Watch Live: The Battle Of The Back-Ups – Vance-Walz Veep Debate

The two vice presidential nominees – Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – will face each other in a debate tonight (Oct. 1), one month out from the 2024 election.

Debate host CBS News announced on Aug. 15 that after proposing four dates for the matchup – Sept. 17, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, and Oct. 8 – the Harris–Walz campaign quickly agreed to the third.

“See you on Oct. 1, JD,” Walz wrote on X.

In response, Vance said he accepted the date, while also pushing for another debate on CNN on Sept. 18.

“Not only do I accept the CBS debate on Oct. 1, I accept the CNN debate on Sept. 18 as well. I look forward to seeing you at both!” Vance wrote on X.

What Are the Rules?

CBS released the debate rules on Sept. 27.

There will be no opening statements, and the moderators will begin by introducing the incumbent party candidate, Walz.

Vance’s podium will be on the left side of the television screen, while Walz’s will be on the right.

Both candidates will remain behind their podiums for the duration of the debate.

Like both presidential debates this year, there will be no studio audience.

Each candidate will have two minutes to answer questions, and the opposing candidate will have two minutes to respond. There will also be an additional minute for rebuttals.

The moderators are allowed, at their discretion, to give both candidates an additional minute to continue a topic. They will remain seated for the debate and are the only ones in the studio allowed to ask questions.

CBS will have lights in front of both Walz and Vance to indicate how much time remains for each response. Both candidates will also have a countdown clock.

Vance won the coin toss to determine the order of the two-minute closing statements and opted to go last.

CBS may opt to mute the microphones at any given point, but otherwise, they will both remain on for the debate.

Neither candidate will receive questions in advance of the showdown and campaign staffers are not allowed to interact with the candidates during the breaks.

Like the previous debates this year, no props or pre-written notes are permitted onstage.

Vance and Walz will be given a pen, a pad of paper, and a bottle of water.

What to Watch For

Walz has labeled the Republican ticket as “weird” while Vance has argued that Walz is too progressive for voters.

Walz, 60, has a two-decade political record to draw on, including his governing experience in Minnesota and his years representing the state’s first congressional district, which had often voted for Republicans before Walz won it in 2006.

He also emphasizes his Midwestern roots and plain-spoken rhetorical style.

In newly unearthed video, Tim Walz BRAGS about overwhelming small-town America with migrants:

“We have more refugees per capita than any other state. That’s not just morally a good thing, it’s our economic and cultural future.

“This beautiful diversity we see out in… pic.twitter.com/oRwpr8KPs3

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 1, 2024

Vance, 40, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 and has made strong appeals to both rural and working-class America in recent campaign stops, often championing U.S. manufacturing and energy independence.

While criticizing the Harris–Walz campaign, he has described them as radical liberals, particularly for Harris’s California roots and Walz’s gubernatorial policies.

Thomas Hollihan, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said that conversationally, Vance is likely to be bold and declarative.

“I think we’re going to see a much more populist style of presentation from Vance,” he told The Epoch Times.

John Murphy, a professor specializing in presidential rhetoric at the University of Illinois, said Walz has a more relaxed approach to debating.

“He enjoys stories, he talks with people, and he uses a regular-guy, dad-joke speaking style. He is preeminently a personable speaker, shaped by the norms of conversation,” Murphy told The Epoch Times.

Vance has also strongly criticized Walz for mischaracterizing his retirement rank with the Minnesota National Guard.

Vance served in the Marine Corps as a public affairs officer and was deployed to Iraq for six months.

Walz has defended his military record, which includes 24 years in the National Guard, but the Harris campaign recently said he misspoke in a 2018 video where he mentioned “weapons of war that I carried into war.” He has never served in combat.

Aaron Dusso, a political science professor from Indiana University-Indianapolis, said the best strategy for both candidates is to always “try and seem competent on the issues that are not your campaign’s strength and then move as quickly as possible to talking about the issues that are your strength.”

“So Walz will want to continue to emphasize reproductive freedom and social issues like health care and education and continue to hammer Project 2025,” Dusso told The Epoch Times.

Vance, on the other hand, should stick to policy and avoid ad-libbing, Dusso added.

“Be a policy wonk; stick to the border, economy, and crime … even though crime is down and the economy is doing pretty well, it’s still best for Republicans to focus on those issues because the average voter sees those issues as their strengths,” he said.

Watch the full debate live here (due to start at 2100ET)

Matt Taibbi has once again done God’s work to make these debates somewhat more palatable, here are the drinking game rules:

DRINK EVERY TIME…

• Walz mentions Project 2025.

• Vance questions Walz’s military record.

• Anyone says “Proud of my service.”

• Vance accuses Walz of favoring socialism or having ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

• Walz accuses Vance of fomenting anti-Haitian bigotry.

• Vance mentions a colorful family member. Double if the relative is armed or high or both.

• Walz brings up January 6th or claims democracy is on the ballot.

• Vance brings up the Minneapolis riots.

• Either candidate mentions the middle class or the working class. (Do not do shots of hard alcohol for this rule.)

• Either candidate uses folksy rhetoric or Midwestern slang, or the word “folks” is uttered, at all.

• Anyone says, “Right here in New York City.”

• Either candidate mentions Hurricane Helene or the situation in Asheville, North Carolina.

• Either candidate accuses the other of being insufficiently protective of Israel or Ukraine.

• A moderator fact-checks either candidate.

• You feel like driving off a cliff in despair.

*  *  *

Peter Navarro warns that voters may want to consider that 15 of America’s 46 presidents were first vice president.

This includes Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson following the death of a president; Gerald Ford by succession; and Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden by election.

