Debate Recap: JD Vance, Tim Walz talk foreign policy, climate change and immigration
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
MILES PARKS, HOST:
Hey there, it's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: And I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.
PARKS: The time is 11:20 p.m. on Tuesday, October 1, 2024. The CBS News vice presidential debate has just concluded. And I just want to start with some takes. Sue, what was your biggest takeaway from what we just watched?
DAVIS: You know, if you think of the guiding principle of vice-presidential debates as do no harm, I thought tonight was a big success for both JD Vance and Tim Walz. It was a substantive debate. They went deep on issues, but they both defended their candidates and attacked their opponents in all the ways they're supposed to do. And it was also pretty cordial. I think a lot of us were bracing for what could have been a personal, nasty debate based off of a lot of the tone and tenor of 2024 so far. You know, they were nice to each other, agreeable even.
KEITH: Yeah. I mean, this debate did not reflect the election we've been covering at all. This debate - oh, I agree with him. Oh, I don't really disagree with you much on that. Oh. And I'm not doing a good, like, Midwestern accent.
PARKS: (Laughter).
KEITH: But there was a lot of that. There was a lot of Midwestern nice that was just legitimately nice and not secretly also mean. But it was just an alternate universe from the campaign that we are covering and that everyone is living through - that sort of dark, scorched earth campaign that we're seeing from Trump, the election denialism, all of that. And that was not on display.
FOWLER: What really was on display for most of the debate were policy questions and, sort of by proxy, what JD Vance would do for Donald Trump and what Tim Walz would do for Kamala Harris. And then, right at the very end, there was this giant baseball bat to the kneecap of the mood of talking about January 6 and democracy and what Tim Walz had to say about democracy and specifically tying JD Vance to not answering if Trump won the 2020 election really just reiterated that this election is about Donald Trump and a referendum on Trump and what his vision of the future is, not, you know, debates over housing policy and immigration and, oh, you know what? You actually were. Like, you got some good ideas there, but I disagree with you.
DAVIS: I do think one of Tim Walz's best lines towards the end of the CBS News vice presidential debate is when he made the point that there's a reason Mike Pence isn't on that stage tonight.
PARKS: OK, yeah. We will get back to the January 6 conversation, which it took 90 minutes of this debate to get there. But let's start with some of the other bigger policy differences between these two candidates. I feel like the first moment where these - where there was a really stark difference was on reproductive health. And let's focus specifically on the issue of abortion, which, of course, came up during the CBS News vice presidential debate.
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JD VANCE: My party, we've got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people's trust back on this issue where they frankly just don't trust us. And I think that's one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there's so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.
DAVIS: I think that Vance to me came into this debate with a very clear strategy to present himself very differently than how he has come across on the campaign trail in comments he has made both past and present about women, childless cat ladies, postmenopausal women, any number of things that has become sort of a caricature about him. And while he on the policy didn't say much, he articulated and defended Trump's position that it's good that abortion policies are being decided by the states and that democracy can be messy sometimes. But he talked about the issue in a much more articulate and compassionate way.
And that has been a problem that the Republican Party more broadly has had. And he very clearly acknowledged that. He said the Republican Party has to do better about talking about this in a way that makes women's lives feel valuable and that they're part of this party. And I think that acknowledgment tells you that the Republican Party still hasn't done that. And this is still a huge weak issue for the Republican Party because the position of the Harris-Walz ticket is more popular in this country, and it does explain why there is a ginormous gender gap in this election and in this country right now.
KEITH: And there are a number of ballot measures that are going to be on state ballots in key swing states related to abortion rights. What we know is that ever since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court - a Supreme Court that was put in place by former President Trump - ever since then, whenever one of these ballot measures has been before American voters, they have chosen to create more abortion rights, make abortion more available. They have voted against restrictions.
So what we know is that this is going to be an issue in this election. Trump has been trying for months to figure out a way to talk about this, saying, oh, women aren't going to have to think about abortion once I'm president. Vance did it in a way that wasn't just like, suburban women, I have a message for you. But he clearly was directing his message at suburban women.
PARKS: Well, generally, my right and my read of this debate was that Vance was a bit more smooth generally tonight than Walz was in terms of it just felt like he was a little bit more comfortable up there.
FOWLER: I mean, Vance is a skilled debater. He hasn't been in elected office that long, but he comes from a background where he is a good talker. He is very confident in his positions, and he has been on the campaign trail for the last 11 weeks, basically doing public debate prep because he does media interviews. He does speeches. And after these speeches, he's been doing question and answer sessions where he's taking questions from local reporters and national reporters on any and every issue you can think of. And that sets up a little bit of this disconnect between the alternate reality debate and the alternate reality Vance because Vance has been an attack dog.
He's been very antagonistic towards the questions and towards the media and lecturing them on how they should ask Kamala Harris this and Tim Walz this. But that wasn't there on the stage. And that disconnect is even sharper because the campaign in their pre-debate expectations call was kind of hyping up the situation as Vance is going to come in and talk about traitor Tim and his National Guard Service, and he's going to come in, and he's going to crush it. And then there was what actually happened.
