We Watched Walz’s and Vance’s Previous Debates. Expect a Slugfest.

Vice presidential hopefuls JD Vance and Tim Walz have hurled rhetorical hand grenades at each other from afar since the start of their campaigns. On Tuesday night, they’ll get to do so in person when they meet on stage in New York for the first — and likely only — vice presidential debate.

What will a Vance-Walz matchup look like? For some clues, we’ve analyzed key moments from Vance and Walz’s past debates that shed light on each man’s style on the debate stage.

The takeaway: Expect a slugfest. Like his running mate Donald Trump, Vance prefers to go on offense, turning his opponents’ barbs against them and blurring the line between personal and political attacks. Walz, meanwhile, can get fiery when he attacks his opponents, but he tends to lean into his folksy demeanor to defuse tough questions about his record. Both men struggle at times to hide their tempers, and with plenty of bad blood between the two of them — stemming in large part fromVance’s attacks on Walz’s military record and Walz’s crusade to label Vance as “weird” — don’t be surprised if things turn personal.

One wild card: the moderators. After the first presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris,Republicans complained that ABC’s moderators were overly deferential to Harris and biased against Trump, especially in their use of real-time fact checking. If the Trump camp has similar complaints with the moderators from CBS, pay attention to how Vance — who isn’t shy about tangling with his interviewers — handles it, and how Walz responds to such attacks.

Vance Slams His Opponent on Immigration

 Vance has a knack for taking his opponents’ attack lines and turning them back against them — as he does during this first clip from a 2022 Ohio Senate debate with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. Ryan had criticized Vance for supporting a 15-week national abortion ban and cited the widely publicized case of a 10-year old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to leave the the state to receive an abortion. Rather than discuss abortion rights, Vance flipped the attack back against Ryan, arguing that because the assailant was an undocumented immigrant, blame rested with Ryan and the Democrats.

The exchange also highlights Vance’s tendency to skirt the line between personal and political attacks — blaming Ryan personally, rather than his policy or his party, for an attack on a 10-year-old girl. In another of Vance’s Senate debates with Ryan, Vance invoked a joke that Ryan made in an ad about disagreeing with his wife, slipping a not-so-sly personal jab into a broader critique of Ryan’s policy positions.

This tactic has an obvious upside — it gets under his opponents’ skin and throws them off balance — but it also risks making Vance look petty and disdainful. This tactic has already landed Vance in serious hot water during the campaign: Although Vance has tried to frame his now-infamous “childless cat lady” comments as a critique of the effect of Democratic policies on family formation, Vance’s opponents have seized on them as evidence of his bitterness and hostility toward women. During the debate, leaning too much into personal lines of attack against Walz could risk reinforcing this impression among voters.

Vance Parries an Attack on His Business Record

Under pressure from Ryan for his business record with China, Vance resorted to a tried-and-true debating trick: Break the fourth wall. Rather than responding to Ryan’s attack, Vance accused him of parroting lines that he had been fed by consultants, casting doubt on Ryan’s authenticity.

Vance’s move comes across as a pretty obvious dodge, but he does make one savvy counter-attack by pressing Ryan to cite specific evidence to back up his accusation, which Ryan doesn’t have at his fingertips. This plays to one of Vance’s strengths as a debater: He’s got a strong memory for facts and figures, which he draws on liberally to demonstrate command of issues.

Like his running mate, though, Vance’s preferred defensive strategy is to go on offense. Vance’s default tone of voice during debates is a mix of indignation and irritation — which he dials up when he feels like he’s getting backed into a corner.

Vance Brawls with the Media

Vance approaches his cable news interviews as debates. His presumption is that his interviewers are playing the role of “Democratic propagandists” — as he accused CNN’s Dana Bash of doing in this clip from earlier in September — and he doesn’t shy away from calling journalists out for what he sees as their unfair treatment of him and Trump.

Don’t be surprised if this approach factors prominently into Vance’s performance in the debate with Walz. During the first debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump-friendly conservatives took to social media to accuse the debate’s moderators of favoring Harris, with some even calling in real time for Trump to accuse the moderators of bias from the debate stage. Vance — who was almost certainly plugged into the online discussion around the first debate — could decide to put the moderators in the hot seat, just as his friend and ally Vivek Ramaswamy did during a Republican primary debate in November 2023.

