WASHINGTON: United States vice presidential contenders JD Vance and Tim Walz face off in what could be an unusually important undercard debate on Tuesday (Oct 1) as they compete for the decisive votes of the American heartland.
The debate between Democrat Walz, the Minnesota governor chosen by Kamala Harris, and Republican Vance, the Ohio senator who is Donald Trump’s running mate, is likely to be the last of the 2024 election.
Trump has refused a second clash with Harris, meaning that Tuesday’s debate in New York could be the final chance to see the two tickets go head-to-head.
Vance, 40, and Walz, 60, each claim to be the true voice of the crucial Midwestern swing states that could decide an election that remains on a knife-edge with just five weeks to go.
History suggests that vice presidential debates rarely move the dial much – but in an election campaign that has seen Harris step in for US President Joe Biden unprecedentedly late in the game, Tuesday’s contest may have added significance.
The campaign has seen Vance and Trump use increasingly divisive rhetoric – and even falsely accuse migrants of eating people’s pets – meaning that the debate is almost guaranteed to make for fiery television.
“It will whet a lot of people’s appetites for Nov 5,” Thomas Whalen, an associate professor of social sciences at Boston University, told AFP.
Walz and Vance were each picked by their bosses to reach out to voters in the Midwestern battleground states where, thanks to the idiosyncratic US electoral college system, a few thousand votes could determine who wins the White House race.
Both are military veterans with strong blue-collar credentials, with Vance known as the author of the Rust Belt memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and Walz boasting a folksy persona as a former teacher and football coach.
But the similarities end there.
The combative Vance shares Trump’s penchant for courting controversy, whether by smearing Democrats as “childless cat ladies” or by boosting the false claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town ate pet cats and dogs.
