Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio are meeting Tuesday for their first and only scheduled vice presidential debate.
Walz, who is Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, and Vance, who is on the Republican ticket with former President Donald Trump, will make the case for their respective candidates five weeks before Election Day. They have been crisscrossing the country to introduce themselves to voters, paying special attention to the handful of battleground states that will determine the winner.
Here’s how to watch the debate:
The 90-minute debate will start at 9 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1. It's being moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS' “Face the Nation.”
CBS News is airing on its broadcast network live and will livestream it on all platforms where CBS News 24/7 and Paramount+ are available. It's also being made available for simulcast, and other networks will likely air it.
The vice-presidential debate is taking place in New York City.
Often the scene of fundraising events for candidates in both parties, New York has been considered a reliably Democratic state in the general election. But Trump, a native New Yorker, has insisted he has a chance to put it in the Republican column this year, despite losing the state in his two earlier bids for the presidency, and has held events in the South Bronx and on Long Island.
Harris, meanwhile, has announced she's skipping this year's Al Smith dinner, a Catholic Charities benefit event held in New York City that is typically used to promote collegiality and good humor. Rather than attend the Oct. 17 gala — at which Trump will now be the sole featured speaker — Harris' campaign said she would stump in a battleground state instead.
Walz and Vance will meet for the first time in person on the biggest stage of their political careers. Both have been engaged in preparations for the debate with stand-ins used for their opponents.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been playing the role of Vance in the Walz debate prep, which has been taking place at a downtown Minneapolis hotel, according to a person familiar with the preparations. The person said Buttigieg was chosen because he's a sharp communicator, and the campaign believes that Vance will be a formidable opponent.
On the Republican side, a person familiar with Vance's preparations said GOP Rep. Tom Emmer — who, like Walz, hails from Minnesota — will be standing in for the Democrat in a similar fashion. The people speaking about both candidates' plans spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door preparations.
CBS is expected to release more information about the debate rules in the coming days.
No additional presidential or vice presidential debates are scheduled, but that could always change.
After Harris and Trump's presidential debate on Sept. 10, Harris said she'd be open to debating the former president again. She said she would “gladly” accept an Oct. 23 invitation from CNN and hoped Trump would do the same.
Trump, however, has said that date, less than two weeks ahead of the November election, would be “too late.” Early voting is already underway in several states.
But that proposed timeline would be roughly in line with the last two presidential cycles. Trump’s last debate with President Joe Biden in 2020 was on Oct. 22, and the third and final debate he had with Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 occurred on Oct. 19.
Presidential nominees typically debate each other more than once per cycle, but this year is different in several ways. Debates are being orchestrated on an ad hoc basis by host networks, as opposed to the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, through which debate rules were previously negotiated privately. Trump and Biden debated each other once this year, but Biden’s disastrous performance in that June meeting is one of the factors that led to his decision to shutter his reelection bid, making way for Harris to become the Democrats’ nominee.
Associated Press writers Chris Megerian and Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.
Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
How to watch the vice presidential debate between Walz and Vance
How to watch the vice presidential debate between Walz and Vance
This combination of images shows Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, at left in Erie, Pa., Aug. 28, 2024, and Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaking at the DNC in Chicago, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo)
PHOENIX (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday will make her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee to confront head-on one of her biggest vulnerabilities ahead of the November election.
She is scheduled to appear in Douglas, Arizona, as former President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans pound Harris relentlessly over the Biden administration's record on migration and fault the vice president for spending little time visiting the border during her time in the White House.
Immigration and border security are top issues in Arizona, the only battleground state that borders Mexico and one that contended with a record influx of asylum seekers last year. Trump has an edge with voters on migration, and Harris has gone on offense to improve her standing on the issue and defuse a key line of political attack for Trump.
In nearly every campaign speech she gives, Harris recounts how a sweeping bipartisan package aiming to overhaul the federal immigration system collapsed in Congress earlier this year after Trump urged top Republicans to oppose it.
"The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” Harris plans to say, according to an excerpt of her remarks previewed by her campaign.
After the immigration legislation stalled, the Biden administration announced rules that bar migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. Since then, arrests for illegal border crossings have fallen.
Harris will also use her trip to remind voters about her work as attorney general of California in confronting crime along the border. During an August rally in Glendale, outside Phoenix, she talked about helping to prosecute drug- and people-smuggling gangs that operated transnationally and at the border.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said then.
Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost, at 27 the youngest member of Congress and a leading advocate for Harris with young and Hispanic voters, said that in backing stricter enforcement, Harris is trying to “strike a chord” and “she understands that, right now, there is a crisis at the border. It’s a humanitarian crisis.”
“That’s why she’s pushing for more resources at the border so that we have an orderly process, which is really important,” Frost said. “But, the thing is, that’s where Donald Trump stops, is just at enforcement.”
The vice president’s trip to Douglas thrusts the issue of immigration into the brightest spotlight yet less than six weeks before Election Day.
Trump didn’t wait for her to arrive there before pushing back.
On Thursday, he delivered a lengthy diatribe from New York, declaring that “anything she says tomorrow, you know is a fraud because she was the worst in history at protecting our country. So she’ll try and make herself look a little bit better. But it’s not possible."
A day earlier, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump told voters that “when Kamala speaks about the border, her credibility is less than zero."
The Trump campaign has also countered with its own TV ads deriding the vice president as a failed “border czar.”
“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here,” said one spot. However, estimates on how many people have entered the country illegally since the start of the Biden administration in 2021 vary widely.
Harris also never held the position of border czar. Instead, her assignment was to tackle the “root causes” of migration from three Central American nations — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — that were responsible for a significant share of border crossers.
The vice president took a long-term approach to an immediate problem, helping persuade multinational corporations and Latin American businesses to invest in the region. That, she argued, would create jobs and give locals more reasons to stay home rather than take the arduous trek north.
Still, Trump has continued to decry an “invasion” of border crossers.
Polls show that most American trust him to handle immigration more than they do Harris.
Douglas, where Harris will appear, is an overwhelmingly Democratic border town in GOP-dominated Cochise County, where the Republicans on the board of supervisors are facing criminal charges for refusing to certify the 2022 election results. Trump was in the area last month, using a remote stretch of border wall and a pile of steel beams to draw a contrast between himself and Harris on border security.
The town of 16,000 people has strong ties to its much larger neighbor, Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a busy port of entry that’s slated for a long-sought upgrade. Many locals are as concerned with making legal border crossings more efficient as they are with combatting illegal ones.
Weissert reported from Washington.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris departs from Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024, enroute to New York. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris addresses the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Pittsburgh, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at Trump Tower in New York, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (Seth Wenig)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks as she meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, at the Vice President's ceremonial office inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
