Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) will go head-to-head Tuesday evening for the first and only vice presidential televised debate.
The event, moderated by CBS News, will feature 90 minutes of live discussion between the running mates of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris just three weeks after the nominees held their own debate.
Recent Google Search trends on politics and elections offer a window into some of the topics voters are most interested in.
Some of those topics, according to the Associated Press and Google Trends, include the economy, crime, healthcare, immigration, abortion, and Social Security.
Here’s where Vance and Walz stand on each of those subjects heading into their debate. Many of their positions reflect that of the candidates at the top of their respective ticket.
The economy
Under Walz, Minnesota has expanded a host of social safety nets while supporting increased tax policies targeting wealthier residents and corporations.
He approved a state child tax credit and a free school meal program that was offered regardless of income. The state has also increased K-12 funding, allocated funds for affordable housing development, implemented universal paid family and medical leave, and expanded protections for unions.
Walz has cited drug prices and housing affordability as some of the most pressing economic problems.
“Kamala Harris and I know something about it. Being middle-class folks, our families sat at the table trying to pay the bill,” Walz told a local Georgia TV outlet during a recent campaign visit. “We know coming out of the COVID pandemic with prices where they were, that people need to see some relief.”
Vance has propped up Trump’s desire for across-the-board tariffs as high as 20%, a plan to boost domestic manufacturing that many economists say would lead to the increased prices of imported goods being passed down to consumers.
“The economics profession is fundamentally wrong about both immigration and about tariffs,” Vance told the New York Times in May. “Yes, tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things — though I think it’s massively overstated — but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects.”
Like Trump, Vance has pit blame for rising costs on migrants for things such as housing. He has also supported an $11 hourly minimum wage, suggested the economy could benefit from a weaker dollar, and deregulating more industries.
Crime
In Congress, Vance has supported legislation to raise sentences for those convicted of killing or assaulting police officers. On the campaign trail, he has vowed a tough-on-crime agenda, particularly as it pertains to illegal immigration, and accused Harris of enabling weaker crime laws as a former prosecutor and California senator.
“The contrast … between President Trump’s policies and Kamala Harris’s policies, it’s really just unbelievable,” Vance said at a recent rally in Wisconsin, a battleground state. “Kamala Harris wants to suspend deportations. Donald Trump wants to reimplement deportations.”
Walz’s handling of the racial justice riots in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd has been elevated by Vance and Republicans since joining Harris on the ticket as evidence that the centrist-congressman-turned-progressive-governor would be weak on crime nationally. Walz’s delay in calling in the National Guard to quell rioting in Minneapolis and elsewhere sparked backlash.
Last year, Walz signed into law a public safety bill that included gun control measures and a separate $300 million measure to boost public safety agencies.
“I’m a veteran, a hunter, and a gun owner,” Walz posted to social media this summer. “But I’m also a dad. And for many years, I was a teacher. It’s about keeping our kids safe. I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”
Immigration
Vance has echoed Trump on illegal immigration by vowing a sweeping crackdown on mass deportations and border crossings. He has blamed Harris and President Joe Biden for enabling a record influx and exacerbating the flow of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, into the U.S. Biden tapped Harris as a de facto “border czar” in 2021 to tackle the causes of mass migration from Central America.
“It’s hard to believe until you see with your own eyes just how bad the policies of the Kamala Harris administration have been when it comes to the southern border,” the GOP vice presidential candidate said during a recent trip along the southern border.
Vance has more recently sparked backlash for spreading debunked conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating the pets of local residents.
Walz has taken a progressive approach in Minnesota with migrants by expanding benefits afforded to those in the U.S. illegally, such as driver’s licenses, and free healthcare and state college tuition for those who qualify. In 2021, he urged congressional Democrats to create a citizenship pathway for “Dreamers” who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children by their parents.
Vance opposed a bipartisan Senate border deal that failed earlier this year, while Walz said he would have supported it.
“You stop this using electronics, you stop it using more border control agents, and you stop it by having a legal system that allows for that tradition of allowing folks to come here, just like my relatives did to come here, be able to work and establish the American dream,” Walz told CNN prior to becoming the vice presidential nominee. “He’s not interested in that. He wants to demonize.”
Abortion
Vance considers himself “pro-life” and has previously supported a national abortion ban with exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. He has more recently backed off more hard-line positions, such as comparing abortion to slavery. Vance has vowed that a Trump-Vance administration would not support a national ban and echoes Trump in saying that abortion should be left to the states.
“I can absolutely commit that,” Vance told NBC’s Meet the Press last month on opposing a national ban. “Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue.”
As Minnesota’s governor, Walz has expanded access and signed into law a bill codifying the right to abortion and other reproductive care. He also signed a “shield” bill into law offering legal protections for patients and providers who seek abortion in Minnesota from a state where it’s banned or restricted.
“Do you like the [policy] where women die because they can’t get healthcare that they should be able to get if they need reproductive care?” Walz said during a recent campaign stop in Georgia.
Healthcare
Walz has backed giving the federal government the authority to negotiate Medicare drug prices and signed into law as governor legislation to make the out-of-pocket costs for insulin no more than $35 for those who qualify. He also signed into law a bill legalizing recreational marijuana use for adults and rolling back related criminal convictions.
The Trump-Vance ticket has vowed to change Obamacare to address increasing insurance costs, but so far, the campaign has declined to offer many details. At his debate with Harris, Trump said he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the healthcare law, which is also known as the Affordable Care Act. Vance has expressed a desire to “deregulate” the law.
“We’re going to actually implement some regulatory reform in the healthcare system that allows people to choose a healthcare plan that works for them,” Vance said at a recent campaign rally.
Social Security
Under Walz, Minnesota enacted a policy that exempted most seniors from state income taxes on Social Security. Minnesota is one of the few states that tax such benefits. In Congress, Walz backed legislation to raise benefits and prolong Social Security’s solvency timeline by raising taxes on those earning more than $400,000 annually.
“The work we’ve done over the last five months will make a generational impact on our state — it will lower costs, improve lives, and cut child poverty,” Walz said last year when he signed into law a budget that included the tax policy.
Vance has mirrored Trump’s arguments that a more robust workforce and economy will bolster Social Security. Vance told the New York Times he opposed cutting benefits and indicated he was against raising taxes. Trump has called for the elimination of federal income taxes on benefits.
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“You get more revenue, yes, from tariffs, but from more people being in the labor force, from higher productivity growth, from higher wages, from transitioning young people who are not working into the workforce,” Vance told the outlet prior to being tapped as Trump’s running mate.
“You can get some revenue out of raising taxes on wealthy Americans,” he continued. “But there’s no way that you can run an economy at a structural growth rate of around 1% with demographics that are getting worse and worse and worse and solve the problem by taxing rich people.”