Historically, this puts the odds of either Governor Walz or Senator Vance eventually becoming president at about one-third. Despite these short odds, conventional wisdom has it that vice presidential candidates don’t decide presidential elections. Yet, this time, these candidates should matter a great deal, at least to voters concerned about the economic and national security threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Here, even a cursory Vance versus Walz comparison reveals a stark contrast between a Trumpian China hawk in Vance and a China dove in Walz.

As is well-documented, communist China’s subversive strategies include wooing foreign academics, businessmen, and politicians so that they knowingly or unknowingly advance the CCP’s agenda.

Walz was born in 1964, just two years before China’s decade-long Maoist Cultural Revolution. From his childhood years, Walz romantically remembers “pictures of Mao Tse-tung, hung in public places and carried in parades.”

In 1989—the year Vance turned 5 and the CCP slaughtered thousands in Tiananmen Square—the 25-year-old Walz took his first China trip and would rave about the “royal treatment” his CCP hosts provided. Walz would gush a mere year after the slaughter at Tiananmen: “No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again. They gave me more gifts than I could bring home. It was an excellent experience.”

By 1994, Walz was honeymooning in Kunming, China, after he had deliberately scheduled his wedding to be on the same day, June 4, as the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. When asked by the Scottsbluff Star-Herald why, wife Gwen said Tim simply “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”

Between early 1990 and 2008, Walz would establish his own personal private and lucrative business, and bring to China young and persuadable American students who surely were indoctrinated. Walz took “travel cost” payments from the Chinese government as well.

According to Walz’s congressional financial disclosure statements, his China-focused travel company was only dissolved in the fall of 2008, more than a year and a half after he became a member of Congress in January 2007. During that period, Walz would visit China more than 30 times.

Vance’s experience with communist China and its economic aggression couldn’t be more different. That experience is best revealed in his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Vance was born in 1984 in the poor, Rust Belt manufacturing town of Middletown, Ohio. In his heart-wrenching elegy, Vance references the all-American ethos of Hank Williams, Jr.’s country classic “A Country Boy Can Survive” and describes how his hardscrabble childhood was filled with lessons from his Mamaw and uncles in eastern Kentucky, including the family lore of “classic good-versus-evil stories” about “defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes.”

Throughout “Hillbilly Elegy,” the specter of communist China and its destruction of the jobs and factories in Vance’s Rust Bowl environs looms large. In his vice presidential nominee acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Vance described China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 as a “sweetheart deal” facilitated by out-of-touch Washington politicians and power brokers that “destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.”

Vance himself saw firsthand how communities across the United States were “flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor, and in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl.” Meanwhile, as China entered the WTO in 2001, a 37-year-old Walz continued to capitalize on China’s economic rise at America’s expense, organizing more trips to China through his private travel company.

In 2005, both Vance and Walz were readying to deploy to Iraq, Vance as a Marine, Walz as the command sergeant major of his National Guard unit. Only Vance would go; Walz quit his unit before it was deployed to Iraq in order to run for Congress, was eventually demoted in rank, and later, after he falsely claimed he saw combat, accused of stolen valor.

In 2007, Vance was honorably discharged from the Marines as a corporal after serving in Iraq. Under the G.I. Bill, Vance completed his undergraduate studies at The Ohio State University in just two years, graduating with a double major, summa cum laude and would follow that with a law degree at Yale that Walz would later inexplicably ridicule.

Meanwhile, even as a congressman, Walz worked as an international fellow at Macau Polytechnic University, a state-run Chinese institution that backs CCP dictator Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and touts its “long held devotion to and love for the [Chinese] motherland.”

In the same year that Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy,” chronicling the economic carnage communist China had inflicted on his community, then-Congressman Walz publicly downplayed the need to stand up to communist China’s aggression, stating in a 2016 interview: “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree.”

Walz would double down on his CCP accommodation strategy in 2019. As the governor of Minnesota, in opposition to the tariffs that form a vital part of America’s defense against China’s economic aggression, Walz called for President Trump to “end the trade war with China.” In Walz’s world view, “there’s just no substitute for 1.6 billion consumers, who are hungry, to get our China trade negotiations normalized,“ and ”there’s not enough market in the rest of the world to absorb our capacity.”

This year, Walz has met with Zhao Jian, the Chinese consul general in Chicago, to discuss “China–U.S. relations and sub-national cooperation”—a euphemism for facilitating more Chinese influence in the United States at the state level. In response to Walz’s selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate, China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, wrote that he would bring “sanity” to U.S.–China relations—code for Walz softening America’s stance against Chinese economic aggression.

During his August acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Walz made no mention of the CCP or Chinese aggression.

By contrast, during his July acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Vance made a point to defend the American people and explicitly stand up against communist China and the CCP’s aggression.

Promised Vance: “Together, we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.”

If elected, Walz would be the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to have had such extensive dealings with communist China. As vice president, Walz would surely seek to further accommodate the CCP.  With the odds of Walz eventually also becoming president at more than 30 percent, that’s a bad bet for anyone concerned about the existential threat the CCP poses.

As Jacob Burg detailed earlier via The Epoch Times, a total of 43% of registered voters say that they will watch the entire vice presidential debate live, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey. Those who said they would watch or read highlights made up 27%, compared to 18% who said they would watch part of it live, while 12% said they would not watch the debate. Only 24% said they will be watching the debate to help them decide who to vote for.

The survey also found that 49% of registered voters believe Walz is qualified to be president, if necessary, while 44% believe the same of Vance. However, 51% said that Walz isn’t qualified, and 56% said the same about Vance.

Of the registered voters surveyed, 86% said that they want to hear the candidates’ economic views, 76% said they want to learn about the candidates’ immigration views, 56% want to hear their views on abortion. Just 14% of respondents said they want to hear the candidates criticizing each other.