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Tuesday night saw Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz square off in the first and only debate between the 2024 vice presidential nominees.
According to the most recent polling, Walz has a significantly higher favorability rating among Americans than Vance, with the Minnesota governor sitting at a +4.6 percent favorability compared to Vance’s -10.4 percent.
However, many Republicans had high praise for Vance’s performance in Tuesday’s debate. Some of Alabama’s most prominent GOP leaders were among those who expressed their support.
Following the debate, Sen. Katie Britt tweeted, “@JDVance delivered one of the strongest debate performances in American history tonight. Proud to call him a friend and colleague!”
Britt also called Vance’s performance “one of the best debate performances in American history” saying that the senator “was collected, he was on point and he was very direct.” Before telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that she thought “it was a master class from JD Vance about how to make sure the American people know what’s at stake.”
“And they have hope about the vision of Donald Trump that he’s so well executed,” Britt continued. “And he also put it back on Kamala Harris, reminding voters over and over again that they’re not better off than they were three and a half years ago, and that she and Tim Walz have no plan to make that the case. I thought it was excellent.”
Britt’s colleague and fellow Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville also referred to Vance’s performance as a “master class.”
U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Haleyville, chimed in as well, tweeting, “Senator Vance did a fantastic job tonight. Again, just like in the last debate, it was clear which side the moderators were on. But the American people see through that. We just saw the next Vice President and it’s not Tim Walz.”
U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Hoover, called Vance “the runaway winner in the Vice Presidential Debate.”
The reaction among the general public was far more muted, with roughly equal approval of Vance and Walz’s performances according to CBS. Additionally, according to NPR’s fact-checking report following the debate, it was Vance, not Walz, who was guilty of making repeated lies or misleading statements over the course of the evening.
When discussing climate change, Vance claimed that the Biden-Harris administration had decreased American manufacturing and energy production during their tenure. In reality, last year, the U.S. produced record levels of oil and gas under the Biden-Harris administration. Additionally, solar and wind power have also grown under Biden and Harris. The share of American energy produced by coal — one of the most polluting, carbon-emitting fuel sources — decreased during that period.
Vance also side-stepped a question asking him whether or not former President Trump has denied the existence of climate change.
“Look, what the president has said is that if the Democrats, in particular Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that’s not what they’re doing,” Vance said. “I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about … this idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument.”
In fact, Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and made light of the issue despite the consensus among scientists that human activity is indeed causing the climate to change through the use of fossil fuels, and that the ramifications of such phenomena pose a serious threat.
When it came to immigration, Vance continued to preach the common talking point that undocumented immigrants “undercut the wages of American workers.” However, NPR’s Scott Horsley writes that “increased migration — both legal and illegal — has helped to grow the labor force in recent years, allowing employers to keep adding jobs at a rapid clip without putting much upward pressure on prices.”
Indeed, without added immigrant workers, the U.S. economy would be on the decline. Immigration does not appear to be decreasing employment rates among natural-born citizens. 89.5 percent of working-age men were employed in August, which eclipses statistics from all but one month of the Trump administration. And, 78.4 percent of working-age women were employed last month, the highest rate ever.
Vance also claimed that illegal immigration was responsible for bringing “a lot of fentanyl” into the U.S. and that “Kamala Harris let fentanyl into our communities at record levels.” Both claims are untrue, as close to 90 percent of illicit fentanyl is seized at official border crossings, nearly all of which is being smuggled by individuals who are legally crossing the border. More than half of those individuals are themselves U.S. citizens. Virtually no illicit fentanyl is seized from asylum-seeking migrants who cross the border.
Additionally, fentanyl circulation and fentanyl-related overdoses have recently been on the decline in the U.S. CDC estimates suggest that fentanyl-related deaths decreased by around 10% in 2023.
Vance also made claims that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts resulted in “an American economic boom unlike we’ve seen in a generation this country.”
In reality, tax revenues as a share of GDP dropped to 16.3 percent in the year following the passage of Trump’s tax cuts, down from 17.1 percent the year prior and the 17.7 percent average over the last 40 years. “Even though federal spending also declined as a share of GDP in 2018, the deficit topped $785 billion that year, and approached a trillion dollars in 2019 — the year before the pandemic,” writes Horsley.
And although Vance claimed that “a lot of those resources went to giving more take-home pay to middle-class and working-class Americans”, the Tax Policy Center reported that more than half the savings from the 2017 tax cut went to the top 10% of earners, with more than a quarter going to the top 1%.
Vance was also fact-checked on his comments about health care and gun policy. With the Senator making innacurate claims that former President Trump “salvaged” the Affordable Care Act and that guns are being smuggled into the country by Mexican cartels. On the latter point, the exact opposite is true, as around 70 percent of guns entering Mexico have had their origins traced back to the U.S.
The only issue which NPR fact-checked Vance’s opponent on was the Minnesota Governor’s claims that he had been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Walz himself admitted that he had been inaccurate in those comments, saying, “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times … I got there that summer and misspoke on this.”
NPR also noted that Walz has apparently exaggerated his number of trips to China, with his campaign acknowledging that the Governor has been there around 15 times in his life despite sometimes saying that he has made the trip “30” or “dozens” of times.
With generally mild reactions from the public, it does not appear as though Tuesday’s debate will have any major ramifications on November’s election, which is now only 33 days away.