DAVIS: I think that tonight was a night that a lot of Republicans - both elite Republicans in power and Republican voters - were like, oh, thank god. Like, Vance presents MAGA policies and MAGA politics in a way that so many people wish Trump would just focus on in this election. You know, he didn't do any of the personal attacks or the stuff that Trump does or the stuff that makes people just be like, just focus on Harris and her policies. Don't attack her race. Don't attack her gender. And he did the thing that so many Republicans want Trump to be able to do. And I think tonight, you know, regardless of what happens in this election, he did sort of carve out a place for himself as, like, he is MAGA future. He can articulate Trump policies in a way to a national audience that really no one else has been able to do as well.
KEITH: But people don't vote on the vice president. So, you know, Vance did a really solid job. He also really injected his biography, his really interesting life story, his experiences growing up with his grandmother raising him. He injected all of that. He made himself much more relatable and a lot less of a caricature. Tim Walz definitely got as much folksiness as - in there as he could, but he was also nervous. He was clearly nervous. He was halting. He had these rehearsed things that he was supposed to say, but he didn't spit it out correctly. And at one point, he said, I've become friends with school shooters, which I'm pretty sure is not what he meant to say.
So I think, like, objectively, like, you know, a speech and debate teacher would say JD Vance won this debate. No question. Does it matter? Lloyd Bentsen also won a debate in 1988, and he never became vice president. So I think it's, like, as interesting as all of this was, these guys aren't the ones that voters are voting for.
PARKS: Yeah. I feel like no bigger sign of, like, Vance's performance was how much the conversation tonight was about immigration. That's the thing he wanted to keep getting back to. He found a way to get back to it over and over again, which is touching on that white working-class grievance that Trump does. But Vance does it, like, a little bit smoother. You know, he has a little bit smoother pivot a lot of the time. OK. Let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back talking more about the debate.
And we're back. And I do want to hit this point about immigration 'cause it did come up a lot tonight, Stephen. Did you get the sense that this was part of Vance's game plan to bring kind of every issue back to this issue of the southern border?
FOWLER: Absolutely. I mean, the central plank of Donald Trump and Republicans' 2024 message is immigration. Housing policy is immigration. Energy policy - immigration. Immigration policy - immigration.
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FOWLER: And so what you saw here was Vance weaving things together in ways that Trump really has and hasn't been able to do at times of arguing that everything would be better in America if we didn't have migrants and they didn't have American jobs and if they didn't have American houses and didn't really explain what that would actually look like. You know, the moderators had to follow up and be like, OK, but how would you actually deport these people? And this was kind of a victory for Vance and Republicans in that so much of the debate was talking about immigration. He hit a lot of the points that he needed to hit. But Walz was a little bit more effective, I think, in poking holes in those things.
PARKS: Well, Walz's big defense on the immigration point - I feel like he said it a number of times - was basically, we worked with Congress to try to pass a law to fix some of these issues, and they didn't do it. How effective is that message, Sue, essentially kind of passing the buck to Congress for this issue?
DAVIS: I think it's successful because, without that failed legislation, Democrats really didn't have any defense for what their plan was to get all of these things fixed. And it's true that Congress had a bipartisan plan partly crafted by conservative Republicans that was endorsed by the border patrol agent union that would have solved or at least contributed to solving some of these problems. And Donald Trump told Republicans to oppose it. Those are well-documented facts.
And Kamala Harris is also campaigning as a candidate saying, send me that legislation, and I will sign it. So it does give them a retort of actually having policy solutions that they would endorse and sign. And also, this is one of, to me, those through-the-looking-glass politics moments where you now have a Democratic presidential candidate campaigning and pledging to sign the most conservative immigration legislation in a generation because that is what she's promising to do.
PARKS: I had another looking-glass moment when we were talking about health care during this debate.
DAVIS: No, that was all crazy real (ph) moment.
PARKS: Right? OK, so there was this moment where Vance is talking about the ACA, and he essentially says - right? - that Donald Trump defended and supported the ACA while he was president.
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NORAH O'DONNELL: Senator, you have not yet explained how you would protect people with preexisting conditions or laid out that plan.
VANCE: Well, look, we currently have laws and regulations in the place - in place right now that protect people with preexisting conditions. We want to keep those regulations in place, but we also want to make the health insurance marketplace function a little bit better. Now, what Governor Walz just said is actually not true. A lot of what happened and the reason that Obamacare was crushing under its own weight is that a lot of young and healthy people were leaving the exchanges.
Donald Trump actually helped address that problem, and he did so in a way that preserved people's access to coverage who had preexisting conditions. But again, something that these guys do is they make a lot of claims about if Donald Trump becomes president, all of these terrible consequences are going to ensue. But in reality, Donald Trump was president - inflation was low, take-home pay was higher and he saved the very program from a Democratic administration that was collapsing and would have collapsed absent his leadership.
