Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance tried to “throw off” his opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate by greeting him with friendliness and cordiality, an aide to the Ohio senator said in a new report.
Walz was reportedly preparing to debate a much more hostile Republican nominee, sources told Axios—and was expecting “more MAGA mode given what [Vance has] been saying repeatedly on the stump.”
“The ‘MN nice’ dynamic played out more surprisingly and organically onstage than strategically, in a way maybe neither candidate expected,” a Walz campaign aide told the outlet.
Vance’s camp said: “We had an intentional strategy of not being overly adversarial and aggressive and jumping down Walz’s throat on every little thing,” a Vance aide told Axios.
It stands in stark contrast to the no-holds-barred image his Walz debate prep stand-in, Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, gave reporters the night before the debate.
“No amount of Minnesota nice is going to make up for the fact that Walz embodies [Kamala Harris’] open-border and soft-on-crime” policy stance, Emmer told reporters on a call on Monday night. The GOP congressman predicted Vance would “wipe the floor” with his state’s governor.
But viewers tuning in to the actual debate were greeted with a different reality: Vance and Walz started and ended the debate with a handshake, and agreed with one another at multiple points throughout the evening.
When Walz spoke about his son, Gus, witnessing a shooting at a community center near his school in 2023, Vance offered him an apology:
“I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed the shooting,” the Ohio senator said. “And I’m sorry about that. And I hope, Christ, have mercy. It is awful.”
“JD’s focus on bipartisanship was intentional, because we knew it was a side of JD that the media has largely ignored,” the advisor told Axios. “The goal was to disarm the ‘he’s an extremist’ B.S. by positioning him in the populist center. Democrats may have mindf—ed themselves into believing the caricature they invented.”
Despite this, at least one response seemed only designed to appeal to the MAGA wing of the Republican base. When asked if he accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election, Vance deflected and said he was “focused on the future.”
Walz called the response a “damning non-answer.”
But some of Vance’s personality as the campaign’s “policy attack dog,” as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, did manage to shine at moments during the debate. After Margaret Brennan corrected the Ohio senator that most of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio do have legal status, Vance spoke over the moderators and went on the offensive.
The CBS anchors eventually cut off both candidates’ microphones as they continued to argue about the legal status of the Haitian immigrants.
