JD Vance vs Tim Walz VP debate: Live updates

JD Vance and Tim Walz faced-off in a debate where Kamala Harris' VP candidate stumbled on a few awkward moments as they debated gun crime, energy, the Middle East, the border, China and abortion. 

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris' running mates JD Vance and Tim Walz have squared off in the only vice presidential debate scheduled before November’s US election.

The rival running mates focused largely on policy problems and avoided personal attacks in what was a far less combative clash than last month’s presidential debate.

But Mr Walz tripped up on several occasions, confusing Israel with Iran twice in his first answer about the crisis in the Middle East, and then later saying he “became friends with school shooters” when speaking about tackling gun violence.

When the Minnesota Governor was grilled over why he claimed he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989, even though he did not arrive as a school teacher until months later, he said he was “a knucklehead at times”.

“Many times, I will talk a lot, I will get caught up in the rhetoric,” Mr Walz said, before adding when pressed further: “I got there that summer and misspoke on this.”

Mr Vance – who shot to fame with his memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his upbringing – made a noticeable effort to reach out to female voters who have been breaking towards Ms Harris.

The abortion opponent acknowledged voters did not “agree with everything I’ve ever said on the topic and that they “frankly just don’t trust us” on the issue.

“We’ve got to earn people’s trust back,” Mr Vance said, promising a suite of “pro-family” policies “to give women more options”.

Mr Walz responded by uncorking his popular rehearsed line, telling Republicans to “mind your own damn business” and promising to restore the federal right to abortion.

In perhaps his strongest moment of the night, the Democrat seized on Mr Vance’s claim that censorship represented a bigger threat to democracy than the violent invasion of the US Capitol which was fuelled by Mr Trump’s false election fraud claims after the 2020 election.

“This has got to stop. It’s tearing our country apart,” he said, and when he directly confronted Mr Vance over whether Mr Trump lost the last election, the Republican refused to answer.

On several occasions, Mr Vance sought points of agreement with his opponent, and expressed sympathy when Mr Walz revealed his teenage son had witnessed a shooting.

But the Republican said he thought his opponent had “a tough job here because you’ve got to play Whac-a-Mole”.

“You’ve got to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t deliver lower inflation, which of course he did, and then you’ve simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record,” Mr Vance said.

Mr Trump’s campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita declared Mr Vance won the debate in “dominating fashion” with “the best debate performance from any vice presidential candidate in history”.

Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon argued the Democrat was “a straight talker focused on sharing real solutions” and that he won “on every single issue”.

She dared Mr Trump to “step up and face the voters” in a second presidential debate, with Ms Harris having accepted an invitation from CNN on October 23 ahead of the election on November 5.

See how it unfolded below.

Originally published as JD Vance vs Tim Walz VP debate: Live updates