The Most Desperate Part of J.D. Vance Agreeing to Debate Tim Walz

Tim Walz and J.D. Vance will be debating on CBS News on October 1.

CBS News invited Walz and Vance for a debate in New York City on Wednesday, offering them a choice of September 17, September 24, October 1, and October 8. Walz quickly confirmed his willingness, posting on X that afternoon, “See you on October 1, JD.”

And on Thursday morning, Vance finally agreed. He even tried to pressure Walz into a second debate hosted by CNN in September, a clear sign that things are not going well for him.

Typically, the vice presidential candidates don’t debate more than once leading up to an election, and many see the proposition as desperation from Vance and the Trump campaign.

When Vance was initially asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday evening if he would show up to the October 1 debate, he waffled.

“I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates where they don’t actually have an audience there, where they don’t actually set the parameters in a right way where you can have a good exchange of ideas,” Vance told Ingraham.

“In other words, we’re not going to walk into a fake news media garbage debate. We’re going to do a real debate, and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it,” Vance added.

But things clearly changed in the Trump team’s calculus. Vance’s debate follows Donald Trump’s decision last week to debate Kamala Harris, after weeks of hesitating and complaining about Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. He attempted to schedule a new debate on GOP-friendly Fox News, only to face criticism from his own supporters. It seems that now Trump and Vance are getting desperate in the face of Harris and Walz’s surge in the polls.

Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, just got a little bit weirder.

On top of the wannabe authoritarian’s other archaic views of women, the Ohio senator revealed to Fox News Wednesday that he doesn’t believe it’s “normal” for suburban women to care about their reproductive rights.

“What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda?” prompted Fox News host Laura Ingraham, claiming that some women have fallen into the belief that abortion is banned nationally.

“Well, first of all, I don’t buy that, Laura,” Vance said. “I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.”

But Vance’s assumption that suburban women don’t care about abortion is plainly wrong—and Trump’s campaign might be doing better in the polls if they paid attention to the data. An April Wall Street Journal poll found that abortion ranked head and shoulders above other issues in seven battleground states, with 39 percent of surveyed suburban women describing it as a “make or break” issue in the 2024 election.

An August report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in seven U.S. women have had an abortion at some point in their lives and that three out of four U.S. women believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Roughly 74 percent of the polled women also opposed leaving it up to the states to decide the legality of the lifesaving procedure.

“JD Vance thinks he gets to tell women how to live our lives,” Harris-Walz 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Women are sick of Trump, Vance, and their Project 2025 obsession with controlling our most private decisions. We’ll shut the door on them this November.”

Donald Trump’s obsession with convincing his supporters to surveil the upcoming presidential election may ultimately be hurting his campaign.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly claimed that Republican Party officials only need to focus on ensuring election integrity in November, and has centered his campaign’s efforts on recruiting thousands of poll watchers and poll workers. As a result, the campaign is relying on a constellation of outside groups to rustle up the traditional networks of volunteer door-knockers and canvassers.

These groups include Elon Musk’s incredibly shady America PAC as well as Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of white-nationalist Charlie Kirk’s organization. A recent FEC rule change from March now allows for canvassing super PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns on messaging and campaign data. As a result, Trump’s scrappier in-house volunteer program can be boosted by funds from megadonors.

However, outsourcing this aspect of the campaign could prove problematic if strong personnel and structural dynamics don’t fall into place. The America PAC recently underwent a change in leadership, which caused it to clean house with its vendors supplying the workers.

The Trump campaign said it has rounded up more than 150,000 poll watchers and poll workers, reviving concerns about voter intimidation that first cropped up in 2020. The number of employed campaign staff and campaign volunteers is far smaller.

James Blair, the campaign’s political director, posted about the campaign’s operations on X Thursday, following a report from Axios that relied on numbers he’d shared last week.

In his update, Blair wrote that the campaign was bolstered by 14,500 community volunteers called “Trump Force 47 captains.” He said 2,500 of them had been trained in the last week alone, and has previously estimated that another two thousand would join every week until election day.

Last week, Blair had said that outside groups had employed more than 1,000 canvassers in battleground states, which would rise to 2,500 by election day. He said that the campaign employed hundreds of staff across the battleground states.

The Republican National Committee had plans in place for a more expansive canvassing effort, those plans were discarded once Trump’s team took over in March, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

While Trump’s focus on election integrity may not have been a detractor when he was running against President Joe Biden, it certainly looks that way now. Since announcing her candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has worked with 330,000 volunteers and has a staff of 15,000 people.

“What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is we actually have a real race. This is a real presidential campaign. The Biden-Trump version of this was one event a week by each candidate, very rarely on the campaign trail and no real engagement,” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, told the Post. “Now this is going to be one of those campaigns where strategies matter, resources matter, time matters, and there is not much room for error.”

