What to Watch For in Tonight's VP Debate

Abortion, childcare, cat ladies, and masculinity politics.

Photo by René DeAnda on Unsplash

Tonight, vice presidential nominees Tim Walz and JD Vance will face off on the debate stage. CBS, the network hosting the debate, has said that its moderators will not be fact-checking in real time, which is frustrating to say the least, especially given Vance’s penchant for flat-out lying (see, e.g., “Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs”).

It’s hard to imagine two more different men going head to head: Walz with his midwestern folksy charm and lefty politics, Vance with his claims to the midwest but aggressive, puffed-up style that reads more as “weirdo tech bro / potential serial killer” than “boy of Appalachia.” What both men do have, though, is a deep understanding of policy and hard ideological commitments to their positions. The question is whether those policies and ideologies will actually be laid out honestly and in detail by Vance, who is the slippery number-two to an even-dodgier man without much in the way of ideological commitments, or whether we’ll hear actual ideas from Walz and a vague angry tantrum from Vance (my guess is it will be the latter).

One topic I’ll be listening for is abortion. Kamala Harris is excellent at talking about reproductive rights, but Walz is also pretty great, and it’s damn refreshing to hear a man take on abortion rights not just as a women’s issue but as one that has shaped his own life. Walz will no doubt talk about how his own family was formed thanks to fertility medicine, much of which would be curtailed if anti-abortion groups got their way, and if actual Republican-penned anti-abortion bills were made law. Vance will no doubt continue his walking-back of his own anti-abortion extremism, claiming a Trump administration would oppose a federal abortion ban and accusing Democrats of being the real extremists (the bizarro lie that Democrats support post-birth abortions has come roaring back from Trump and Vance). Vance will want to soft-peddle actual GOP policies, and will likely claim that his party does not actually oppose IVF; I doubt he will answer why, then, he skipped out on a vote that would have protected IVF procedures going forward (only two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted for that IVF protection bill). Abortion is the issue on which Trump and Vance are the most slippery, because it’s the issue that’s the strongest for Democrats. Actual GOP policies abortion policies are wildly unpopular, and so the GOP strategy this election season has been to either lie or obfuscate when it comes to abortion. They could actually change their positions to be more in line with what voters want, but that would require refusing to cater to the extreme anti-abortion right and, well, they simply don’t want to do that. Trump doesn’t seem to really care, but Vance has a strong politics of misogyny. He is particularly troubled by women who live on their own terms and don’t have children. His opposition to abortion seems to come less from any veneration of fetal life, and more from a deep desire to curtail women’s lives, and to force as many of us into motherhood as possible.