High Stakes and Surprising Civility: Top 5 Takeaways From the VP Debate Between Vance And Walz – Essence
With only 35 days until election day, the first and only vice-presidential debate saw the Ivy League-educated junior senator JD Vance face off against the six-term congressman and current Minnesota governor Tim Walz in a surprisingly civil debate. Typically, vice-presidential debates are low-stakes affairs, but with a shortage of presidential match-ups and this likely being the final time candidates from both presidential tickets face-off, the stakes were higher.
Both men brought strengths—and both had something to prove. Vance rocketed to fame on the strength of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy in which he described the challenges facing people in Appalachia and rust belt cities like Middletown, Ohio where he grew up. Donald Trump chose him as VP not only because he’s a strident MAGA supporter but because he could strengthen Trump’s appeal to white voters in rust belt states which Trump lost in 2020. Polls show Vance has a likeability problem, especially with women (his comment calling them “childless cat ladies” has dogged him for months.) His incendiary and race-baiting comments, like the promotion of the baseless rumor that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, haven’t helped either. So, the debate represented an opportunity for him to improve his image.
Walz is a seasoned politician but wasn’t nationally known until he called Vance and Donald Trump “weird” during a campaign appearance in St. Paul, MN, over the summer. The viral insult seemed to be the perfect balm for a weary Democratic electorate tired of the normalization of Trump’s behavior. VP Harris chose Walz not only because of theirpersonal rapport but for his folksy, everyman demeanor and background as a high school teacher and football coach, which could potentially appeal to white male voters in Midwestern states. However, he has not had very many high-profile interviews. So, this debate was one of the few times Walz faced hard questions in front of a national audience. The challenge was seeing how he stood up under the pressure. So how did both men do? Here are the top five takeaways.
Walz challenges Trump and Vance to get serious about immigration
The latest Pew Research poll shows Trump leading Harris on the immigration issue 52% to 45%. His hard line on immigration includes using the U.S. military to carry out the largest deportation plan in history. Vance was challenged on the logistics of this policy, including the potential problem of separating American-born children from their undocumented parents. He tried to pin the immigration issue on VP Harris, saying, “The real family separation policy in this country is, unfortunately, Kamala Harris’s wide open southern border.” And the solution is “you’ve got to reimplement Donald Trump’s border policies, build the wall, reimplement deportations,” which would start with undocumented people with criminal records.
Walz challenged this view, saying that Harris, as California’s attorney general, had prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug trafficking. She’d also been a champion of the bipartisan border bill that Trump scuttled because he thought immigration would be a strong campaign issue for him. Walz also pointed out that Trump had years to fix the border but hadn’t. “Here we are again, nine years after he came down that escalator, dehumanizing people, telling them what he was going to do as far as a deportation plan. At one point, Senator Vance said it was so unworkable to be laughable. So that’s where we’re at. Pass the bill; she’ll sign it.” He also decried Vance and Trump’s demonization of immigrants. “We could come together and solve this if we didn’t let Donald Trump continue to make it an issue,” he said. “When it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings.”
Walz and Vance offer competing visions on the economy
Another area where Trump leads VP Harris is on the economy. Pew Research shows 55% of voters have confidence in Trump’s handling of the economy versus Harris’ 45%. Walz attempted to make up ground by promoting what Harris has called an “opportunity economy.” Under the plan, three million homes would be built with down payment assistance to help people buy homes. And he used policies enacted in Minnesota to prove that this housing policy would save money in the long run. For example, he said they built 12% more housing and rent prices went down by 4%. Walz also touted the plan to lower prices on things like prescription drugs, which has already resulted in a steep reduction of the price of insulin, made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act. Tax cuts for the middle class, a $6000 child tax credit (which he said had already been enacted in Minnesota and reduced child poverty by one-third) and increasing the small business tax credit from $5,000 to $50,000 are also part of the plan. Getting the wealthy to pay their fair share is how Harris wants to pay for these initiatives: “When you do that, our system works best. More people are participating in it, and folks have the things that they need,” Walz said.