This aggressive posture plays well with the MAGA base, where distrust of — and even outright derision for — the mainstream media is the norm, but it can read as evasive to less friendly audiences. At various points in the campaign, Vance has tried to sidestep questions about his more inflammatory comments — most recently regarding his unsubstantiated claims about Haitian immigrants eating residents’ pets in Springfield, Ohio — by blaming the media for distorting his words. But his aggression has a tendency to devolve into condescension, as when he chastises Bash for not being “polite” enough to let him answer a question.

Walz Ignores Attack Over National Guard Service

Tim Walz has faced intense scrutiny about his time in the National Guard, including over his decision to retire shortly before his unit was deployed to Iraq after 24 years of service. J.D. Vance — who served in the Marine Corps — has led the attacks against Walz on the matter and is all but certain to rekindle the criticism during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.

But it’s not a new issue for Walz. During a 2022 gubernatorial debate, Walz hit Republican nominee Scott Jensen by saying he “quit the legislature,” and in response, Jensen charged: “You quit the National Guard.”

Perhaps because it was a fleeting mention, the seemingly-perturbed Walz ignored the attack and pivoted to pillorying his opponent. He criticized Jensen for wanting to ban abortion, backing policies that would purportedly destroy the state’s budget and lacking governing experience.

“I’ve been governing through a pandemic that you made harder by pushing false information, profiting off of Ivermectin and some of the things you were doing,” Walz said.

While that rhetorical reversal proved sufficient to rebuff Jensen’s attack, it’s highly unlikely that Vance — known for his pugnacious debate style — will let the issue drop so easily. That means Walz will almost certainly need to be ready with more to say about his military record.

Walz Defends His Record

Another line of attack against Walz will almost certainly be that he’s governed as a tax-and-spend liberal in Minnesota, funneling money into programs like free meals for all K-12 students and free public college tuition for low-income students.

During a 2018 gubernatorial debate at the Minnesota State Fair, Republican nominee Jeff Johnson argued that Walz had made more than 40 promises to increase spending without laying out a credible plan for how to pay for it.

In response, Walz dialed up the folksy Midwestern populism that’s become a major part of his political brand and helped propel him onto the national stage. “I’m a school teacher,” Walz said of his approach to budgeting. “I’ve lived thrifty my entire life.”

But he also didn’t back down from making the case for major investments to improve people’s lives, arguing that they’ll prove cheaper in the long run by keeping people out of prison and off government benefits. Walz also pivoted to a tried-and-true rhetorical gambit for politicians on both sides of the aisle: bashing Washington, D.C.

“It’s just like the tax cut we saw in D.C., that the middle class benefited nothing from — services are cut, property taxes go up,” Walz said, drawing cheers from the crowd. “If you are going to cut spending tell us if it’s nursing homes, tell us if it is assistance to schools, tell us if it’s roads or bridges.”

Still, Walz is likely to face a much more vigorous prosecution on this front from Vance, in contrast to the unfailingly polite sparring from Johnson. At one point in another gubernatorial debate as they traded barbs over fiscal responsibility, Johnson actually apologized for interrupting his opponent.

Walz in Attack Mode

Walz isn’t shy about throwing a rhetorical jab, but generally does so without resorting to personal insults. There’s evidence, however, particularly in the 2022 debates with Republican Scott Jensen, that Walz struggles at times to control his temper in responding to attacks on his record.

During a debate with Jensen at Minnesota Farmfest, Walz savaged his opponent for purportedly trying to sabotage a budget deal the governor cut with Republicans that included a major tax cut.

“Scott asked Republicans to step away so that it would look like it did not get done,” Walz charged. “That’s what’s broken about government. That’s the game playing on this.”

Walz was similarly blunt in attacking Jensen, a physician, over a topic that will almost certainly come up at the VP debate: abortion. He chastised his opponent for vowing to ban abortion and then trying to back off from that position when it became clear that it was a political liability.

“I didn’t have to practice 40 years of medicine to change a position on women’s health care in the final weeks once we saw how unpopular it was,” he jabbed.

Walz will undoubtedly jump at the opportunity to put Vance on the defensive on the issue. The Ohio Republican previously supported a federal abortion ban, but now, following Trump’s lead, says it should be left up to the states. Walz is likely already practicing his attack lines.

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