Washington: Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz are meeting in their first — and possibly only — vice presidential debate of the 2024 election, bringing together candidates who have spent two months going after each other and the opposing nominees who top the major-party tickets.
What to know about the Vice Presidential Debate:
How long does the debate last? The debate is expected to last 90 minutes. It started at 9 p.m. EDT.What are the rules? Host network CBS News says there will be two four-minute commercial breaks, and — unlike in the presidential debates — candidates’ microphones will not be muted.What’s at stake? The debate gives Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, and Walz, a two-term Democratic governor of Minnesota, the chance to introduce themselves, make the case for their running mates and go on the attack against the opposing ticket.The vice presidential candidates are demonstrating very different body language and debating styles on stage. Vance hadn’t picked up his pen and pad as the debate closed in on the end of its first hour. Walz, by contrast, jotted down notes throughout. Vance tilted his head at Walz when the governor was answering questions, while Walz would turn his full body to face Vance as the senator spoke.Walz looked nervous or unsettled at the start of the debate, speaking with “umms” and pauses on the debate’s early foreign policy questions. But he’s looking more comfortable as the debate crosses the halfway mark. It probably helps that the topic has shifted to his favored ground, abortion rights.Vance voiced support for access to fertility treatments and called himself “pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.” Vance has previously cosponsored Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s bill supporting in vitro fertilization. But in June, he voted against the Right to IVF Act, which would have codified a federal right to IVF access.Vance says he’s confident that he can be a vice president willing to give Trump advice that he might not want to hear. Asked about recent Washington Post reporting that he levied criticism against his current running mate as recently as 2020, Vance said that he’s been “open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump ” initially. He also added that “there were a lot of things that we could have done better in the Trump administration.” Vance was once a caustic critic of Trump, but became a fierce ally during his 2022 Senate race, landing Trump’s crucial endorsement in the final weeks of a crowded GOP primary.Asked about accusations that Harris is not doing enough to restrict fentanyl into America, Walz talked about the failed Senate immigration bill. A group of Republican and Democratic senators spent weeks in late 2023 and early 2024 negotiating a far-reaching border security bill that failed in a matter of hours when it was introduced. The legislation would have limited asylum access. It included more money for asylum officers, Border Patrol agents, immigration judges and for technology to detect contraband like fentanyl. But even before the bill was introduced, Trump effectively killed it by labeling it a gift to Biden’s reelection chances.Similar to Harris’ strategy of referring to abortion restrictions as “Trump abortion bans,” Walz also pointed to Trump’s role in appointing the three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion, unleashing a wave of restrictions on the procedure across Republican-led states. “ Donald Trump put this all into motion,” Walz said.Walz touted his track record on policies to boost the middle class, including a tool that has drawn support from both Republicans and Democrats and has the potential to radically reduce child poverty: the child tax credit. The Harris-Walz campaign said it wants to increase the child tax credit to $6,000 and make it fully refundable, meaning all families with citizen children would get the full amount. In early August, Vance said he wanted to boost the child tax credit to $5,000 but did not give further details. Trump doubled the child tax credit in 2017 but its benefits did not reach the poorest families. Biden expanded it as part of a massive coronavirus relief bill and made it fully refundable, which made it available to all households with citizen children, regardless of income. It halved child poverty but expired after a year.The candidate got into an argument about the value of advice from trained experts. Vance acknowledged that Trump’s instincts are often contradicted by academics and others with expertise. But he said Trump had “the wisdom and the courage” to reject bipartisan consensus. He cited trade policy, saying both parties supported offshoring manufacturing in exchange for cheaper goods but it was a bad deal for Americans. “This has to stop,” Vance said. “And we’re not going to stop it by listening to experts, we’re going to stop it by listening to common sense wisdom.” Walz said Trump thinks he knows best but he doesn’t.”If you’re going to be president, you don’t have all the answers,” Walz said. “ Donald Trump thinks he does. My pro tip of the day, if you need heart surgery listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump.”Walz said he “misspoke” when he previously claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the period that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Walz in public comments has said he was in the then-British colony of Hong Kong in May 1989 and on the day of the massacre, June 4, 1989. Public documents suggest he did not arrive until August. “I got there that summer and misspoke on this,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee said of his previous misleading statements.The devastation caused by Hurricane Helene led to an early exchange on climate change, an issue that was lightly touched in last month’s presidential debate. Vance called the hurricane “an unspeakable human tragedy’’ and pledged to support ”a robust and aggressive federal response.’’Walz called Helene “a horrific tragedy” and said the Biden-Harris administration is working with “no partisanship” to help states affected by the storm, which has killed more than 150 people. “The