A CIVIL VP DEBATE: VANCE AND WALZ FOCUS ON ISSUES AND ELECTION INTEGRITY

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By: Rachel Williams & Miriam Raftery

Vance refuses to pledge to certify election results in a future presidential election, even if all 50 governors submit certified results.

October 6, 2024 (New York City, NY) — Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz maintained a tone of civility during Oct. 1’s demure debate at the CBS Broadcast Center’s historic studio 45 on October 1, a sharp contrast from the contentious presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Polls show a stalemate, with neither VP candidate a clear winner. 

Vance provided a polished, slick delivery, while Walz appeared earnest but at times uncomfortable. The pair differed sharply on key issues such as the economy, healthcare, housing, climate change, gun violence, immigration and more. Each offered misinformation at times, and the contenders clashed sharply when Vance downplayed violence in the January 6 capitol attack and dodged answering on whether as Vice President, he would certify results when no evidence of fraud exists.

CBS’s moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, touched on current unfolding crises from the Middle East to Hurricane Helene to a dockworker’s strike. Walz was challenged on why Harris hadn’t already accomplished her goals, with 1,400 days in office, while Vance faced questions over his hesitation to serve as a firewall to pressures to subvert democracy.

O’Donnell noted that despite Trump losing all 62 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and all 50 governors sending certified results to the Senate, the former president pressured his then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to carry out his constitutional duty to certify the election results.  

“Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last Presidential election and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. Would you again seek to challenge this year's election results, even if every Governor certifies the results?” O’Donnell asked.

Vance dodged the question, instead saying he wants to focus on the future, such as solving the inflation and housing challenges.  He accused Harris of trying to censor views on social media platforms, claiming this is “a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January 6th.”

Walz called Vance’s response a “damning non-answer” and corrected Vance’s mischaracterization of the January 6 attack as peaceful. Walz noted that 140 police officers were beaten at the Capitol on January 6 and said Pence “made the right decision” despite chants to hang Mike Pence. “I worked with kids long enough to know, and I said, as a football coach, sometimes you really want to win, but the democracy is bigger than winning an election. You shake hands and then you try and do everything you can to help the other side win,”  Walz concluded. “That's, that's what was at stake here.”

Moderators challenged Walz to explain his past misstatement claiming he was at the crackdown on Tienanmen Square,  where China’s military killed pro-democracy demonstrators. He acknowledged this was a “knucklehead” statement and has further clarified that he was in Asia, but not at Tienanmen Square when the violence there occurred.

Vance dodged key policy and economic questions essential to voters concerning climate change. Former President Trump’s administration rolled back some 100 environmental protection rules. Vance promotes the U.S. as having the cleanest economy in the entire world, which stirs chatter on the subject of energy and climate change. “This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science,” he said. He said this means the U.S. should bring more manufacturing jobs back to the America, but failed to offer any solution to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.

When the moderator, Norah O’Donnell, sought clarification over Trump’s plan to use  the U.S. military in deportation, she asked Vance whether this would mean a return to separating families at the border. He pivoted rebuttal with testimony of his own mother’s opioid addiction, and claimed Harris hasn’t done enough to prevent drugs from flowing over the border. 

Walz claimed that in the last 12 months, we saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths throughout our nation’s history. Provisional data does show a significant decline in reported opioid deaths in the past year, though the  figure is still higher than it was at the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration. 

Vance attributed unaffordable housing to Harris’s open border, he said, where millions of illegal immigrants are now competing with American citizens for scarce home options. Even though Vance helped launch a start-up in Eastern Kentucky called AppHarvest intended to provide the area with more blue-collar jobs, only created extremely harsh working conditions and forced the company to contract migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala and other countries, former employees told CNN. 

Walz countered that illegal border “crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.” This proved true with a side-by-side comparison of Trump’s final months to the past 60 days. However, a full snapshot of Harris as vice president, showed illegal border crossings increasing exponentially. 

Vance repeatedly criticized the border policies created by the Biden-Harris administration.  The Biden-Harris administration has documented that thousands of unaccompanied minors who came to the border during the Trump administration went missing; many have been reunited but some remain unaccounted for. Vance has claimed with no supporting evidence that thousands of lost children have been effectively sex trafficked or used as drug mules in recent years. 

“And what she's actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%, open the American southern border and make middle-class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans?” Vance said. 

Both candidates eagerly touched on the political unrest of gun safety swirling nationwide, without addressing a definitive plan of action. Walz illustrates the gravity of sitting in a room with Sandy Hook parents while being affiliated with the NRA and school shooters. Though he is a gun owner,  Walz has called for reasonable gun laws that respect the 2^nd amendment but also protect students’ lives.

“We know that thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels,” Vance fired back. However, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the problem stems from the flow of American-made weapons into Mexico, 

Both parties pointed fingers while making proclamations about the January 6th riot. Vance claims Biden’s administration and social media companies teamed to censor free speech, but Walz held his ground firmly and said January 6th was not about Facebook ads.

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said  at the time, “They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.” The Republican leader added, “Former President Trump’s actions [that] preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

On the topic of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and healthcare, Vance defended Trump’s position by acknowledging his bipartisan effort to bring all Americans affordable healthcare access. In fact, Trump tried to repeal the ACA by supporting a lawsuit to invalidate the program, and supported its repeal, which was blocked by one vote, when Republican Senator John McCain joined with Democrats to save the ACA.

If Trump proves successful in repealing the ACA then a considerable amount of protections for preexisting conditions would be dissolved, Walz fires back. Even though some protections were in place for those with employer-based plans before enacting the ACA, Trump pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans to deny pricing coverage based on health status, and his administration cut advertising and outreach enrolling the community in ACA health plans. 

Most polls showed a close race between Trump and Harris in battleground states and a near-tie after the VP debate. Ballot tracking is a tactic implemented by the U.S. to reduce the probability of voting fraud where election officials track the ballot’s progress and 94% of registered voters live in states with this available, according to Paul Gronke, director of Reed College’s Elections and Voting Information Center. 

One survey found that party identification strongly shaped the perceptions of people who watched the debate between Walz and Vance  When asked who won, voters were split 50-50, according to a Politico/Focaldata snap poll of likely voters conducted just after the two went head-to-head.