Who Won the Walz-Vance V.P. Debate? Here’s What the Polls Say

Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate may not have changed many minds in the electorate. 

Polls following the contest between Republican Senator JD Vance and Democratic Governor Tim Walz don’t show an uncontested winner, with CNN reporting that 51 percent of viewers gave the edge to Vance versus 49 percent for Walz.

The favorability numbers for both candidates improved after the debate: Walz’s went from 46 percent favorable and 32 percent unfavorable to 59 percent favorable and 22 percent unfavorable among people who watched the debate. Vance’s numbers went from 30 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable to 41 percent favorable and 44 percent unfavorable.

But largely, the debate didn’t change many people’s minds.

Politico’s polls found that who viewers thought won the debate depended on their political loyalties. About 72 percent of Democrats think Walz won the debate, with a similar number of Republicans thinking Vance won. Perhaps more importantly, Walz won over independents, with 58 percent of them saying that he was the winner as opposed to 42 percent for Vance—but these people were also more likely to say they didn’t even watch the debate.  

Demographically, Walz’s strongest support came from people who tend to support the Democratic Party: younger people, those aged between 25 and 34, people with college degrees, and Black and Latino poll respondents, according to Politico. Vance drew his support from Republican standbys: people over 55, white voters, and people without college degrees. Men and women were evenly divided on who won. 

Vance came into Tuesday night’s debate in a massive polling deficit, showing him as more unpopular than any other vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race. He may have improved his standing somewhat given that starting point, but it wasn’t at the expense of Walz. Republicans don’t have much of an answer for Vance’s unpopularity, so it’s up to the Republican vice presidential nominee to improve his stock. 

On Tuesday night, while Vance did say some horrific things about January 6 and immigration, it doesn’t appear to have hurt him, at least according to these early polls. Now he just has the task of staying away from weirdness and hoping more damaging statements from his past don’t resurface.

There was another incredible fact-check during debate night on Tuesday that came only after the stage lights turned off.

In the spin room, Donald Trump Jr. spoke with CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins, using the opportunity to complain about what he sees as the demonization of his father by the media.

“The media has radicalized the people that are trying to kill my father. I’ve had to deal with that twice now in the last two months,” said Trump’s eldest son. “That didn’t just magically happen, that’s not him. The media created the fake Russia scenario,” he continued, winding up to place the blame of political violence squarely on Democrats and journalists.

“You can’t blame the media for those threats,” Collins replied. “There’s been no evidence that that’s what drove those—”

“When someone calls and allows people to have a platform to call someone literally Hitler every day for nine years, it creates it,” Trump interjected. “Whether you want to believe it or not, that’s a fact.” What he didn’t realize, however, is that he set the journalist up for a scathing correction.

“But as you know, JD Vance once likened your dad to Hitler as well. He questioned if he was America’s Hitler,” Collins reminded him.

One wonders how Don Jr. could even forget this, considering that Vance himself was asked about his disparaging comments about Trump, including the Hitler comparison, on the debate stage just an hour before.

In his response, Vance similarly blamed the media for misleading him about the former president. “I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” said Vance, using the typical MAGA scapegoat to explain away his long list of previous critiques.

Donald Trump’s potential second vice president—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—brushed off the events of January 6 during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, and refused to definitively say whether he would challenge November’s election results.

While cooking up an answer for the last question of the debate, Vance dove into the hypercharged history of the attempted MAGA coup, but with his own revisionist twist.

“The governors of every state in the nation, Republicans and Democrats, certified the 2020 election results and sent a legal slate of electors to Congress for January 6,” said CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell. “Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last presidential election and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?”

Vance immediately attempted to deflect the question, focusing instead on inflation, housing, and groceries, before quickly addressing the actual content of O’Donnell’s question.

“Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully, in the public square, and that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said,” Vance said, without making mention of any of the multiple instances in which Trump has publicly defended his supporters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol.

Vance opted to double down during a heated back and forth with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz moments later.

“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that, did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.

“I don’t run Facebook,” Walz continued. “What I do know is I see a candidate out there who refused and now, again, and I’m pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate. This is not, anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world. When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.

“Where is the firewall, if he knows he can do anything including taking an election, and his vice president’s not going to stand to it? That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn’t?” Walz said. “So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was asked to respond to Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion talking point during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.

“Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe that abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no, is that what you support?” asked CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.

“That’s not what the bill says, but look, this issue is what’s on everyone’s mind,” Walz replied, explaining that Trump had made way to destroy national protections for abortion.

During the presidential debate last month, Trump had claimed that Walz supported abortion in the ninth month—and after. Trump claimed that Walz “also says, ‘Execution after birth’—execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born—is OK. And that’s not OK with me.”

No one supports “abortion in the ninth month,” which is not a medical procedure, but Republicans continue to claim Democrats do in order to fearmonger about abortion.

During the vice presidential debate, Trump posted an all-caps rant on Truth Social claiming he doesn’t support a national abortion ban.

The moderators repeatedly asked questions of Walz that were shaped around right-wing talking points. When asking the two candidates to explain their leadership qualities, Walz was asked specifically to respond to reporting Tuesday that suggested he’d lied about being in Tiananmen Square in May 1989—a startlingly specific question, which clearly knocked Walz off his game. Walz took the opportunity to introduce himself to the viewers, and when pushed on the question, said that he “misspoke.”

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance was not asked about admitting to blatantly lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Trump-Vance ticket hasn’t ruled out bringing back one of the Trump administration’s most insidious policies.

During CBS’s vice presidential debate Tuesday night, J.D. Vance skirted and deflected a direct line of questioning about a highly controversial immigrant processing program that separated children from their families.

“Senator Vance, your campaign is pledging to carry out the largest mass deportation plan in American history and to use the U.S. military to do so,” started CBS’s Margaret Brennan. “Could you be more specific about exactly how this will work, for example, would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?”

But the Republican number two pick wouldn’t answer the question outright. Instead, Vance went on a conspiratorial tangent about the influx of fentanyl (the vast majority of which is actually trafficked in by U.S. citizens), crime, and minimum wage before finally touching on the policy’s victims.

“We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” Vance said. “Some of them have been sex trafficked. Some of them hopefully are at home with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules.”

Vance didn’t cast judgment on the Trump-era program, though. Instead, he opted to deflect the blame of the program onto someone who had absolutely no involvement in its proliferation: Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s wide open southern border, and I’d ask my Americans to remember when she came into office, she said she was going to do this,” the vice presidential pick said. “Real leadership would be saying, ‘You know what, I screwed up. We’re going to go back to Donald Trump’s border policies.’ I wish that she would do that. It would be good for all of us.”

Trump, meanwhile, has made his stance on the cruel policy perfectly clear. In an interview with Univision in 2023, the former president appeared open to resurrecting the violent blueprint, arguing that his administration’s family separation policy was not only an effective deterrent but actually decreased the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country.

“When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come,” Trump said at the time. “When you think you’re going to come into the United States with your family, you come. And we did for a period of time family separation, and others have, too, by the way.”