After hardly speaking to the media since becoming Democrats’ Vice Presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz stumbled and gaffed through his highly anticipated debate against Senator JD Vance.
Vance and Walz faced off Monday on CBS News in what appears to be the last debate of the 2024 election cycle. Vance, who has done about seven times more media appearances than the Harris-Walz ticket combined, was noticeably confident next to Walz, who tripped through his defense of past lies.
“I think the lack of interviews he has done with local media, with national media, it shows. He needed more practice,” CNN’s Dana Bash said on the network’s post-debate show.
Walz’s nerves were on display from the moment he took the debate stage and stumbled through an answer on how his administration would support Israel in retaliation against Iran.
After Walz blamed Trump for the crisis in the Middle East, Vance pivoted to point out that the former president wasn’t the one in charge when the war broke out.
“I think that something Gov. Walz just said is quite extraordinary. You, yourself just said Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon today as they have ever been. And Gov. Walz blamed President Trump. Who has been the vice president for the last three-and-a-half years? And the answer is your running mate, not mine,” Vance said.
“Walz is nervous as hell,” Saagar Enjeti, co-host of Breaking Points and former Daily Caller White House correspondent, tweeted four minutes into the debate.
Walz’s first major stumble came about forty minutes into the debate when he was asked about a CNN report stating that he had falsely claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre.“
Now look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. I will be the first to tell you, I 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, but it’s always been about them. Those same people elected me to Congress for 12 years and in Congress, I was one of the most bipartisan people working on things like farm bills that we got done and working on veterans’ benefit,” Walz said, adding that sometimes he gets caught up in the rhetoric.
After he failed to explain the discrepancy, the CBS moderators asked Walz again. The governor then said he misspoke, before repeating the lie that he was in Hong Kong during the massacre.
“All I said on this was I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I, I will, just, that is what I said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the Democracy protests [inaudible] and from that I learned a lot about what needed to be in governance,” Walz said.
His most consequential gaffe of the night came when Walz claimed he was friends with school shooters while trying to answer a question on gun control.
“Governor, you previously opposed an assault weapons ban, but only later in your political career did you change your position. Why?” moderator Norah O’Donnell asked.
“Yeah, I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters. I’ve seen it,” Walz began. “Look the NRA, I was an NRA guy for a long time. They used to teach gun safety. I’m of the age where my shotgun was in my car so I could pheasant hunt after football practice. That is not where we live today.”
Vance’s confidence and assertiveness towards moderators O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan was also a theme.
Twenty minutes into the debate, Brennan attempted to fact-check Vance on the migration in Springfield, Ohio, after the network agreed to not do any fact-checking beforehand. Vance expressed concern about how 20,000 Haitian migrants have flooded into Springfield, Ohio, over the past three years and overwhelmed the town.
Brennan attempted to move onto another question after, adding that the Haitian migrants had “legal status.” Vance, while trying to challenge the assertion, had his mic cut.
“Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,” Brennan said.
“But Margaret … 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,” Vance responded. “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 10 years — ” Vance started to reply before Brennan told the senator they needed to move on and his mic was cut.
Polling has shown Americans have found Walz to be a more attractive running mate than Vance. Early on after being tapped, Vance faced a barrage of Democratic attacks that branded him as “weird” for past statements. Yet Vance, to Republicans’ satisfaction, began to find his footing as Walz was forced to defend his close ties to China and false claims about his military record.
Despite Walz’s favorability advantage, Democrats began to pivot mid-debate and argue that the vice presidential debate has little to no impact on the state of the presidential race.
“Bottom line on this is that I don’t think this changes the race at all,” former Obama advisor David Axelrod said on the CNN post show.
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