opponents, that explanation may not sit well with voters. Trump now has just one month left to convince Americans that he deserves another four years in the White House. More

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      Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

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      Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.View image in fullscreenHer decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.She goes on to appeal for compassion.“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.” More

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      JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense | Moira Donegan

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      Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.Perhaps Vance’s quintessential moment of the night came early, when he was attempting to further his smears of the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio, whom he had previously targeted with lies that they eat pets. Vance was cut off by the moderators, but talked over them insistently. “Margaret. Margaret. Margaret. Margaret”, he said repeatedly, trying to strong-arm one of the women into letting him talk. As they corrected his misstatements, he whined to the women: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, reportedly told Kamala Harris when he was being vetted for the job that he does not consider himself a good debater. Going in, expectations for him were low. And indeed Walz had an uneven night, sometimes appearing flustered or nervous. An early answer on foreign policy, in particular, was confused and unconvincing. But Walz visibly gained confidence throughout the debate, issuing more forceful answers, attacking Trump and Vance’s record, and emphasizing himself, often successfully, as a homespun purveyor of goodwill and common sense.He was most convincing on what seems to be, for him, the most morally animating issues: healthcare and abortion. Walz named Amber Thurman, a woman killed by an abortion ban, as someone whose life could have been saved were it not for Trump’s policies; he spoke with passion and clarity of how Trump’s plan to reverse the Affordable Care Act would kick millions off their insurance.But perhaps Walz’s best moment came near the end of the debate, in a conversation about democracy, when he pointedly asked JD Vance to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged.“That’s a damning non-answer,” Walz said. It could have summarized Vance’s whole performance.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      JD Vance and Tim Walz keep it civil in policy-heavy vice-presidential debate – US elections live

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      Good morning and welcome to the blog as we wake up to reaction to Tim Walz and JD Vance’s vice-presidential debate which offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.It was a debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump.The most tense exchange occurred near the end of the debate, when Vance – who has said he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election – avoided a question about whether he would challenge this year’s vote if Trump loses.Walz responded by blaming Trump’s false claims of voter fraud for instigating the 6 January 2021, mob that attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, before turning to Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance again sidestepped the question, instead accusing Harris of pursuing online censorship of opposing viewpoints. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.Meanwhile, 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.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 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 doesn’t win the election. He has also said supporters won’t 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.Donald Trump’s senior aides saw JD Vance as having a slick debate performance over Tim Walz, according to people close to Trump, that made his campaign appear palatable despite the former president’s increasingly caustic threats such as vowing to prosecute his perceived enemies.The campaign aides also believed that Vance reset the narrative over his image and likely came across in a more favorable light to undecided voters after a brutal few months of being hammered for making disparaging remarks about women as “childless cat ladies”.Vance’s favorability issue was perhaps the principal priority for Trump’s senior aides because they saw it as potentially fixable and if so, beneficial to the Trump campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day in what has become a vanishingly close race against Kamala Harris.Afterwards, Trump predictably claimed Vance won the debate, but a CBS News poll confirmed how vice-presidential​ debates matter increasingly less in close elections compared to ground game efforts to drive turnout.In the post-debate poll, 42% of respondents said Vance won the debate, 41% gave the win to Walz, while 17% said it was tied – suggesting the main takeaway remains that it is unlikely to play any material role in which campaign wins each of the seven battleground states in November.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 contested.Walz also criticized the Trump-Vance position that states should decide whether women have access to abortion.“That’s not how this works. This is basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world,” he said.Good morning and welcome to the blog as we wake up to reaction to Tim Walz and JD Vance’s vice-presidential debate which offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.It was a debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump.The most tense exchange occurred near the end of the debate, when Vance – who has said he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election – avoided a question about whether he would challenge this year’s vote if Trump loses.Walz responded by blaming Trump’s false claims of voter fraud for instigating the 6 January 2021, mob that attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, before turning to Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance again sidestepped the question, instead accusing Harris of pursuing online censorship of opposing viewpoints. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.Meanwhile, 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. More

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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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      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 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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      ‘This man is everything’: how devoted Trump supporters took over the Republican party in a Michigan city

