Key points of the debate between the VP candidates, Tim Walz and J.D. Vance: Two army veterans face off

Two army veterans, a former Marine and a former National Guard officer, are waiting to square off at the only scheduled debate between the vice presidential candidates. The event will represent practically the last chance for the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to reach a national television audience, since a second debate between the two presidential candidates has been ruled out. The face-to-face between the Democrat Tim Walz and the Republican J. D. Vance is set to take place on Tuesday night under one main guiding principle: not making mistakes. Voters do not get to choose the vice president at the polls, so the main issue for the VP candidates will be to avoid saying anything that could harm their running mates at a debate that will be televised live in prime time.

Added to this is the fact that, five weeks before the election, Vance is going into the event under the shadow of several gaffes: his comments about Harris’s unsuitability to be president because she has not had children; the bizarre story of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield (Ohio); his statements about Ukraine and, to top it off, a snub to Volodymyr Zelenskiy just one day after the Ukrainian president met with Trump. The former president assumes Vance’s presence as that of a son who, by virtue of being one, is tolerated for his venial sins and mistakes, although these also offer Walz a clear flank for attack.

Vance is the lowest-rated vice presidential candidate in history, and one of the questions raised by the upcoming debate is whether he will be able to improve that negative image. Walz has a much higher approval rating, but he also lacks experience on the national stage. The Democrat has shown political instinct in interviews, but he is entering a debate where for the first time he will have to counter attacks and return blows. If his repeated references to the weirdness of the Republican candidates gave him his moment of glory on social media — memes about the word “weird” were trending for weeks — discussing proposals and ideas on a television set puts him in a completely unfamiliar position.

Unless he chooses to insist on them, Vance will not only have to recant his mistakes, but also his contradictions with respect to his boss: for example, in the cases of Ukraine and abortion, when he said that Trump would veto the national ban on abortion derived from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Roe v. Wade doctrine, something that the former president rejected in the last debate, although his position on the matter remains ambiguous and undefined.

One of the potentially most contentious points of the showdown will be the pair’s military background. Walz faltered in a recent CNN interview when he was asked about the issue, and his quick thinking and wit seemingly froze onscreen. In early August, Vance was presented with a bone to chew after the Democratic campaign released a video of Walz talking about gun control and, in particular, the “common-sense” ban on assault rifles. “We need to make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only used in wars,” Walz says in the video. Vance immediately fired back, asking him what conflict he has been in: “Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when have you been in war? When was that?” Walz served in the National Guard for 24 years, retiring in 2005 to run for Congress. He briefly served as a master sergeant, but that was not the rank he held at the time of his retirement, as he claimed in 2006. Vance, a former Marine who fought in Iraq, is the first veteran to seek the White House since fellow Republican John McCain in 2008.

Vance will be keen to portray his rival as too liberal by digging into his time as governor of Minnesota and highlighting the apparent weakness he displayed during the Minneapolis riots that followed the police killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. Vance could paint a portrait of Walz overwhelmed by street anger, who took too long, as Republicans say, to call out the National Guard. He could also lash out at his rival for, in his view, repeatedly misrepresenting parts of his personal history.

As for the rules of the game, the campaigns have readily accepted those imposed by CBS: there will be no live audience and microphones will remain on for the entire 90 minutes of the broadcast, with two four-minute commercial breaks each, although the producers reserve the right to mute them, the network announced on Friday.

For the first time since 2008, the vice presidential candidates will not sit at a table to debate, but will instead stand at a lectern. Without opening statements or introductions, the order of interventions was decided by a draw in favor of Vance, who gets the last word. The debate will be hosted by the anchors of two of CBS’s flagship news programs, with rounds of questions for the candidates and two-minute turns for answers, plus one minute for counter-replies. As a novelty, the channel will offer a special QR code that will direct viewers to a data verification system in real time.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition