VP debate live: Vance refuses to say Trump lost 2020 election as Walz asks America to ‘stand up’ for democracy | US elections 2024

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:

Adam Gabbatt

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.

Adam Gabbatt

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.”

Let’s return to one of the questions during the debate, which was about abortion.

JD Vance was asked about a claim that Tim Walz made, which was that the Trump administration “would seek to create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency”.

The claim, which Walz has made before, is false – Project 2025, which is what he is referring to, does not explicitly call for a federal pregnancy monitoring agency.

Walz has previously described it as a “new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion bans”.

But while Project 2025 – which the Guardian describes as the wishlist for a Trump 2.0 administration – does not explicitly call for this agency to be established, it does propose several ways to restrict abortion access.

Among these is to increase CDC “surveillance” over abortion:

The CDC already collects information about abortion from most of the country, in a report that the agency titles “abortion surveillance”. But its reports are incomplete, since states such as California do not supply the data. Project 2025 suggests that the CDC should go so far as to cut funds from a state if it does not tell the CDC “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”.

It also calls for the government to “eliminate” the department of Health and Human Services Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, “install a pro-life taskforce”, and rename it the “Department of Life”.

According to the document, the taskforce will, “ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children … by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care”.

Vance, asked if he will create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency, said the Trump administration would “certainly not” seek to create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency.

This is Helen Sullivan taking over the Guardian’s live coverage after the debate between the two vice-presidential candidates.

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”.

The youth-led climate action group the Sunrise Movement said Tim Walz delivered a “winning message” on the crisis, while JD Vance “spewed utter nonsense”.

“JD Vance spewed utter nonsense. He made it clear that a Trump-Vance administration would do nothing to stop the climate crisis and prevent more disasters like Helene because they don’t want to upset their fossil fuel billionaire donors,” Sunrise communications director Stevie O’Hanlon said. “Tim Walz delivered a winning message calling out Trump’s allegiance to big oil. This is the kind of message Harris and Walz need to repeat going into November to turn out young voters.”

Post-debate, Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen Walz, partook in an important New York tradition: 11pm pizza after an intense night.

Joe Biden has said tonight’s debate “made it clear that my friend Tim Walz has what it takes”.

“Trust me, I know what a good vice-president looks like,” Biden wrote in a post on X after the debate.

The family of Amber Thurman, who died in 2022 in what ProPublica called the first “preventable” abortion-related death in Georgia, has released a statement after her name was raised during the debate.

“Amber’s tragic death was a direct result of Georgia’s archaic and dangerously restrictive abortion laws, which denied her the life-saving care she so desperately needed,” the statement reads. “We strongly condemn the republican platform that seeks to further restrict women’s access to necessary healthcare under the false guise of protection.”

Tim Walz was pictured at Justino’s pizza shop across from the CBS studios in New York City after the debate.

The Harris-Walz campaign is praising Tim Walz’s performance at the debate, saying that he “showed exactly why Vice President Harris picked him”.

Walz is a “leader who cares about the issues that matter most to the American people”, a statement from Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said, adding:

Americans got to see a real contrast: a straight talker focused on sharing real solutions, and a slick politician who spent the whole night defending Donald Trump’s division and failures.

Representative Ted Lieu, an impeachment manager in the second impeachment case against Trump, said that JD Vance’s comments on the transfer of power after 2020 election were disqualifying.

JD Vance attacked Kamala Harris’s record on the US-Mexico border. “The only thing that she did when she became the vice-president, when she became the appointed border tsar, was to undo Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.”

This contains inaccuracies.

First, Harris was never a “border tsar” – that’s a term invented by her critics. She had a role in the Biden government to look into addressing the root causes of immigration to the US, including safety and economic turmoil in Central American countries.

Second, she did not “undo Donald Trump executive actions”. Presidents sign executive orders, and she was not president. Joe Biden did reverse some Trump executive orders. He initially kept in place Trump-era restrictions known as Title 42, which allowed the US to turn away immigrants at the border on the grounds of preventing the spread of Covid-19, before eventually lifting them.