Gone was the JD Vance of “childless cat ladies.” Gone was the JD Vance who falsely claimed Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. And gone was the JD Vance of gleefully owning the libs online.
Instead, Vance — the Republican senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s running mate — used Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in New York to try to reintroduce a smoother, more affable version of himself to the nation. And, potentially more valuable to the Trump-Vance campaign, he also used the prime-time slot to repackage MAGA for the political middle — offering a softer, more moderate, and often misleading version of Trump’s polarizing vision and policy prescriptions.
In fact, Vance spewed falsehoods and exaggerations on a host of Trump’s core policy positions, ranging from immigration to health care to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Toward the end of the debate, he refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the election in 2020, a reminder of the revisionist history the Republican ticket has embraced.
But in many ways, the hardcore online bro from the far-right scrollisphere was conspicuously absent, replaced for at least one evening with the helpful narrator of “Hillbilly Elegy” — Vance’s 2016 memoir that explained and demystified Appalachia for large swaths of the country still coming to terms with Trump’s unexpected victory. It was yet another well-timed reinvention for a candidate who in the past few years transformed from vocal Trump critic to obsequious Trump defender.
Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and ardent Trump critic, took to X to facetiously praise Vance’s ability to “code switch,” writing that his transformation from a jerk “who is ambivalent to human suffering on MAGA bro podcasts to a guy who credibly seems like he doesn’t want other people to die on the debate stage is a useful political skill that he has deployed with effect.”
Perhaps the clearest example of the MAGA rebrand — the version the campaign hopes that political independents and suburban voters could actually feel good about supporting — came midway through the debate on the topic of abortion.
Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the fall of Roe v. Wade. And Vance ran for Senate in 2022 on a platform that promised to “end abortion,” saying he would like the procedure to be “illegal nationally” and suggesting that he might be open to restrictions to stop women from leaving the state for abortion care.
But on Tuesday night, Vance referenced an anonymous friend in an abusive relationship who told him how grateful she was that she had been able to have an abortion, seeming to imply — but not quite saying — that he supported her decision to terminate her pregnancy.
“I know she’s watching tonight and I love you,” he said, staring directly into the camera, before acknowledging that most Americans feel differently than he does about the issue — and pledging to earn their trust.
“We’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they, frankly, just don’t trust us,” he said. “And I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.”
The Trump campaign has wrestled all year with how to talk about abortion, eager to win the support of moderate Republican and independent women in swing states who care about abortion rights without alienating its largely antiabortion base.
The former president flip-flopped in late August on an amendment that would protect abortion rights in Florida’s constitution — declaring that he found the measure too “radical” less than 24 hours after suggesting that he would support it. He also recently said his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”
On Tuesday night, Vance offered the clearest recognition yet from the Republican ticket that his party is out of step with the American people on this issue — 63 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases — and Trump, watching from afar and weighing in on social media, appeared to agree. During the debate, the former president pledged on Truth Social to veto a national abortion ban — after refusing to make that same promise in his own debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month.
Abortion was hardly the only issue on which Vance offered a gauzy — and at times distorted — portrait of the Trump-Vance platform.
Venturing into territory that some Democrats instantly flagged as anti-vaccine, Vance offered a more benign spin to those skeptical of the anti-vaccine movement, referring to his own three children and saying: “Look, so many of the drugs — the pharmaceuticals — that we put in the bodies of our children are manufactured by nations that hate us. This has to stop, and we’re not going to stop it by listening to experts.”
And during an exchange about guns, Vance immediately offered his sympathy after Walz described his 17-year-old son witnessing a shooting at a community center while playing volleyball.
“Tim, first of all, I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed the shooting, and I’m sorry about that, and I hope he’s doing okay,” Vance said. “Christ have mercy.”
In many ways, Vance offered a redo of the debate his campaign wished Trump had executed against Harris in their debate faceoff last month, largely refusing to get distracted and keeping his focus squarely trained on the vice president.
He also repeatedly made the argument against Harris that Trump’s team had hoped the former president would make: that she has served as President Joe Biden’s vice president for nearly four years, and if she has so many grand plans, why didn’t she implement any of them?
“Governor Walz, you blame Donald Trump,” Vance said at one point early in the debate. “Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years? And the answer is your running mate, not mine.”
Vance’s performance Tuesday night offered a striking contrast not just to his campaign-trail self, but also to his running mate, who just hours earlier in Milwaukee had offered remarks that were, by turns, rambling, off-script and, at times, even nearly incoherent.
The senator from Ohio was polished, speaking in calm, measured tones and at times going out of his way to stress that he agreed with Walz on some issue or another.
He also tried to soften his own image, referring to his children at least three times.
“I’ve got three beautiful little kids at home — 7, 4 and 2 — and I love them very much,” he said at one point. “I hope they’re in bed right now.” (The classic awards show line was a gentler reprise of a similar refrain in his convention speech, where he admonished: “Kids, if you’re watching, Daddy loves you very much but get your butts in bed.”)
Near the end of the debate, when the topic of threats to democracy came up, Vance attempted to gloss over the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s role in it.
“Remember, he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened?” Vance said. “Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House.”
It was one of several blatant instances of Vance offering — again, with an equanimous, respectful delivery — downright falsehoods. He repeatedly praised Trump’s leadership on the Affordable Care Act, despite his years of trying to repeal it, and touted the protections in place to protect people with preexisting conditions — people protected by the very act Trump unsuccessfully worked to overturn.
On immigration, too, Vance claimed the government is giving away free housing to “millions” of migrants. In fact, there is no free national housing program for migrants, and Vance seemed to be referring to shelters in New York, Chicago and a few other northern cities.
But the debate, which CBS said from the outset would not involve moderators doing significant fact checking, also underscored the limits of “Minnesota nice,” as well as Walz’s less polished skills as a debater. The Minnesota governor often struggled to push back on some of Vance’s claims, which allowed Vance to repackage both himself and the MAGA mantle he now helps shoulder.
“I like and respect Tim Walz. I’m voting for him and Harris,” Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist and outspoken Trump critic, wrote on X. “But he has the killer instinct of a manatee.”
Nick Miroff contributed to this report.