What to watch for in tonight’s U.S. vice-presidential debate

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When Tim Walz goes head-to-head with JD Vance on Tuesday evening at the U.S. vice-presidential debate, the event will carry unusual weight. Not only is the presidential race a dead heat a little more than a month from the Nov. 5 election, but this may be the final time the two campaigns clash directly.

So far, the Republican presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has refused requests from his Democratic counterpart, Kamala Harris, for another presidential debate.

And with debates already playing an outsize role in the election – see President Joe Biden’s June implosion, which ultimately forced him out of the race, and Ms. Harris’s strong performance against Mr. Trump last month – all eyes will be on the undercard bout.

The debate begins at 9 p.m. ET on CBS. Here’s what to watch for.

Vance’s “weird” pronouncements

In the nearly three months since Mr. Trump elevated him to the presidential ticket, Mr. Vance, Ohio’s junior senator, has arguably become as well known for his strange comments as for his policies.

Among other things, he compared Mr. Trump with Adolf Hitler in a 2016 Facebook message, complained that the country is run by “childless cat ladies” in a 2021 interview, and last month pushed a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs.

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Expect Mr. Vance to have to explain or defend these comments, either under questioning from moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, or in response to attack lines from Mr. Walz.

Given that Mr. Walz has famously used the word “weird” to describe the Republican presidential ticket, this will likely be an area that Mr. Vance will want to move past as quickly as possible.

But who knows: he has repeatedly doubled down on the Springfield-dogs-and-cats line, even after it became clear the story had been spread by a Nazi group. He may do the same here.

Attacks on Walz

Like Mr. Vance, Mr. Walz was largely chosen for the presidential ticket in the hope that he could reach out to voters in the U.S. Midwest. But in contrast with Mr. Vance’s bumpy road, Mr. Walz has so far had a relatively smooth ride. The Minnesota Governor has played up his identity as a small-town football coach. In one of the Harris campaign’s ads, he is shown fixing a truck.

One of Mr. Vance’s prime objectives will be to take this image apart. Republicans have been testing out variations on one particular attack for the past few days: that under Mr. Walz’s aw-shucks-regular-guy exterior he is either a radical leftist, a “California liberal,” or both.

Look for Mr. Vance, for instance, to accuse Mr. Walz of being too slow to send in the National Guard in response to arson during the George Floyd protests in 2020.

Other likely lines of attack will be for Mr. Vance to accuse Mr. Walz of inconsistency in his positions on gun control (he went from an “A” rating by the National Rifle Association to an “F”) or of being a “liar” for misstating his National Guard rank.

How Mr. Walz responds to these broadsides under pressure remains to be seen. In theory, his 12 years in Congress and two terms as governor should make him practised at parrying attacks. But some Democrats, in anonymous leaks to CNN and Politico, have been trying to lower expectations: they have said Mr. Walz is nervous about facing Mr. Vance, and that he even told Ms. Harris when she named him as her running mate that he was bad at debating.

He is not, apparently, leaving anything to chance. Mr. Walz has reportedly held multiple intensive debate preparation sessions with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg playing Mr. Vance. On the Republican side, Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer has been playing Mr. Walz in Mr. Vance’s mock debates.

Them or us

The focus on Mr. Vance’s and Mr. Walz’s personalities during the campaign has been somewhat unusual for a pair of vice-presidential contenders. How much attention, for instance, did Ms. Harris, Tim Kaine or Mike Pence attract when they were vying for the country’s number-two slot?

For Mr. Vance, it’s a function of his natural comfort with the role of attack dog, his eagerness for media ubiquity and the popularity of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. For Mr. Walz, it’s at least partly the Democrats’ overt use of him as a contrast with Ms. Harris. He is the Midwestern everyman to her West Coast intellectual.

They will each have to decide whether they lean into these profiles and make the debate about themselves (and each other) or play the more classic role of avatar for their respective presidential contender.

Mr. Walz will almost certainly try to pivot from Mr. Vance to attacking the ever-polarizing Mr. Trump. What is unclear is how much he will attempt to stand aside and talk more about Ms. Harris. In Mr. Vance’s case, he may do the same – particularly given that his party’s brand is Mr. Trump and not himself. Or he may decide that the best thing he can do is try to damage the more popular vice-presidential contender across from him.

The knockout blow

It’s been something of an adage since Lloyd Bentsen’s famous takedown of Dan Quayle (“senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”) in 1988 that vice-presidential contenders should just play it safe and mostly try not to make themselves the focal point of the campaign, even for an evening. Does anyone remember, for instance, anything about the 2020 vice-presidential debate other than the fly that landed on Mr. Pence’s head?

But with 2024′s track record of consequential debates, the respective contenders’ outsize public profiles and the presidential race still deadlocked, that truism could easily be turned on its head. Watch tonight to see if either, or both, candidates have a Bentsen moment – or a Quayle.