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Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota met on Tuesday night for the first and only vice presidential debate.
It was the third general election debate of the 2024 campaign, following the June 27 debate that triggered President Joe Biden's eventual dropping out of the race and the September debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
It's likely to be the last of the 2024 campaign. Trump has refused to debate Harris again.
Tuesday night's faceoff represented an opportunity for both Walz and Vance to introduce themselves to their biggest audience yet while reinforcing their respective running mates' campaign messages.
Here were some of the biggest moments of the debate.
The first question of the debate was about the Middle East in light of an Iranian missile attack on Israel earlier on Tuesday. Both men were asked whether they would support a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran.
Walz appeared to stumble over his words at first as he affirmed Democrats' standard line on Israel — that they support the Jewish state's right to defend itself while acknowledging the humanitarian suffering in Gaza.
At one point, the Minnesota governor declared that the "expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States," seemingly confusing Israel with Iran, a country whose proxies include Hamas and Hezbollah.
Walz then pivoted to attacking Trump, saying that "a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment." He did not directly address the question about an Israeli strike.
Vance, on the other hand, started with his biography. "I recognize a lot of Americans don't know who either one of us are," he said, recounting the life story that he first detailed in his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy."
The Ohio senator later addressed the question by saying that he would support an Israeli strike if that's what Israel decided to do, saying the country should do "what they think they need to do to keep their country safe." He also argued that Trump kept the world safe by "establishing effective deterrence" and that "people were afraid of stepping out of line."
Both Walz and Vance acknowledged the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene, which caused catastrophic flooding throughout parts of the Southeast.
However, the two men then diverged sharply on climate change, which Democrats have championed as a defining issue of our time, while many GOP lawmakers have generally dismissed it as one that's been overstated.
At first, Vance's message appeared to acknowledge climate change.
"A lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns," he said. "I think it's important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer."
But then the Ohioan questioned whether carbon emissions are the main driver of climate change. He then remarked that the US needed to produce more energy within its borders.
Walz responded by praising the Inflation Reduction Act — which made big clean energy investments — and hammered the Trump-Vance ticket over what he said was their record on the climate.
"My farmers know climate change is real," Walz said, tying the issue to his experience as a Midwestern governor. "They've seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods — back-to-back."
Walz then sought to elevate the Biden-Harris record on energy production.
"We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have," the governor said. "We're also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to continue to move forward. That climate change is real."
In a portion of the debate about immigration policy, Vance was asked to be more specific about Trump's plan for mass deportations — specifically whether his administration would separate families in the case where parents entered the country illegally, but the children are citizens.
He largely avoided and deflected on the question. "We already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris's open border," Vance said, pointing to what he said were instances of possible sex trafficking.
Vance also largely dodged a question about Congress's role in immigration policy as Walz argued for the merits of a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump and Republicans moved to tank earlier this year.
"Most of this is about the president and the vice president empowering our law enforcement to say, 'If you try to come across the border illegally, you've got to stay in Mexico,'" Vance said.
Eventually, the Ohio town of Springfield came up — and things got testy when the moderators noted that the bulk of the Haitian migrants in the city are in the country legally.
That led Vance to begin arguing with the moderators. As he started describing the asylum process, the moderators cut him off, eventually cutting both his and Walz's microphones.
When asked about their economic plans, each candidate made their standard pitch. Walz touted Harris's "Opportunity Economy" policies, including an expanded child tax credit and encouraging more housing construction.
Vance argued that voters should consider the state of the economy under Trump, which he said was largely strong until the pandemic. He then argued against the experts who've said Trump's plan would increase the deficit.
"They have PhDs, but they don't have common sense, and they don't have wisdom," Vance said.
That led Walz to appeal to the power of experts. "My pro tip of the day is this: If you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — not Donald Trump."
Vance then retorted, claiming that experts "lied" about the impact of offshoring US manufacturing.
"Governor, you say trust the experts," Vance said. "But those same experts, for 40 years, said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods. They lied about that."
