Clare Hall · Just now Gage Skidmore / Flickr (Left), Office of Governor Tim Walz & Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan / Flickr (Right)
CV NEWS FEED // Donald Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-OH, and Kamala Harris’ running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz faced off in New York City for the sole planned vice presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle.
Most observers deemed Vance to be the debate’s winner, and many commended the Republican’s answers to questions on a range of topics.
CBS hosted the debate and Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell served as its moderators.
Before the debate, the network said that the moderators would not “fact-check” statements made by either candidate – but viewers widely agreed that the pair “fact-checked” Vance on multiple occasions throughout the debate.
Vance began his first answer by giving viewers a brief introduction to his personal background, adding “I recognize a lot of Americans don’t know who either one of us are.”
The senator and “Hillbilly Elegy” author explained how he “grew up in a working-class family” and “went to college on the GI bill after I enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq.”
“I stand here asking to be your vice president with extraordinary gratitude for this country, for the American dream that made it possible for me to live my dreams,” Vance declared.
“I know that a lot of you are worried about the chaos in the world and the feeling that the American dream is unattainable,” he continued. “If we get Donald Trump back in the White House, the American dream is going to be attainable once again.”’
‘Stopping the bleeding’ at the border
“We have to stop the bleeding,” Vance said regarding the ongoing crisis at the nation’s southern border, which has intensified to unprecedented levels under the Biden-Harris administration.
“We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies,” Vance went on. “Ninety-four executive orders, suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud – that has opened the floodgates. And what it’s meant is that a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country.”
“I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let fentanyl into our communities at record levels,” Vance stressed.
In response to Brennan’s question as to whether he supports “family separation,” Vance answered: “Right now in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’ wide-open Southern border.”
Walz replied to Vance’s answer on the border: “Most of us want to solve this. And that is the United States Congress, that’s the border patrol agents, that’s the Chamber of Commerce.”
Walz then repeated a popular Democratic talking point in support of a failed Senate bill from earlier this year that has been widely criticized by supporters of border security as not doing enough to address the present migrant crisis.
“Donald Trump had four years to do this,” Walz said. “But here we are again nine years after he came down that escalator dehumanizing people.”
Also during the discussion on immigration, Vance reiterated: “The gross majority of what we need to do at the southern border is just empowering law enforcement to do their job.”
“I’ve been to the border more than our border czar Kamala Harris has been, and it’s actually heartbreaking,” Vance added, “because the border patrol agents, they just want to be empowered to do their job.”
While still on the topic of the border, Walz quoted a verse from Scripture.
“I don’t talk about my faith a lot, but Matthew 25:40 talks about, ‘to the least among us, you do unto me,’” he said. “I think that’s true of most Americans.”
The border and ‘fact-checking’
Later on in the debate, Walz claimed that border “crossings are down compared to when Trump left office.”
Media Research Center (MRC) pointed out on X (formerly Twitter) that the average number of monthly border crossings under the Biden-Harris administration is nearly four times higher than the number under the Trump administration.
While the debate’s moderators did not dispute Walz’s claim, Brennan seemed to “fact-check” Vance’s statements about the surging number of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Oho, by pointing out that many of them have “legal status.”
“Margaret, the rules were you guys were not going to fact check,” Vance pointed out – as O’Donnell tried to interrupt him and change the debate’s topic.
“And since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” Vance continued:
So, there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole, and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open-border wand.
That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card, and waiting for ten years. That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway.
As Vance was explaining the controversial app, Brennan cut him off: “Thank you for describing the legal process.”
Walz then interjected: “Those laws have been on the books since 1990.”
“The CBP One App has not been on the books since 1990,” Vance replied, as the moderators cut his microphone.
FOX News national correspondent Bill Melugin weighed in on this exchange on X, calling Walz’s 1990 claim “completely false.”
“The Biden/Harris admin started using it in winter 2023 to begin mass paroling migrants into the country by the hundreds of thousands, typically between 1,300-1,500 every single day,” Melugin wrote.
The economy
Vance said that much of what Harris “proposes to do” regarding the economy are things that Harris, the incumbent vice president, has already “had the opportunity to enact.”
“And what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher, by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher, by about 60%, open the American southern border, and make middle-class life unaffordable,” the vice presidential candidate said.
“If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle-class problems,” Vance stated, “then she ought to do them now. Not when asking for a promotion but in the job the American people gave her three-and-a-half years ago.”
“And the fact that she isn’t tells you a lot about how much you can trust her actual plans,” he stressed.
>> AUGUST: HARRIS UNVEILS ECONOMIC AGENDA <<
Vance noted that Trump’s proposed economic policy on the other hand “is not just a plan, but it’s also a record.” He said that the handful of economists who attack Trump’s plans “have PhDs but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom.”
“Because Trump’s economic policies delivered the highest take-home pay in a generation in this country, 1.5% inflation, and to boot, peace and security all over the world,” Vance continued. “When people say Donald Trump’s economic plan doesn’t make sense, I say look at the record.”
The issue ‘on everybody’s mind’
As the debate turned to the topic of abortion, Walz claimed: “This issue is on everyone’s mind.”
According to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll from August, significantly fewer voters said abortion was an important issue to them than those who named the economy and immigration as important.
When asked if a controversial Minnesota bill he signed as governor legalizes abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, Walz responded: “In Minnesota what we did was restore Roe v. Wade.”
The Democratic vice presidential nominee then baselessly claimed that Project 2025 – a conservative policy initiative that Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from – would create a “registry of pregnancies.”
Vance ensured that if he and Trump are elected they “certainly” will not create such a pregnancy registration.
Multiple critics on X noted that current Minnesota law indeed allows abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy.
Walz has served as the state’s governor since 2019.
Vance confronted Walz about the law in question: “As I read the Minnesota law that you signed … the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”
Walz fired back: “That’s not true.” He later accused Vance of trying to “distort” the “way the law was written.”
“That is fundamentally barbaric,” Vance said. “Do you want to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions against their will? Because Kamala Harris has supported suing Catholic nuns to violate their freedom of conscience.”
“We can be a big and diverse country where we respect people’s freedom of conscience and make the country pro-baby and pro-family,” Vance added.
Furthermore, Vance told the debate’s viewers that with regard to abortion, pro-life Republicans have to do “so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly don’t trust us.”
“I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do,” the senator added. “I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.”
Vance said he wants to “make it easier for moms to afford to have babies.”
“I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family,” he continued. “I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.”
‘Rich or poor’
In his closing statement, Vance said:
I believe that whether you’re rich or poor, you ought to be able to afford a nice meal for your family. That’s gotten harder because of Kamala Harris’ policies.
I believe that whether you’re rich or poor, you ought to be able to afford to buy a house, you ought to be able to live in safe neighborhoods, you ought to not have your communities flooded with fentanyl, and that too has gotten harder … because of Kamala Harris’ policies.
He noted that Harris continually promises that “on day one” she would “work on all these challenges I just listed.”
“She’s been the vice president for three-and-a-half years,” Vance said. “Day one was 1,400 days ago and her policies have made these problems worse.”
“We have the greatest country, the most beautiful country, the most incredible people anywhere in the world,” the candidate said. “But they’re not going to be able to live their American dream if we do the same thing that we’ve been doing for the last three-and-a-half years.”
“We need change,” Vance stressed. “We need a new direction. We need a president who has already done this once before, and did it well. Please vote for Donald Trump.”
Concluding, he told the American people: “I’m so proud to be doing this and I’m rooting for you.”
