Walz touts Minnesota policies in painting contrast with Trump-Vance ticket

WASHINGTON – Minnesota was on the debate stage alongside Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance on Tuesday night, which was notable both for its civility and its political punching.

Walz repeatedly schooled the nation on how things work in Minnesota, pushing back on Vance’s attacks on Harris’ policies on everything from the nation’s housing shortage to health care by explaining how the state responded to those challenges.

When Vance attacked Minnesota, saying a state law allows doctors to ignore the health needs of an infant born in a late term abortion, Walz said “that is not true.”

“In Minnesota, what we did was restore Roe v. Wade. We put women back in charge,” Walz said. “In Minnesota we are ranked first in healthcare for a reason. We trust doctors, we trust women.”

He also said “Minnesota has the lowest teen pregnancy rates.”  

Walz was criticized by several analysts for not pushing back against Vance hard enough at critical moments.

“I like and respect Tim Walz. I’m voting for him and Harris. But he has the killer instinct of a manatee,” GOP strategist and never-Trumper Mike Murphy posted on X.

Vance’s smooth, television-honed style contrasted with Walz’s blunt and less-practiced approach. Walz was more comfortable attacking Donald Trump than Vance, who on several issues said he could find common ground with his counterpart.

Walz was on stronger footing when he attacked the Trump-Vance plan to provide the nation with affordable housing – which involved selling federal land to developers. He promoted Harris’ plan to give first-time homebuyers a $25,000 tax credit and other help and compared it to efforts in Minneapolis to increase affordable housing, saying the city “does not have a lot of federal land.”

Walz turned on Vance for Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, saying “I come from a major health care state,” and lauded Rochester’s Mayo Clinic twice.

“If you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic and not Donald Trump,” Walz said.

Promoting Harris’ proposed $6,000 child tax credit, Walz said “we have one in Minnesota, too.” Ditto for Harris’ paid family leave plan. “We implemented it in Minnesota and it became a pro-business state,” he said.

When Vance declined to answer whether he believed Trump lost the 2020 election, saying he was “focused on the future,” Walz pushed back, saying “that is a damning non-answer.”

Vance responded that it was a “damning non-answer” for Walz not to condemn what he said were Democratic attempts to censor speech on social media — a reference to attempts to ban hate speech and dangerous posts.

Polls indicate that a significant share of Americans have not formed opinions about either Vance or Walz, and both debaters shared their life stories.

Vance recounted his rough childhood as a son of an opioid-addicted mother who lived with a grandmother dependent on Social Security and attended college on the GI bill. And Walz said he was a child of a small town where “you rode your bike with your buddies until it got dark.”

“My community knows who I am,” Walz said.

In the post-debate spin room, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said, “You heard a lot about Minnesota today.”

She said she would have handled the debate differently — and perhaps not as politely. “Tim Walz is Tim Walz and I am me,” Klobuchar said.

“I think the American people got to see two different visions. Tim is a North Star. He’s blunt,” she said. “JD Vance may not have seemed heartless, but his policies are heartless.”

Walz used his first question, regarding Iran and Israel, to hit at Trump’s age. “A nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,” he said.

But the most memorable line of the debate may have been Walz’s admission that he was “not perfect.”

“I am a knucklehead sometimes,” he said.

Rep. Tom Emmer, R-6th District, attacked the governor by repeating that quote on X and adding, “I think Minnesotans would agree.”

A stumble for Walz was his answer to recent revelations that he was not in Hong Kong, as he has said he was, when Chinese troops violently put down student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Walz said during the debate that he was in Hong Kong that summer when the protests were taking place and he might have “misspoken.”

Meanwhile, Trump hammered Walz for saying “I’ve become friends with school shooters” — by which he presumably meant survivors of school shootings or families of victims — when the debate turned to the question of gun violence.

The vice presidential debate is likely the last one of the 2024 election cycle since Trump has declined invitations to debate Harris again.

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