federal government comes in, makes sure that they recover. But we’re still in that phase where we need to make sure that they’re staying. They’re staying focused.’’Tim Walz and JD Vance are both saying they’d be better for the economy, but the two vice presidential picks are both avoiding the reality that the pandemic shaped the economic records of the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations. For Trump, the 2020 outbreak of COVID led massive job losses and higher deficit spending but also low inflation. For the Biden-Harris administration, the emergence out of the pandemic was associated with higher inflation, faster than expected job gains and, yes, deficits that remain elevated compared to previous forecasts.The presidential debates rarely involved the candidates talking directly to each other, but that’s not been the case with their running mates. Several times in the debate’s first hour, Walz and Vance have addressed each other in their responses to questions about topics including immigration and the economy.Walz noted that he doesn’t talk publicly about his faith very often. But he’s a Lutheran, as are many Minnesotans and other Midwesterners. In a discussion on immigration, he quoted from the Bible, paraphrasing the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 40. It says, according to several translations, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Vance has repeatedly blamed Harris for enacting — or failing to enact — policies over the past four years. Absent from his remarks, however, is President Biden, who crafted legislation with a Democratic-controlled Congress over the first two years of his presidency. Harris did have a significant role in enacting some of Biden’s biggest legislative accomplishments — she often cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, which she presides over as vice president.Vance said experts have said for 40 years that “if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we’d get cheaper goods.” This brings to the front the debate over the U.S. trading relationship with China, which did bring cheaper goods to U.S. consumers. American companies also have benefited from the trading relationship by earning hundreds of billions of dollars.Walz praised the Democratic administration for working to bring down the costs of everyday items, like prescription drugs. Democrats passed a law two years ago that capped the price of insulin at $35 monthly for millions of older Americans who are on Medicare. But Walz wildly overstated the price of insulin prior to the legislation, claiming that Americans were paying “$800 before this law went into effect.” That’s not true. A December 2022 study found that people who were on Medicare or enrolled in private insurance paid $452 yearly on average prior to the law going into effect.CBS cut the mics on both candidates after Vance interjected out of turn to explain how Haitian migrants were given temporary legal status in the U.S. The moderators tried to move on, but Vance insisted on explaining how temporary protected status works. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check and since you’re fact-checking me. I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” he protested.Moderator Margaret Brennan implored him to wrap up. “Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process,” she said. “We have so much to get through.” When Walz tried to jump in himself, the candidates were informed that the audience could no longer hear them because their mics had been cut.CBS News Moderator Norah O’Donnell is using estimates from the Penn Wharton Budget Model to suggest that the Harris and Trump campaigns would both drive up budget deficits. That model is authoritative, but it excluded some of the revenue raisers attached to the Harris campaign that would keep the deficit from rising above current projections. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said the key for helping the economy is building 3 million more houses as Harris has proposed, as it would enable more people to build wealth while making ownership more affordable because supply could match demand. Ohio Sen. JD Vance said that Trump’s record as president and the preservation of his 2017 tax cuts would do more for growth.Vance was asked about a pledge by Trump to carry out “mass deportations” of migrants. Vance said that under a Trump administration, the first priority for deportations would be migrants with criminal records. Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. He made similar claims during his first White House bid, but he never approached the record 432,000 deportations that occurred under his predecessor, Barack Obama, in 2013. But this time Trump has promised to use wartime powers to overcome legal obstacles and rely on like-minded governors to provide National Guard support to carry out deportations.During a spirited exchange on immigration, Walz accused Vance and Trump of villainizing legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance’s home state, in an effort to elevate the issue. He pointed to the fact that Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had to send in extra law enforcement to provide security to the city’s schools after Vance tweeted about and Trump amplified false claims about Haitians eating pets. “This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it, you demonize it,” he said, saying not doing so would allow people to “come together.” Vance said the 15,000 Haitians in the city had caused housing and economic issues that the Biden-Harris administration was ignoring.Vance described Harris as the “border czar” multiple times. This tactic is commonly used by Republicans — including Trump — to link Harris with an issue they know is important to voters. But that was never her formal title, and she was never specifically given the responsibility for security on the border. She was tasked by Biden in March 2021 to tackle the “root causes” of migration from the Northern Triangle — the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — and pushing leaders there and in Mexico to enforce immigration laws.
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