Walz has previously claimed to have been in Hong Kong both before and during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, according to CNN, despite contemporaneous newspaper reports indicating that he did not travel to the territory until after the massacre. Walz made those claims in a 2019 radio interview and during a 2014 congressional hearing.
The Minnesota governor was pressed about that discrepancy during the debate and largely turned to his biography.
"I have poured my heart into my community. I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect, and I'm a knucklehead at times," Walz said. "Many times, I will talk a lot, and I will get caught up in the rhetoric."
When pressed further, he said: "I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just say that's what I've said. I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests."
The Ohio senator was pressed about his shift from supporting federal restrictions on abortion to the "states rights" approach favored by his running mate, Donald Trump.
Vance pointed specifically to the results of a 2023 referendum in Ohio in which the Buckeye State voted to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. "The people of Ohio voted overwhelmingly, by the way, against my position," he said.
Vance said, as he has before, that Republicans have "got to do a better job at winning back people's trust" on the issues.
"So many young women would love to have families," Vance said. "So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that's going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships, and we have got to earn people's trust back."
In a debate that was already strikingly collegial, the two candidates shared a rare moment of empathy over gun violence.
It came after Walz mentioned that his 17-year-old son Gus witnessed a shooting in a community center while playing volleyball.
"First of all, I didn't know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting. I'm sorry about that," Vance said when it was his turn to speak. "Christ have mercy."
The two otherwise stuck to their respective partisan positions on gun violence, with Walz arguing for gun-control laws as Vance promoted school security measures.
"We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make doors stronger. We've got to make the windows stronger," Vance said. "The idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it just doesn't fit with recent experience."
"Do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort?" Walz later said.
One of the biggest issues facing voters is the shortage of affordable housing. And in many of the country's major metropolitan areas, some first-time homebuyers find themselves priced out the very same communities where they grew up.
When asked whether Harris's plans to provide $25,000 in down-payment grant assistance for first-time homebuyers would drive up home prices even more, Walz rejected the notion. And he made a personal appeal on the issue.
"The problem we've had is that we've got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity," he said. "It can be bought up, it can be shifted, it can be moved around. Those are not folks living in those houses."
Vance leaned into a message of expanding energy production — which he said would lower costs overall — while also criticizing the Biden-Harris administration.
"We don't want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices, but we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs," he said.
"If we open up American energy, you will get immediate pricing release relief for American citizens, not by the way, just in housing, but in a whole host of other economic goods too," he added.
But the Ohio senator and Minnesota governor expressed empathy for parents who have to balance work and childcare and touted the benefits of an expansive child tax credit and more generous paid leave policy.
"I had to go back to work five days after my kids were born," Walz said, saying the paid medical leave he signed in Minnesota "allows you to stay home."
Vance recounted the challenges faced by his own wife, Usha. "Being a working mom, even for somebody with all of the advantages of my wife, is extraordinarily difficult," he said.
However, they disagreed on how those sorts of programs would be funded. Vance argued that Trump's economic policies — particularly tariffs — would help bring in the revenue to fund those projects. Walz disagreed.
"Not only do they not get the money to pay for that, they're $4,000 in the hole," Walz said of what he contended households would pay in higher costs because of tariffs.
One of the most contentious points of the debate was on the topic of January 6, when Vance sought to draw an equivalence between Trump's sweeping efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the prior Democratic protests of elections.
"Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought like $500,000 worth of Facebook ads," Vance said. 'This has been going on for a long time."
Walz shot back: "January 6 was not Facebook ads."
"He lost the election. This is not a debate. It's not it's not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump's world," Walz said. "Look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage."
Each candidate used their two-minute closing statements to reiterate the message of their respective campaigns.
Walz leaned heavily on Harris's pitch that she represents a passing of the torch and a chance to move beyond what he said were divisive politics.
"I'm as surprised as anybody of this coalition that Kamala Harris has built, from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift, and a whole bunch of folks in between them," Walz said. "They don't all agree on everything, but they are truly optimistic people."
Vance argued that life had become unaffordable for many Americans since Biden took office while asking voters to remember what he said was the state of the economy under Trump.
"We need change. We need a new direction," Vance said. "We need a president who has already done this once before and did it well."
