Tim Walz in 2024 Vice Presidential debate: Gov. Tim Walz vs. Sen. JD Vance

On Energy & Oil: Let's harvest wind and produce more clean energy

WALZ: Donald Trump called it a hoax, [but Minnesota] farmers know climate change is real. They've seen 500 year droughts, 500 year floods, back to back. But what they're doing is adapting, telling me, "Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybean, and I harvest wind." We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We're also producing more clean energy.

VANCE: The real issue is that if you're spending billions on solar panels that are made in China, you're going to make the economy dirtier. We should be making more of those solar panels here in the United States.

WALZ: We are. In Minnesota.

VANCE: Some of them are, Tim, but a lot of them are being made overseas in China, especially the components that go into those solar panels. So if you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production.

On Foreign Policy: I am sometimes a knucklehead; I misspoke on Tiananmen

WALZ: I got the opportunity in the summer of '89 to travel to China, and we would go back and forth to China. And I'm a knucklehead at times...I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn't be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn't start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world.

Q: The question was, can you explain the discrepancy?

WALZ: No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that's what I've said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest.

On Free Trade: We need fair trading partners for soybeans and corn

VANCE: Experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods. They were wrong. Donald Trump said "we're not doing it anymore; we're bringing American manufacturing back."

WALZ: We need to have fair trading partners. That's something that we believe in. I think the thing that most concerns me on this is, is Donald Trump was the guy who created the largest trade deficit in American history with China. So the rhetoric is good. Much of what the senator said right there, I'm in agreement with him on this. I watched it happen, too. I watched it in my communities and we talked about that.

VANCE: So, appreciate that. So if you notice, what Governor Walz just did is he said, "First of all, Donald Trump has to listen to the experts." And then when he acknowledged that the experts screwed up, he said, well, "Donald Trump didn't do nearly as good of a job as the statistics show that he did."

WALZ: No, that's a gross generalization.

On Immigration: Matthew 25:40 applies to Haitian immigrants

WALZ: Senator Vance vilified a large number of [Haitian] people who were here legally in the community of Springfield. The Republican Governor said, "It's not true." There's consequences for this. The Governor had to send state law enforcement to escort kindergarteners to school.

VANCE: In Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans. The people that I'm most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris's open border.

WALZ: This is blaming migrants for everything. I don't talk about my faith a lot, but Matthew 25:40 talks about, "To the least amongst us, you do unto me." Most Americans simply want order to it. This bill [from Senator James Lankford, R-OK, and supported by Biden-Harris] does it. This bill gets it done in 90 days.

On Principles & Values: Jan 6 was not Facebook ads: it was overturning an election

WALZ: Donald Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost this election. 140 police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day. Several later died. To deny what happened on January 6--the first time in American history that a President or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power--and here we are four years later in the same boat.

VANCE: Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought, like, $500,000 worth of Facebook ads.

WALZ: January 6th was not Facebook ads. Donald Trump is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?

VANCE: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?

WALZ: That is a damning non answer.

On War & Peace: Build coalition against Iranian nuclear weapons

VANCE: Governor Walz just accused Donald Trump of being an agent of chaos, Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence.

WALZ: We had a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran's nuclear program in. Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place. So Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump's fickle leadership.

On Abortion: No registry of pregnancies; that's nobody else's business

JDV: Donald Trump has been very clear that on the abortion policy specifically, that we have a big country and it's diverse. And California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.

On Energy & Oil: Reducing our impact is absolutely critical on climate change

JDV: This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let's just say that's true, just for the sake of argument, so we're not arguing about weird science. Let's just say that's true. Well, if you believe that, what would you, what would you want to do? The answer is that you'd want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you'd want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we're the cleanest economy in the entire world.

On Families & Children: Paid medical leave will enhance our families and workplaces

JDV: We should have a family care model that makes choice possible. Let's say you'd like your church, maybe, to help you out with child care. Maybe you live in a rural area or an urban area, and you'd like to get together with families in your neighborhood to provide childcare in the way that makes the most sense. You don't get access to any of these federal monies. We want to promote choice in how we deliver family care and how we promote childcare because, look, it is unacceptable.

On Free Trade: Tariffs will add another $4000 in costs to families

JDV: We're going to be taking in a lot of money by penalizing companies for shipping jobs overseas and penalizing countries who employ slave laborers and then ship their products back into our country and undercut the wages of American workers. It's the heart of the Donald Trump economic plan. Cut taxes for American workers and American families. Cut taxes for businesses that are hiring and building companies in the United States. But penalize companies and countries that are shipping jobs overseas.

On Government Reform: People think we can get rid of regulations; some are needed

JDV: [Inflation] is not the entire driver of higher housing prices. It's also the regulatory regime of Kamala Harris. Look, we are a country of builders. We're a country of doers. We're a country of explorers. But we increasingly have a Federal administration that makes it harder to develop our resources, makes it harder to build things, and wants to throw people in jail for not doing everything exactly as Kamala Harris says that they have to do.

On Gun Control: Do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort?

On Health Care: Trump repeatedly tried and failed to repeal ObamaCare

JDV: I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged ObamaCare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump. When ObamaCare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and healthcare costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.

On Immigration: Congress must enact immigration reform; Trump said "No"

JDV: We've got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally. I think you start with deportations on those folks, and then you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country.

On Principles & Values: Democracy is bigger than winning an election

JDV: We don't have to agree on every issue, but we're united behind a basic American First Amendment principle that we ought to debate our differences. We ought to argue about them. We ought to try to persuade our fellow Americans. Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID, she's done it over a number of other issues. That is a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January 6th.

On Welfare & Poverty: 3 million new houses proposed, under the Harris plan

JDV: Here's what you won't hear, is that Kamala Harris has already done it. Because she's been the Vice President for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies. And what she's actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%, open the American southern border and make middle class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.