What to expect from the Tim Walz, JD Vance faceoff

Walz is comfortable on the attack, less steady if his opponent hits back, and cautious about his word choice. At one point in a 2022 re-election debate, Walz paused before criticizing GOP nominee Scott Jensen’s skepticism during the COVID pandemic, before calling it “dangerous.” In another debate, running for his first term as governor, Walz bristled at GOP nominee Jeff Johnson’s warning that he would turn Minnesota into a sanctuary state for migrants.

“Simple statements are for fear-mongering,” Walz said, suggesting that Johnson would rather “stoke fear of immigrants” than fix a problem. He did not land on an answer to the basic question — whether the state would cooperate with deporations — but positioned himself as a problem-solver fending off a demagogue.

That, say Democrats, will be tougher to do with Vance. The Ohio senator is comfortable on the attack, never worried about using a word or a story that might shock a moderator.

“You can believe in the border without being a racist,” he said in one showdown with Ryan. “You can believe in the country without being a racist.” In 2022, Vance’s starting premise was typically that the Democrat and the media were in cahoots, distracted by niceties and trivia, and not the elemental issues — immigration, bad trade policies — that voters cared about.

“He’s good at staying on message and trying to pivot that back to whatever he wants to talk about,” said Danny O’Connor, a Democratic politician in Ohio who played Vance in Ryan’s 2022 debate prep. “He’s disciplined, but I think he’s tried to be more cocky and clever since he became the VP pick.”

Vance was “cocky” in 2022, too. When he first faced Ryan, he was a slight underdog; the Democrat took advantage of the long, expensive GOP primary to introduce himself in TV ads as a pragmatic job-creator who’d taken on his own party. Democrats and Republicans had blasted the airwaves with Vance’s old, recanted attacks on Donald Trump, portraying him as a say-anything phony; Vance attacked Ryan as a fraud who would do whatever his donors on the coasts told him to do.

That meant highlighting the most left-wing ideas than Ryan endorsed during his brief, doomed 2020 presidential bid — and insulting Ryan’s intelligence. When the Democrat mentioned a Vance investment in a company that offshored jobs, Vance asked why he couldn’t name it, then told him that opposition research worked better when you “actually know it.” At another point, he mocked a Ryan ad about how often he disagreed with his wife as a “pretty fun TV commercial” cooked up for him by someone smarter: “Congrats to your team.”

All of that, in 2022, served Vance’s basic argument that Ryan was a “failed leader” who couldn’t deliver on promises, because he never had. That’s a play he can run against Walz, incorporating questions about the Democrat’s record that Vance has elevated at his own events. He was one of the first Republicans to accuse Walz of “stolen valor” over how he described his service in the National Guard; he mischaracterized Minnesota’s “trans sanctuary” law as a scheme to “take children away from their parents if their parents don’t want to do sex changes.”

Walz has gotten attacks in that zone at his previous debates, visibly bristling at what his opponents were saying, and trying to characterize every attack as desperate politics. “This job entails more than admiring a problem, second-guessing,” Walz said at one 2022 debate with Jensen, shutting down a critique of his pandemic leadership.

The Republicans Walz beat in his six congressional races were either less sharp-edged than Vance, or under-funded. In his two gubernatorial campaigns, Walz faced Republicans who accused him of dodging questions and excusing his own failures; in 2022, when he mentioned that Jensen had “quit the legislature” after a single term, Jensen invoked Walz retiring before his Guard unit deployed to Iraq.

“You quit the National Guard,” snapped Jensen. “My wife needed some surgeries, but nice shot, Tim.”

Walz didn’t have a comeback to that. Often mentioning his experience as a teacher and a guardsman, he’s attacked his candidates’ vulnerabilities directly – pummeling Jensen, a medical doctor, for prescribing opioids – then moved on. Their policy ideas are diversions from what works; his are just common sense. The gulf between Vance, who warns of migrants destroying rural America, and Walz, who in 2022 boasted about the “50 languages” being taught after Minnesota welcomed more asylum seekers, is especially wide.

“So, Parkland is everything but guns?” Walz said in a 2018 debate with Johnson, looking aghast at the Republican for talking about how to limit school shootings without more gun control. In the same debate, Walz demeaned how Johnson and every other Republican was talking about immigration, accusing them of political hyperbole. That was his comfort zone, one he may return to against an opponent who’s claimed that migrants are destroying Ohio towns and that liberal rhetoric about Donald Trump is inspiring assassination attempts against him.

“It’s not about ginning things up,” he said to Johnson, six years ago. ”It’s about staying calm and listening to the facts.”

What you can’t quite figure out from a close watch of old debates is how either of these men will defend and explain a running mate’s record. Vance can ask why Kamala Harris is running on proposals that she could, theoretically, talk Joe Biden into doing right now. Walz can try to diminish Vance by pointing out why he’s here; Trump’s last vice president didn’t try to overturn the 2020 election, and now he’s not even supporting his old boss.

There is an opportunity here for both men. Vance has never been as distractible as Trump was in his debate with Harris, when he wouldn’t let any of her attacks go, and would burn half of his response on a rebuttal. But he has never had to defend the totality of Trump’s record. Some of his criticisms of Trump before 2020 weren’t known before this campaign, and contradict what he’s been saying as a vice presidential candidate – leaked messages with a friend about how Trump hadn’t effectively fought China, shifting positions on how the Affordable Care Act should change or what it should cover. Both Trump and Vance tackle abortion questions by accusing their opponents of extremism, often in grisly detail, but the stakes for a single senate race and a race with the man who’ll pick judges are substantially different.

Walz has never faced an opponent so unafraid to attack him directly. Vance enjoys breaking the fourth wall, bringing up something that he finds obnoxious, and the TV audience might too — “crazy transgender bills,” Harris talking about her “middle class roots,” people being called “racist” because they want less immigration. “You can believe in the border without being a racist,” he said in one debate with Ryan, invoking his own biracial family. “You can believe in the country without being a racist.” He likes to leave a question hanging in the air, betting that his opponent would rather wind down the round than answer it. The Walz that usually shows up at debates would be highly vulnerable to that tactic.

If it works. There have been vice presidential debates with a well-timed line that demolished a candidate’s image — you know the one. And there have been attacks that were too personal, and too clever, by half. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro accused George H.W. Bush of being “patronizing” after he offered to “help you with the difference” between Lebanon and Iran. In 2004, John Edwards used a question about the Bush administration’s support for a constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage to point out that Dick Cheney had “a gay daughter.”

Bush’s line backfired, and so did the Edwards line. In the latter case, Cheney’s family won the post-debate debate about whether the slick senator on the Democratic ticket was getting too personal. Walz wants to do what Harris did last month: Make them confident that she could handle the presidency, and make them worry that a second Trump term would govern cruelly and selfishly. Vance needs to make a potential Harris-Walz administration sound dangerous and crazy – without going overboard in a way that hurts him.