DAVIS: I honestly - I can't even - a lot of times when you hear these debates, you're like, oh, I get that spin or they're picking...
PARKS: Yeah.
DAVIS: ...And choosing their facts. Like, I don't even know what he's talking about in that regard. I mean, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress attempted and failed to repeal Obamacare without anything in place to replace it, and it only failed - very well-documented - because the late Senator John McCain killed it in the Senate. And to this day, Donald Trump has not offered a comprehensive alternative to the Affordable Care Act. So I think JD Vance was doing his toughest work...
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DAVIS: ...At that part of the debate. But some of the stuff he said there, I don't honestly know what he could base that off of.
KEITH: Yeah. When they failed to repeal Obamacare, then Trump began through regulatory measures to try to undermine it and starve it to death. And that is what JD Vance says salvaged it.
FOWLER: That reminds me of the great philosopher Jay-Z, who has some words that says, I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell. I'm a hustler, baby, sell water to a well. And this was what JD Vance did with health care and with some of the other things of just trying to spin up out of whole cloth a Donald Trump that we have seen for the last nine years does not exist. And he did it with health care. He did it with Trump on abortion. He's done it on the campaign trail with other issues and tried to fill in and, in some cases, overfill the gaps of what Trump says and what he means, but in reality, that's not the case.
PARKS: So I feel like, you know, there was this whole cordial debate for an hour and a half, and then there was the topic of democracy, which was, I feel like, the biggest disagreement, obvious disagreement, between the two candidates. And I do want to just listen to a little bit of that exchange from the CBS News vice presidential debate.
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TIM WALZ: He is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?
VANCE: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?
WALZ: That is a damning...
VANCE: Has she tried to...
WALZ: That is a damning nonanswer.
VANCE: Has she - it's a damning nonanswer for you to not talk about censorship. Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020. We've talked about it. I'm happy to talk about it further. But you guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there's no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use the power...
WALZ: Or threatening or hate speech.
VANCE: ...Of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment.
PARKS: And this exchange just kept going.
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WALZ: He lost the election. This is not a debate. It's not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump's world because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election - that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is, where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election, and his vice president's not going to stand to it?
That's what we're asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn't? And I think Kamala Harris would agree. She wouldn't have picked me if she didn't think I would do that because of course that's what we would do. So America, I think you've got a really clear choice on this election of who's going to honor that democracy, and who's going to honor Donald Trump?
PARKS: I was surprised at how Vance responded to that question. Were you guys?
DAVIS: No because JD Vance has continued to obscure or deny the outcome of the 2020 election. And I think it's - when we think about who the audience was tonight - there's a national audience. To me, that was the audience of one. That was Donald Trump. Donald Trump still falsely does not concede that he lost the 2020 election. JD Vance has backed him up on that. I think when it comes to being Trump's running mate, that is an ultimate test of loyalty, and I honestly think I would have been more shocked tonight if JD Vance would have said on national television that Donald Trump lost that election.
KEITH: Yeah, I am with Sue. I also think that the moment where JD Vance then said, well, no, there was a peaceful transfer of power. It happened on January 20, was a pretty shocking moment because, yes, Joe Biden was able to take the oath of office, but Donald Trump broke with a long-standing tradition of actually attending the inauguration of the person that follows. And on January 6, he did everything he possibly could to try to cling to power, to try to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
DAVIS: And is currently under a federal indictment for his actions in that case. So I think JD Vance just completely lives in that world where they don't acknowledge any of that - any of those both legal charges against Donald Trump and also the findings of the January 6 committee before Congress that very squarely said that Donald Trump played a role in fomenting the events of that day.
FOWLER: I mean, this debate happened past most people's bedtime. Everything that happened up until that moment was completely out the window because Tim Walz and JD Vance gave the most stark distillation of what the campaigns say that this presidential election is about. It's not necessarily about $6,000 child tax credit versus $5,000 tax credit, or, you know, should we close the border? Should we build the wall here? Should we build the wall there?
But this is about what Donald Trump would do if he is in the office of the President again, and that, I think, is going to be the takeaway of the debate and why you see, like Tim Walz said, the Harris-Walz coalition is everybody from Taylor Swift to Dick Cheney. It's not because Dick Cheney is like, man - you know what? - I really love progressive policies around health care. It's because of Donald Trump. And so if you're JD Vance, you're feeling pretty good up until that last question comes because everything else you said within 90 minutes before that is now completely gone.
PARKS: Maybe they don't think this is a liability, that this is not something that most voters are going to go to the ballot box and care about.
KEITH: He is also not running a campaign that banks on winning over suburban voters or Dick Cheney or the people who voted for Nikki Haley. He is running a base campaign going after base voters who either don't care about January 6, don't think it happened, think it was a tourist visit or something else. He is preaching to a choir.
PARKS: All right. Well, let's leave it there for now. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.
KEITH: I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
FOWLER: I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.
DAVIS: And I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.
PARKS: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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