Vance responded by claiming that Harris should have already enacted these policies because she’s been Vice President for nearly four years. However, vice presidents don’t set policies, presidents do. He also tried to pin higher food and housing prices on Harris: “What she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%, opening the American southern border and make middle-class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.” Food prices have actually gone up by 21%, according to the A.P. and home prices have increased by 47%, as noted by the Case-Schiller National Home Price Index; this increase reflects an upward trend that has been happening for the past 25 years. In any event,
To be clear, he offered no proof that increased immigration was overall responsible for higher housing costs. In response to the analysis by Penn Wharton that Trump’s proposed economic plan would raise the deficit by $5.8 trillion (in comparison to Harris’ plan, which would raise the deficit by $1.2 trillion), Vance simply dismissed the assessment “A lot of those same economists attack Donald Trump’s plans, and they have PhDs, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom, because Donald Trump’s economic policies delivered the highest take-home pay in a generation in this country, 1.5% inflation and food, peace and security all over the world.” While wages did increase by 7% (more than they had since the 1970s) during Trump’s term, according to an analysis by Texas A&M University, those numbers are due to the large number of low-wage workers that were driven out of the workforce due to the pandemic, leaving higher-wage workers in place. Inflation rose 1.9% on average, not 1.5% each year during the Trump presidency, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Vance tried to soften his abortion stance and Walz pushed back
Voters trust Harris much more on this issue than Trump. Harris has an 11-point lead over Trump (55% to 44%), according to Pew Research. Vance has tried to swing public opinion his way. While he supported a nationwide abortion ban back in 2022, as reported by Forbes, since becoming Trump’s running mate, he says he supports leaving abortion laws up to the states, bringing his views in line with Trump. In the debate, he attempted to soften his views even more. Vance spoke sympathetically of a friend who had an abortion because she was in an abusive relationship and claimed that he and Trump were committed to earning America’s trust on the issue “where they frankly just don’t trust us.” He continued, “I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word… There’s so much we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.”
Walz pushed back forcefully on Vance’s state-by-state abortion approach. He brought up the tragic story of Georgia resident Amber Thurman, who had to cross state lines into North Carolina to get a medically-induced abortion and wound up dying from complications back in Georgia. “The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, are determined by geography? There’s a very real chance that if Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.” Walz said.
He also roundly rejected Vance’s characterization that his stance is pro-abortion and anti-baby. “We’re pro-women. We’re pro-freedom to make your own choice.” He declared, “When we do a restoration of Roe, that works best. That doesn’t preclude us from increasing funding for children,” nor “from making sure that once that child’s born, like in Minnesota, they get meals, they get early childhood education, they get health care.”
Vance claims Trump saved Affordable Care Act, despite repeal attempts
Trump first ran for president in 2016 on a promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act(ACA), but he was only blocked from doing so by Senator John McCain’s vote against repeal in 2017. Trump and Republican-led states even brought the case for repeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, as reported by WRAL, but the case was dismissed in 2021. As recently as last month’s presidential debate, Trump said he had “concepts of a plan” for replacing the ACA. Given this history, it was a very bizarre moment when Vance painted Trump as a savior of the ACA. “Of course, you don’t have to agree with everything that President Trump has ever said or ever done, but when Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
Walz not only corrected the record, he criticized the “conceptual” plan to repeal the ACA, as described by Vance. “What Senator Vance just explained might be worse than a concept because what he explained is pre-Obamacare.” “What they’re saying is, if you’re healthy, why should you be paying more? So what they’re going to do is let insurance companies pick who they insure. Because guess what happens you pay your premium, it’s not much. They’re not going to have to pay out to you. But those of you a little older, gray, you know got cancer, you’re going to get kicked out of it. That’s why the system didn’t work.”
Walz had his strongest moment of the night regarding protecting democracy
The claim that Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election is called the big lie for a reason: it weakens people’s belief in our political system and is corrosive to democracy. However, parroting the big lie is the cost of entry into Trump’s Republican party, so during an exchange on Jan. 6th, when Walz asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance deflected and refused to answer. Walz responded, “That is a very damning non-answer.” Elsewhere in the exchange, Vance shamelessly claimed that “it’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.” This is a lie, as Trump was impeached a second time for inciting an insurrection.
He also disingenuously claimed that Trump had asked protesters to march “peacefully” on January 6th while making no mention that he’d also told the crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore,” and waited for hours while a violent mob ran amok in the Capitol before telling them to go home.
Walz didn’t mince words denouncing Trump’s actions and Vance’s defense. “This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen, and it manifested itself because…he is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” he said. Walz continued, “So America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice in this election: who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump?”
Kamala Harris has agreed to a CNN debate on October 23rd, but Trump hasn’t, so this may be the last debate before the election. Early voting has already started in 23 states.
