Tim Walz and JD Vance have defended their respective running mates during their first and possibly only vice presidential debate.
Hosted by CBS News, the event gave the pair the chance to introduce themselves and go on the attack against the opposing ticket.
Each man pointed to the crises of the day as reasons for voters to choose their respective running mates for president.
Mr Walz, a two-term Democratic governor of Minnesota, used a question on whether he would support a pre-emptive strike on Iran to paint Donald Trump as too dangerous for the country and the world in an unstable moment.
Read more:
US election latest: Vance and Walz face off in VP debate
“What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter,” said Mr Walz.
“And the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment.”
Mr Vance, in his reply, argued that Mr Trump is an intimidating figure whose presence on the international stage is its own deterrent.
“Donald Trump actually delivered stability,” the Republican freshman senator from Ohio said.
Mr Walz then accused Mr Vance and Mr Trump of villainising legal immigrants in Mr Vance’s home state.
He pointed to the fact that Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine had to send in extra law enforcement to provide security to the city’s schools after Mr Vance tweeted about (and Mr Trump amplified false claims) Haitians eating pets.
“This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it, you demonise it,” Mr Walz said.
Mr Vance said the 15,000 Haitians in the city had caused housing, economic and other issues that the Biden-Harris administration was ignoring.
When the debate moderators pointed out that the Haitians living there had legal status, Mr Vance protested that CBS News had said its moderators would not be fact-checking, leaving the onus to the candidates.
‘Drill, baby, drill!’
As Mr Vance continued and the moderators tried to move on, his microphone was cut and neither man could be heard.
Mr Walz was asked about a report this week that he was not in China during the violent 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, as he had previously claimed.
Read more:
Who is JD Vance?
Analysis: Why Harris picked Walz
“I’m a knucklehead at times,” he said. “I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I was in Hong Kong and China
during the democracy protests, and from that I learned a lot about what it means to be in governance.”
Mr Vance, meanwhile, defended his running mate despite having criticised Mr Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
“I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he said.
“I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.
“But most importantly, Donald Trump delivered for the American people.”
The pair struck a noticeably friendlier tone than the matchup between Mr Trump and Ms Harris.
Source Agencies