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      Debra Ell opened her Trump Shoppe in a dingy Saginaw strip mall back when establishment Republicans and TV pundits were still scoffing at the man who was about to remake US politics.Ell latched on to Donald Trump as a winner not long after he declared his run for the presidency in 2015. But she understood that the key to his success in her corner of swing state Michigan was to keep a distance from the local Republican party, which Ell regarded with almost as much hostility as she did the Democrats.So the Trump Shoppe was born, soon drawing in people who had never voted Republican in their lives. Ell recalls the car factory workers struggling after General Motors closed the plants that propped up Saginaw county’s economy.“There’s no way union workers were going to go into Republican offices but they came in here because Trump’s name was on the sign and said: ‘There’s no way in hell I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.’ So we had that gift, and then they wanted to know more about Trump,” she said.“We’d educate them in what he was saying and they liked it because he’s a phenomenon. We’ll never ever see anybody like Donald Trump again, ever. It’s not going to be fun anymore when he’s not around. Even if you don’t support him, it’s fun, don’t you think?”View image in fullscreenNearly a decade later, the Trump Shoppe is still in business, squeezed between Lovely Nails and an insurance company. These days, it’s busy with people buying “vote Trump” signs sporting slogans tailored to military veterans, bikers, union members, Black people and Latinos. “Cats and Dogs for Trump” signs have done well since the former president accused Haitian immigrants of eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.A blanket imprinted with a picture of Trump raising his fist in the moments after the July assassination attempt is for sale near the entrance. T-shirts carry the words Trump shouted as he walked away with blood running down his face: fight, fight, fight.But besides serving as a shrine to Trump, the office is now also the local Republican headquarters after Ell led a campaign to purge the Saginaw county party of those she derided as “Rinos” – Republicans in name only – for their lack of total fealty to Trump.She led a takeover last year by packing the local party with delegates aligned with the America First movement, a populist political philosophy embraced by Trump that promotes a nationalist agenda of unilateralism and protectionism but has frequently been accused of being underpinned by racism.Amid accusations of intimidation that on one occasion resulted in the police being called to an official party meeting, Ell’s husband, Gary, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, was installed as chair of the county Republican party.View image in fullscreen“The Saginaw county Republican party were old guard, traditional establishment people. When Debra started a Trump office here, we grew a following of people that supported Trump strictly as Trump. We built up a continual base to the point where none of the previous executive committee or officers who were not loyal to Trump are now in any leadership capacity,” said Gary Ell.But for all her success in taking control of Saginaw’s Republican machinery, Debra Ell now faces a critical question: does any of this help get Trump elected in five weeks?Saginaw is a bellwether county. Trump narrowly won it in 2016, and took Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. He lost the county and the state four years later, helping to send him to defeat in the presidential election. Victory for Trump in Saginaw and Michigan in November would be a major blow to Kamala Harris’s campaign.But some Republicans have questioned the wisdom of what they see as the Saginaw party leadership’s obsessive focus on conspiracy theories claiming the 2020 election was stolen and denial of Trump’s role in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.Thomas Roy was forced out as vice-chair of the county party by Ell and America First supporters in late 2022. “A lot of us don’t believe the election was stolen in 2020. They basically do, 100%,” he told WJRT television afterward.Roy then founded a Republican “club” to act as a rival to the local party by fundraising for more reasoned candidates – some of whom won their primaries against the America First challengers.Ell also led a campaign to unseat the director of the Michigan Republican party, Jason Roe, after just six months in office when it emerged that he had said not long after the 2020 election that Trump was responsible for his own defeat.“The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump,” Roe told Politico at the time.Since his unseating, Roe has warned that America Firsters are damaging Trump’s chances for victory this year and has described some of its candidates in Michigan state races as “kooks”.Another former local Republican official, who remains a Trump supporter, said that repeatedly “harping on about election fraud and January 6 only reminds people of the most disruptive threat to democracy in modern American history – with Trump at the heart of it”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenHe added: “He lost then because of the chaos. Reminding voters of that chaos is not the way to win this election. We should stick to talking about his strength, the economy.”Ell is having none of it. She said America First politicians are only voicing Trump’s own views. But is that the way for him to win back Saginaw county after his defeat by just a few hundred votes in 2020?View image in fullscreen“I don’t think he lost it to begin with. I was here. I was on the ground. We walked out of our office in 2020 at about 10 o’clock at night and he was 75% ahead in Saginaw County, and we were just on a cloud. There’s no way that that could change. I think they cheated,” she said.In the Trump Shoppe, cardboard cutouts of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower serve as a reminder of Republican royalty. But most of those who walk in the door are there for the man, not the party. Their views are better represented on a large television streaming Real America’s Voice, a rightwing channel peddling election conspiracy theories, which has displaced Fox News as the trusted source for America First supporters.Ell, too, is a Trump supporter first and a Republican second.View image in fullscreen“We are America First. That’s what Trump’s all about, is America First. And that’s not an arrogant, racist statement. America First is what our constitution is about,” she said.“They like to say that we’re so divided. I don’t think so. Trump’s brought up so many issues that have been buried for so long. He’s saying: ‘Why are these illegals coming in?’ He’s actually bringing us together by talking about these things. We were the silent majority that felt the hurt and the pain of what was happening to our country. We saw it and we knew it, but we didn’t have an advocate to do anything about it, so we didn’t talk about it until Trump came along.”Asked if she really believed that the US is more united because of Trump given the national political discourse and the divisions in her own party, Ell said whatever differences there may be are a result of the “left spreading disinformation”.Still, she agrees with her critics that the constant talk about alleged election fraud and the Capitol insurrection are not what most voters care about. Opinion polls consistently show that Trump is more trusted on the economy and inflation, a key issue for many voters after years of rising prices, although a recent poll for the Guardian showed that, in a blind test, Harris’s specific economic proposals – including some price controls and higher taxes for the wealthy – were more popular.Perhaps that should be the focus of the Saginaw Republicans campaign?“We talk about it plenty. Biden gave us the gift of this economy. And who, for the last three-and-a-half years, gave us that? Kamala Harris was his VP. This is her fault,” she said.For all that, recent polls consistently put Harris ahead in Michigan, albeit by the low single digits. Ell is dismissive.“In 2016, Trump was an unknown to the political world, and that’s why the Democrats and Hillary took him for granted: ‘Oh, he can’t win.’ All the polling was way off base. They thought the election was over. They did it then, they’re doing it now. The polling is similar. It’s wrong,” she said.“He’s going to win. Look at his rallies. Everyone there, including me, would take a bullet for that man because he’s going to save this country for my grandchildren. This man, at this time in history, is everything.” More