COLUMBUS, Ohio – When two of his Republican rivals for an Ohio Senate seat nearly came to blows on live statewide television two years ago, JD Vance appeared unimpressed.
“Sit down. Come on,” said Vance, the youngest and least politically experienced of the remaining candidates sitting in a row on stage. “This is ridiculous.”
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To many observers, his calm, self-possessed reaction gave Vance an adult-in-the-room authority over his opponents. When Ohio Right to Life endorsed him a couple of weeks later, the group cited his “statesmanship” among the reasons.
Vance's debating skills also caught the eye of Donald Trump, who endorsed him in that winning 2022 Senate bid and chose him to be his running mate in this year's presidential election. His early encounters offer a sense of how the Yale-educated senator could approach Tuesday night's vice-presidential debate, when he meets Kamala Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. It is the only time the two are expected to meet during the campaign.
Vance is known for being informed, articulate and unflappable. Even his 2022 Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, said, “He’s a smart guy." He'll bring a style honed through verbal jousting with a gauntlet of television journalists, but not one that looks like Trump's.
Republican political consultant Terry Casey, who has regularly helped with GOP debate prep in Ohio, said Vance and Trump are “night and day" when it comes to debating.
“He’s a lawyer who, intellectually, likes to dig into subjects in a different way than Trump does,” Casey said. “Trump both missed opportunities and took the bait when he debated Kamala Harris. My guess is, with Vance, he won’t fall into those traps or neglect those opportunities.”
Vance said on a call with journalists this week that he feels no pressure to do “anything similar” to the extensive debate preparation being done by Walz.
“I don’t think we have to prepare that much” because “we don’t have to hide our record from the American people,” Vance said.
Still, Vance has spent the last month reviewing debate plans, strategies and potential questions, according to a person familiar with his preparations who requested anonymity to discuss strategy. In addition to online sessions, most of that work has been taking place at his home in Cincinnati — where his wife, Usha, and Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller have joined members of his inner circle to get Vance ready.
Minnesota U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, the House majority whip, has been helping verse Vance in the Minnesota governor’s “folksy” Midwestern style, as the team pores over Walz’s past debate performances, the source said. It’s perhaps not as far a stretch for Vance — an Ohio native with Appalachian roots made familiar to many by the “Hillbilly Elegy” book and movie — as it might be for another candidate.
Vance comes into the event with solid debate performances from 2022 behind him.
One such performance, in Cleveland, elevated his profile in Trump world — and helped Vance land the former president’s coveted endorsement.
Vance’s Democratic rival that fall, the former 10-term congressman Ryan, said the senator’s vulnerability Tuesday could be in trying to deliver a performance that pleases Trump.
“He’s got an audience of one, for sure, so that can also be his Achilles’ heel,” Ryan said. “Because Trump will want him to be aggressive, he’ll want him to try to portray Walz as super extreme and out of touch, which I think — given Walz’s appearance, and demeanor, and sense of humor and everything — will be very difficult.”
Ryan said he went into his debates with Vance trying to highlight his past controversial statements, and that can cause Vance to “go off the rails a little bit.”
“Walz should be very aggressive in holding his feet to the fire and getting JD to really have to eat his own words,” he said.
Casey said the two men’s age difference — Walz is 60, Vance 40 — will be apparent onstage, although with that comes a contrast in debate experience. Walz has honed his technique during 12 years in Congress and two runs for governor, while Vance has run in just a single political campaign — albeit a fiercely competitive one.
If history is any indicator, viewers can expect Vance to criticize Tuesday’s moderators, CBS’ Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, while the debate is underway. Since becoming Trump’s running mate, Vance has been the Trump campaign’s highest-profile attack dog and a fixture on weekend news programs — where he often pushes back at hosts and calls them out by name.
In one notable exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance on Sept. 15 signaled his determination to stick by the false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pets, claims refuted by both local officials and Ohio’s Republican governor but amplified by Trump in his Sept. 10 debate with Harris. More than 30 bomb threats following those statements forced the city to evacuate schools and government buildings and some members of the Haitian community, who are in the U.S. legally, have said they feel unsafe.
Vance insisted to Bash that his statements about immigrants eating pets were based on things he’d been told by constituents. He blamed problems involving crowded schools, hospitals and other services in Springfield on “Kamala Harris’ open border.”
Challenged by Bash about the facts behind his assertions, Vance gave no ground. Instead, he directly questioned Bash’s objectivity.
“Dana, would you like to ask me questions and let me answer them, or would you like to debate me on these topics?” he asked.
Vance’s forceful pushback seems to delight the Trump base. In an interview this summer, Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, said such settings are Vance’s strong suit.
“I say commonly that JD Vance’s superpower is his ability to go into adversarial media environments, be calm, cool and collected, and say things that are very persuasive without raising his voice,” Kirk said.
Vance also has viewed those media sit-downs as excellent debate practice, the person familiar with his preparations said.
Under ordinary circumstances, it’s hard to find evidence that debates matter much, said Kevin Parsneau, a political science professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato. He said even the 1988 vice presidential debate — in which Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen devastatingly told Republican Sen. Dan Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” — didn’t change the outcome. Vice President George H.W. Bush still went on to easily win the presidency.
“But obviously the Biden-Trump debate mattered a lot, and there might be some evidence that the Trump-Harris debate mattered a little,” Parsneau said. “Vice presidential debates don’t usually matter.”
Yet, assuming this is the last debate of the 2024 campaign, “the margins are so razor thin that you don’t need to affect a lot,” he said.
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Staff writer Steve Karnowski contributed from Minneapolis.