Vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance square off Tuesday night in their first and only debate of the 2024 presidential election. While VPs typically don’t swing many voters one way or another, the 90-minute debate will still be one to watch, if only because it’s a battle between such diametrically opposed human beings. You’ve got Walz, the high-energy high school football coach who just makes everyone feel good, and Vance, the weirdo who keeps talking about “childless cat ladies” and “postmenopausal females” when he’s not spreading the most racist memes you can find on the internet.
The debate is being hosted by CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan and is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. ET/ 6 p.m. PT on Tuesday. There are many different ways to watch, even if you don’t have a cable connection, and we’ve got the links for you below.
The debate between convicted felon and former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10 will likely be the one and only match-up between the two presidential candidates, since Trump has made several excuses about why he can’t debate again. During that debate, Trump spewed racist nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and kids.
But Trump’s lie about immigrants only surfaced because it was first pushed hard by neo-Nazis online. And it’ll be interesting to see what the chronically online Vance serves up tonight from the darkest corners of the internet. Vance encouraged his army of dipshits to “keep the cat memes flowing,” even after the story was repeatedly shown to be false.
Where can I stream the Walz-Vance debate?
YouTube
- CBS News has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
- ABC News has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
- C-SPAN has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
- NBC News has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
- Washington Post has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
- Fox News has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
- Telemundo has a livestream of the debate on YouTube.
Websites
- CBS News has a livestream of the debate on its website.
- C-SPAN has a livestream of the debate on its website.
- ABC News has a livestream of the debate on its website.
What are the rules for the debate?
The VP debate will be similar to the presidential debate between Trump and Harris. There will be no audience at the CBS Broadcast Center studio in New York, just as there wasn’t an audience when Trump and Harris met in Philadelphia earlier this month. The moderators will have the power to mute microphones, but they won’t be using it unless necessary to stabilize the conversation. For all his faults, Vance doesn’t tend to shout at interviewers in the same way that Trump does, so it seems unlikely that the two men facing off tonight will get muted with any regularity. But, who knows? This is the first time Vance and Walz will be meeting, and Vance could try to put on his tough-guy pants.
The debate will be 90 minutes and consist of two 4-minute commercial breaks, just like the presidential debate. Vance will be introduced first, because the Democrats are the incumbent party, and there will be no opening statements from either candidate. From the perspective of viewers at home, Walz will be on the right side of the stage and Vance will be on the left, the same arrangement that viewers saw during the presidential debate.
Each candidate will have two minutes to answer a question, two minutes to respond, and a minute for rebuttals, according to the CBS rules. Vance won a coin-toss to choose the order of the closing statements and opted to go last.
Vice presidential candidates typically debate sitting down, but that traditional will be broken tonight as both Vance and Walz have agreed to stand. Why? As many people have joked online, perhaps it’s because they’re trying to keep Vance away from couches.
What do the latest polls say?
It should come as no surprise to anyone with an internet connection that Tim Walz is polling much better than JD Vance. On one side you’ve got a relatively lovable dad figure. And on the other, you’ve got the profoundly weird dude who keeps suggesting women should stay in their place. Perhaps that’s why just 27% of registered voters have a favorable view of Vance, according to the latest polling from the Associated Press, while 42% have a favorable view of Walz. And 51% of registered voters have an unfavorable view of Vance, while 32% have an unfavorable view of Walz.
Stepping back for the larger picture, the Harris campaign has been performing well in most mainstream polls lately, though the race is still tight by most measures. FiveThirtyEight’s daily polling average, which attempts to get a better sense of the race by providing an average of the most trusted polls, currently has Harris up 2.8 points, with Harris at 48.5% and Trump at 45.7%. The Guardian’s polling average tracker, which is only updated weekly rather than daily, has Harris up with a very similar margin, 2.9 points.
But the U.S. system doesn’t choose the president by something so silly as a popular vote. All that matters on Election Day is how the candidate perform in roughly half a dozen battleground states, and Harris is doing well in that regard, too. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has Harris up 0.8 points in Pennsylvania and 1.8 points in both Michigan and Wisconsin. If Harris wins all three of those states, she’s pretty much guaranteed to walk into the White House. But if any of those states are lost, the other competitive states come into question, like Arizona (where Trump is currently up 1.1 points, according to the FiveThirtyEight average), Georgia (where Trump is up 0.7 points), and North Carolina (where Harris is up 0.1 points). It’s still a nail-biter, if you believe the polls.
When is Election Day?
Election Day is Tuesday, November 5, 2024. You can check whether you’re registered to vote and learn more about registering if you haven’t done that yet at Vote.org. The deadlines for registering to vote are coming up soon for several states. Don’t wait. And make sure you’re registered by checking online. Because, believe it or not, a lot of states are aggressively purging voters from the rolls.