Several people close to the Trump campaign told the Post that there was an ongoing effort to get the easily distractible candidate to focus more on attacking Harris and other Democrats.

Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are actually encouraging illegal immigration for the purpose of bolstering their voter base. Meanwhile, he was the one who killed a bipartisan border deal earlier this year that would have helped curb the entry of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump has repeatedly said the priority of the Republican Party is to tighten election restrictions, but his fearmongering is fed by his own baseless claims of election fraud and conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting. Trump’s election martyrdom from 2020 may be the nail in the coffin of his 2024 campaign.

This story has been updated.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to meet with Kamala Harris to discuss a Cabinet position in exchange for ending his independent campaign for president, but was rejected, and it might be because she benefits from him staying in the race.

The Washington Post reports that Kennedy tried to meet with Harris last week, but neither she nor her campaign responded. Kennedy met with Donald Trump in Milwaukee last month about the same issue and also had a similar phone conversation with Trump that was later leaked online.

“I think it is a strategic mistake for them. That’s my perspective,” Kennedy told the Post regarding his rejection by the Harris campaign. “I think they ought to be looking at every opportunity. I think it is going to be a very close race.”

Aside from Kennedy’s outlandish political views, Harris has a big practical reason for not giving Kennedy what he wants. Kennedy draws more right-leaning voters to his campaign than left-leaning ones, hurting Trump much more than Harris. It helps her if Kennedy stays in the race.

Kennedy’s campaign is well funded thanks to early support from right-wing donors hoping he would peel away support from the Democratic ticket, as well as from his running mate, Silicon Valley philanthropist Nicole Shanahan. But his prospects, which were never that high as a third-party candidate, have taken a nosedive as Harris has seized the Democratic nomination and as damaging revelations about him have come out.

Those revelations include that he dumped a baby bear carcass in New York’s Central Park more than a decade ago, has multiple sexual assault allegations against him, is lying about his voting residence, and once had a worm in his brain. With these strikes against him, it’s not surprising that neither the Trump nor the Harris campaign has taken him up on his offer.

Donald Trump was scheduled to give remarks on economic policy at a small messaging event in Asheville, North Carolina, on Wednesday—but the former president couldn’t help but venture way, way off topic as his speech devolved into angry ad hominem attacks against Kamala Harris, mixed into his own typical word salad.

The pared-down speaking event is part of the Trump campaign’s new strategy to keep its candidate on topic, by having him speak to smaller crowds about only one thing at a time. Trump didn’t seem committed to this idea for even one event.

“This isn’t a rally, but this is a different kind of a thing. Today we’re going to talk about one subject,” Trump said. “They say it’s the most important subject, I’m not sure it is. But they say it’s the most important—inflation is the most important, but that’s part of economy.”

When trying to speak about the vice president’s not-yet-released economic plan and her influence on the U.S. economy, Trump veered off-script to complain about her laughing. “For nearly four years Kamala has crackled as the American economy has burned,” Trump said.

“What happened to her laugh? I haven’t heard that laugh in about a week. That’s why they keep her off the stage. That’s why she’s disappeared. That’s the laugh of a crazy person, I will tell you if you haven’t noticed—it’s crazy,” Trump said. The crowd seemed to respond to Trump’s detour into bashing Harris, and so he happily repeated the line. “She’s crazy!”

“Her laugh is career-threatening,” Trump said.

The Republican nominee readily abandoned his talking points, instead opting to play to his audience of roughly 2,500 fans, fantasizing about firing his opponent.

“Kamala! You’re fired!” he screamed, pointing forcefully as the crowd cheered. “Get outta here! Go! Get outta here!”

“Right?” he asked someone in the front row. He pantomimed again as the room whistled and cheered. “Get her out,” Trump growled. “Boom.”

Overall, Trump couldn’t manage to stay on focus, even though his spokespeople have lauded the so-called “discipline” of his campaign. He patted himself on the back for his train-wreck interview with Elon Musk, proudly admitted he didn’t understand what a “net zero” carbon emissions policy meant or how wind energy works, and accused Europe of tending to be a “little bit woke.” He grinned as he remarked that was now “changing,” portraying a grotesque attitude amid deadly anti-immigrant riots that have spread across the U.K.

Trump made his regular detours into racist fearmongering about immigrants, pretending to recount—without so many details—a violent crime done by “a gentleman from a certain country, I won’t mention—happened to be in South America.”

The former president tried to list other violent crimes perpetrated by people he called “the Kamala migrants,” but couldn’t remember a single detail. It’s almost as if that wasn’t what he was meant to be speaking about in the first place.

“There were four or five other situations over the last couple of days. Rape and murder. Rape and beating. Rape and something else. And sometimes just immediate killing. These people are brutal,” Trump cried.

Trump then attempted to tie migrants back into the main subject of his speech, blaming them for basically every economic problem.

Overall, Trump delivered all the classics, despite the fact that his campaign was pretty much begging him not to.