Snap polls give vice-presidential debate to JD Vance over Tim Walz

The Republican and Democrat vice-presidential candidates clashed in their one and only scheduled debate in New York City, in a contest that pundits and punters gave to JD Vance by a narrow margin.

The contest between JD Vance, left, and Tim Walz in New York on Tuesday, US time, was more cordial than that between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Picture: AFP

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Tim Walz and JD Vance strove on Tuesday night to stake their policy credentials on abortion and immigration in a more cordial, policy-focused debate than that between their leaders Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last month in a contest that was nevertheless dominated by dozens of references to the former president.

Pundit and punters alike gave the only scheduled vice-presidential debate of the 2024 campaign to the 40-year-old Republican senator Vance, who by most accounts put in a slick and confident performance against a sometimes rattled Mr Walz during their 90-minute contest in New York City.

Mr Walz, the 60-year-old second-term governor of Minnesota, appeared to stumble at the outset in response to a question about whether the candidates would support a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran, confusing the two nations in an unclear answer.

“The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the US,” he said, in an apparent reference to Iran, which hours earlier had launched more than 100 missiles at Israel in what could trigger a wide war in the region.

Apart from foreign policy, the two men clashed over abortion – where Mr Walz sought to cast Senator Vance as an extremist who would want to ban abortion, while the Republican argued that laws the Democrat had signed into law in his own state were extreme – the economy, and immigration.

“As I read the Minnesota law that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion,” Senator Vance claimed at one point.

Mr Walz sought to play down the impact of millions of new immigrants that have arrived in the US during the Biden administration on housing costs, which Senator Vance said had contributed to a housing supply crisis.

“If Kamala Harris has such great plans to address middle-class problems, she ought to do them now. Not when asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her 3½ years ago,” Senator Vance said in what became a refrain of his throughout the debate.

Mr Walz seized on Senator Vance’s refusal to concede that Mr Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election when explicitly asked to, arguing the former president’s behaviour on January 6, 2021, made him a threat to US democracy. “That is a damning non-answer,” Mr Walz said.

Two snap polls in the immediate aftermath of the contest gave the debate by a slender margin to Senator Vance, 42 per cent to 41 per cent (according to CBS, which hosted the debate) and 51 per cent to 49 per cent according to a CNN poll that found 1 per cent of debate watchers had changed their mind after the event.

Democratic Party strategist David Axelrod conceded Senator Vance had a “great performance”, criticising Mr Walz for giving a vague, evasive answer on whether he had wrongly stated in 2014 that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, an error that fuelled Republican criticism of the Minnesota governor for being untruthful.

“I would have delivered and answer in Chinese and it would have been more understandable than the line he gave,” Axelrod said on CNN after the event.

Mr Walz appeared more nervous in his presentation, at one point mistakenly stating he had “become friends with school shooters” without correcting himself in an exchange about gun policy.

In a debate that could have drawn upward of 50 million viewers across the US, the two men sought to introduce themselves to a national audience five weeks out from polling day, after they were picked as running mates by Mr Trump and Ms Harris in July and August respectively.

The debate was often overshadowed by Mr Trump, whose name came up more than 80 times – twice as many as Ms Harris.

Both men referred to their middle and working-class pasts in Midwest US, a region both parties need to win to secure victory in November, to endear themselves to the audience.

The two hosts, CBS anchors Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell, generally refrained from fact-checking the two candidates except once, over the legal status of Haitian immigrants, an issue that prompted national debate in recent weeks. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check; since you’re fact-checking me, I am going to fact-check you,” Senator Vance said.