Vice-presidential candidates set to spar in debate as Harris-Trump race is on a knife-edge

29 Sep 2024

With only a little more than a month left before America’s election, the two vice-presidential candidates face each other this week in the final candidates’ debate for this election. What should we expect in this event? Will it give voters deeper insights into the candidates and will it make any difference to the race?

We are just about ready to fire up some extra-strong espresso for 3am our time, Wednesday morning, when we watch the only one-on-one face-off between the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, and Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz.

Following the recent destruction of Donald Trump by Vice-President Harris in Philadelphia, viewers will be primed to see how this upcoming debate shakes out. Will this debate help even things out a bit — or will it be yet another slam dunk by Democratic candidates?

The format for this particular debate will be slightly different from many previous presidential candidate debates. There will be no opening statements by either candidate and no live audience in the studio. However, the respective candidates’ microphones will not be muted during their confrontation.

Moderators for this event will be CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell, with “Face the Nation” (a Sunday news/interview show) moderator and CBS News foreign affairs correspondent, Margaret Brennan. The debate will take place in New York City, live, and will also be broadcast on various other television and internet streaming channels.

Candidates Vance and Walz will each be given two minutes to answer a question, and the opposing candidate will then have two minutes to respond. Vance won the coin toss so he will go second in answering questions, but will have the final word in the debate with his final summation.

While each candidate will have one minute for rebuttal statements after each initial exchange, CBS News has clarified, “Moderators may, at their discretion, give candidates an additional minute each to continue a topic.” Candidates will have display lights indicating how much time they have left to speak, as well as a countdown clock.

For this debate, audiences must surely hope that Brennan and O’Donnell will be as engaged and rigorous as the moderators at the Trump/Harris debate were in managing the flow of the debate and in calling out a candidate for glaring factual misstatements.

Read more: Kamala Harris cleans Donald Trump’s clock in American presidential candidates debate — no debate about it

The open mike aspect of things may give home audiences opportunities to hear the moans, groans, and muttered, sotto voce criticisms of the other’s comments — thus offering an insight for judging the behaviour (adult or otherwise) of the two debaters.

Given the nature of their circumstances as running mates to a presidential candidate, both Walz and Vance will each be thrust into the position of defending any more problematic aspects of their respective presidential candidate’s positions or views. But they will also have to weigh how to attack the ideas, values, proposals, and positions of the opposing party’s platform and its presidential candidate – but doing so without sounding mean-spirited, churlish, or even childish.

Defending Trump

JD Vance will certainly be called on to clarify Donald Trump’s extraordinary ideas about rounding up and deporting millions of presumably undocumented foreigners as the cure for virtually every economic ill in the country – and why such actions will not cause large-scale economic dislocations, let alone violate the civil rights of citizens or the human rights of immigrants.

Perhaps just a bit snarky-feeling, this writer hopes Vance will be forced to explain why immigrants such as his own in-laws or Donald Trump’s mother were good people as immigrants, while the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are not — especially since all of these people were legally in the US. And just maybe he will be called out to publicly disavow his bizarre statements about Haitians consuming dogs and cats for their tables, purportedly as evidence immigrants are an existential threat to the nation.

It will almost certainly fall to Vance to defend, explain and make sense of Donald Trump’s multiple, conflicting positions on women’s reproductive rights, as well as the repressiveness of some state-level initiatives to sharply restrict such rights.

Further, he almost certainly will be pressed to explain how his running mate’s proposed major increases in tariffs would not contribute to a significant rise in inflation — and why Donald Trump insists on defending the economic gibberish that any new tariffs will be paid for by the exporting nations, rather than the American consumer.

On more personal terms, Vance will be asked to explain how his own “never Trumper” views have so changed dramatically in just a few years and what it was – specifically – that caused him to alter those views.

Maybe, too, he will be asked about his close ties with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel and his seriously right-wing political views — as well as Trump’s ties to fringe political activists like Laura Loomer and other white supremacist advocates.

Read more: Is JD Vance the Sister Carrie of 21st-century American politics?

Pivoting from Biden

As for Tim Walz, he should expect tough questioning about the details of how a Harris/Walz administration would differ from the incumbent president’s economic policies, especially in the ways it will improve the lot of the average middle-class family facing rising prices in their daily expenditures.

Further, Walz should expect some tough questioning about his ticket’s current immigration policy ideas: how they are different from the Biden administration; how they would be more effective than those at present; and how they would be less drastic than those proposed by the Trump candidacy. This will come along by virtue of the fact that concerns about immigration remain the leading issue noted by voters to pollsters about this year’s election.

Walz’s personal history is likely to come under scrutiny as well, most probably from his opponent. These will be about small details of his military service, and several other minor exaggerations in his life story. There may even be references to some scurrilous charges Walz is a stalking horse for China, given his time teaching there and subsequent trips there with students on exchange programmes (rather than that such exposure gave first-hand insights into China).

Almost inevitably, there will also be challenges building on more exaggerated charges about his policies as governor of Minnesota, especially those related to gender reassignment, statewide school feeding programmes and other hot-button topics for the Maga set.

Read more: The epitome of Midwestern values, Tim Walz could be the Democrats’ trump card

Explaining policy

Naturally, both men will be asked about foreign policy – most especially managing American and Nato support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion and its cost; about effective ways of containing an increasingly assertive China; and handling the difficult challenges of finding a way through the destructive conflicts in the Middle East; and in dealing successfully with Iran.

There should also be sharp questioning about their very different perspectives on dealing with climate change, on federal support for educational reform, and the goals and policy prescriptions for the green economy and a shift to renewable power generation.

Read more: Kamala Harris & the world — where does the presidential candidate stand on foreign policy?

It also seems likely both candidates will be asked what went wrong in the Afghanistan intervention and subsequent withdrawal at the end of it – and why. Regarding how to assess blame, given the chaos of the intervention’s final weeks, is likely to bring to the fore a way of seeing sharp distinctions between the two men.

Given recent news events, both candidates should be asked about how best to deal with corruption and personal outrageousness by politicians such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams and North Carolina Lt Governor Mark Robinson, among others. Perhaps, too, there will be questions about Donald Trump’s current batch of legal miseries and what they mean for the country’s rule of law.

More personally, one hopes the two men will be asked who most inspired them to seek public office and who imbued them with their personal moral and ethical codes. Maybe they might be asked what books they have recently read that have greatly influenced how they think about their life and work.

There should also be questioning as to whether candidates should accept (or disavow) endorsements and speaking opportunities extended to them by rabble-rousing extremists like Tucker Carlson or Lance Wallnau. The latter is a religious and political extremist who introduced Vance at a recent public rally.)

One key metric in helping voters to judge the winner will be whether a candidate becomes prickly and defensive; engages in nasty, below-the-belt personal attacks; keeps evading straightforward questions with bait and switch answers; or demonstrates petulance and impatience (like the infamous George HW Bush watch-checking moment in his debate with Bill Clinton).

Or, rather, would a candidate see this debate as a major teaching moment with a mass audience of millions? Finally, voters will be watching closely to see the level of obvious enthusiasm by which the two candidates defend their respective running mates’ ideas and personal histories.

If the past is any guide, winning (or losing) a vice-presidential candidates’ debate has rarely been crucial in the ensuing election, even when a clear winner was declared.

Of course, this year’s race is still neck-and-neck, with just a month and a few days remaining until election day. Accordingly, it is just conceivable a clear knockout or a disastrous performance by Walz or Vance could tip the electoral balance. This debate calls for careful watching. DM

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World

Defending Trump

Pivoting from Biden

Explaining policy