Takeaways from JD Vance and Tim Walz’s nice guy showdown

The country’s two potential veeps faced off in New York City in a markedly polite debate unlikely to alter a stubbornly close, and often much more vicious, presidential race with six weeks to Election Day.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz showcased two very different styles. Vance, a more polished and comfortable debater, landed several punches, while Walz, a folksy former high school teacher and coach, stumbled at times but delivered several memorable moments without getting too shaken.

Here are other takeaways from what was likely the final debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.

The debate was always going to be a more comfortable space for Vance, a Yale graduate, who is a frequent contributor on cable news and has done more interviews than Walz.

It showed during the debate. Vance made a prepared offensive while still managing to come off civil on stage beside a popular governor.

One of his weakest moments wasn’t an exchange with Walz but with the moderators. After Vance referred to unfounded claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, moderator Margaret Brennan noted for viewers that many of the town’s Haitian residents are there legally under temporary protected status program. Vance complained about the clarification.

“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,” he said before CBS temporarily muted his microphone.

Walz missed a few obvious opportunities to challenge Vance and his fast-paced speaking led to a few notable stumbles. In an emotional answer about gun control, Walz mistakenly said, “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters. I’ve seen it.”

When he was asked about comments he made that a trip he took to Hong Kong in 1989 coincided with the deadly Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, he referred to himself as a “knucklehead,” and meandered around to an answer: “I got there that summer and misspoke on this… so I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests.”

Still, there was at least a little chatter among political strategists on social media about whether Harris should have picked a more fiery debater like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

But the impact of a vice presidential debate is likely minor and part of Walz’s appeal is his folksy, real-guy charm.

Some of his strongest responses showcased his empathy. He said Vance and Trump had villainized and blamed migrants unfairly for problems rather than looking to solve them, using a bipartisan border security bill, that was eventually knifed by Senate Republicans, as fodder for his point.”[The border security bill] lets us keep our dignity about how we treat other people,” Walz said.

And the Minnesota governor pressed Vance to acknowledge Trump lost the election and Vance replied “Tim, I’m focused on the future.” Walz called the answer “damning.”

“When this is over, we need to shake hands, this election, and the winner needs to be the winner. This has got to stop,” Walz said. “It’s tearing our country apart.”

But overall, it was a mostly friendly contest. Walz and Vance shook hands twice — once when they first took the stage off camera and then again on camera.

It was off to the relatively-nice-guy races from there.

There was very little speaking over each other, (and these mics stayed hot) and few personal attacks. Walz and Vance — who frequently addressed the other by their official titles — several times said they agreed with the other, swapping Midwestern niceties in between policy disagreements.

“If Tim Walz is the next vice president, he’ll have my prayers, he’ll have my best wishes, and he’ll have my help whenever he wants it,” Vance said near the end of the debate.

When Walz mentioned his 17-year-old son witnessed a shooting, Vance said he was sorry he had to go through that.

The relative cordiality made for a more substantive debate than was often the case in last month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

“I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there’s been a lot of commonality here,” Walz said at one point during the evening.

And after the debate came to a close Vance and Walz spent a few minutes chatting as their wives, Usha Vance and Gwen Walz, joined them on stage and shook hands with each other.

Vance and Walz were both chosen as running mates, at least in part, for their perceived appeal to rural and rust belt America and both of their personal stories were woven into the debate.

The Ohio senator took his first speaking opportunity at the debate to discuss his upbringing in a working class family, including his family’s reliance on food assistance and Social Security as Vance’s grandmother raised him while his mother struggled with addiction during his childhood.

“And so 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 said.

While Walz did not dedicate a lot of time to discussing his background he made sure to give a few nods to his rural roots, including his growing up in a “small, rural Nebraska — town of 400 — town that you rode your bike with your buddy till the street lights come on.”

As he talked about climate change he aligned himself with farmers and spoke to their experiences. “My farmers know climate change is real,” Walz said.

“What they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, look, ‘I harvest corn, I soybean, harvest wheat.’ We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time we ever have,” Walz said. “We’re also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to continue to move forward.”

On several occasions, Vance tried to show separation between Walz and Harris. During an exchange about the U.S.-Mexico border, Vance responded to remarks Walz had made saying: “I think you want to solve this problem. I don’t think Kamala Harris does.”

Later he told Walz: “You got a tough job here because you’ve gotta play whack-a-mole. You got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver rising take home pay, which of course he did. You got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver lower inflation, which of course he did, and then you simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record.”

Walz has the highest approval ratings of the four people on the presidential tickets and Vance rarely went after Walz personally. He did go after Harris, tying her to President Joe Biden.

“If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, 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,” Vance said.

Walz spent a sizable portion of the evening making stark contrasts between Harris and Trump, highlighting the vice president as a stable leader while painting the former president as “fickle.”

In the face of ongoing international crises, Walz said “the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.”

Walz blamed Trump’s foreign policy, saying that “Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership.”

Vance worked to push back on this narrative, though, emphasizing what he believed would be Trump’s strength on the world stage.

“Donald Trump recognized that for people to fear the United States, you needed peace through strength,” Vance said. “They needed to recognize that if they got out of line, the United States global leadership would put stability and peace back in the world.”