What to Watch For in Tuesday’s Vance-Walz Debate

As the two running mates hold their first debate in New York, here is what to be on the lookout for.

Follow live updates on the vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.

The vice-presidential debate between Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota may not have the sizzle of last month’s confrontation between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, but as the last scheduled debate on the 2024 calendar it could still alter the race.

For both campaigns, the debate is largely a proxy fight for who can better define and defend the visions of the candidates at the top of the ticket — and point out inconsistencies.

Mr. Walz, 60, and Mr. Vance, 40, have already exchanged a war of words from afar, with the governor selected after his effective branding of Mr. Vance and the Republican ticket as “weird.” Both are veterans, and Mr. Vance questioned Mr. Walz’s military service record almost immediately after he was selected, an expected line of attack at the debate hosted by CBS News.

The two candidates will be standing and, unlike in the presidential showdown, no microphones will be muted, raising the possibility of lively exchanges of ideas and insults.

Here are five things to watch:

Which persona will dominate: Folksy or cutting?

To start, Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz are proven debaters and quick-witted communicators.

One of the things that helped elevate Mr. Walz onto the national ticket was his disarming way of speaking, both in his national cable television appearances and in his private interactions with Ms. Harris. Ever since, the Harris campaign has leaned into his Midwestern dad persona, with the vice president introducing him as “Coach Walz” and talking up his time as a football coach.

The debate will be Mr. Walz’s best opportunity to show that side of him beyond scripted moments on the Democratic convention stage and carefully edited campaign videos, like one of him taking viewers under the hood of his 1979 International Harvester Scout.

Mr. Vance engages in more interviews than anyone on either ticket and has happily clashed with the mainstream press on TV news shows and in person. He has also emerged from an ultra-online, aggressively combative version of conservatism that can come off as harsh and off-putting to a broader, more mainstream audience.

But he has been careful to present as more thoughtful and well mannered on television, a skill he showed off during his debates in the 2022 Senate race. Mr. Vance has also worked on this by recruiting Representative Tom Emmer to stand in for Mr. Walz, a fellow Minnesotan, in mock-debate practice.

Which attack hits hardest: ‘Dangerously liberal’ or just plain ‘weird’?

Vice-presidential debates are inherently difficult for the participants: Most voters cast their ballots based on the top of the ticket. That means the candidates have to avoid any damaging verbal stumbles while also focusing their attacks not on their opponent behind the other lectern, but on their opponent’s running mate.

Both men have tried to pull this off so far with attacks that are broad enough to encompass the entire ticket.

For Mr. Walz, that has meant describing the Trump-Vance team as “weird.” “These are weird people on the other side,” Mr. Walz said in July. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.”

It is part of the broader Democratic effort to frame the Republican ticket as extreme, focused on strange and divisive issues rather than on the needs of average Americans. Mr. Walz, who flipped a Republican-held congressional district in 2006, is particularly experienced in making appeals to middle-of-the-road voters from the debate stage, even as he developed a more progressive record as governor.

Mr. Vance, for his part, has attacked the Harris-Walz ticket as “dangerously liberal,” taking aim at the vice president’s immigration policies, suggesting she is lax on crime and blaming her for “every single problem we see in this country over the last three and a half years.”

The debate could well turn on which attempt at branding the other side is more effective.

Can Vance reintroduce his compelling life story?

The life story that first made Mr. Vance a national figure and that he told in his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” has largely been overshadowed by the back and forth of the national race.

The debate offers a chance for Mr. Vance to reintroduce the country to his emotional and compelling story of surviving in a family with a drug-addicted mother and being raised partly by his grandmother, “Mamaw” — “the name we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers,” he explained in his convention address.

His book was treated by many liberals as a must-read after Mr. Trump’s first election in 2016 and a guide to the disillusionment in America’s heartland that led to Mr. Trump’s victory despite all the polls showing him behind.

So far, polls mostly show that Mr. Vance has not been as well received as Mr. Walz. The average from the polling website FiveThirtyEight shows Mr. Vance’s favorable rating underwater by 11 percentage points, while Mr. Walz is viewed more favorably than unfavorably by four points. Mr. Vance is likely to reprise his role as a designated attack dog, but a few soft-focus reflections could buffer his image.

One other part of Mr. Vance’s past expected to surface is his old criticisms of Mr. Trump, whom he called “cultural heroin” in 2016 and privately compared to Adolf Hitler. Mr. Vance has answered these questions many times already, but he will now do so before what is likely to be his largest audience of the campaign.

Will their military service become an applause line or an attack line?

One of these two men will be the first military veteran to win a national election as a vice-presidential candidate since Al Gore, an Army veteran, was on Bill Clinton’s Democratic ticket in 1992 and 1996. Mr. Walz served for 24 years in the National Guard, and Mr. Vance spent four years in the Marines.

Their service was an issue earlier in the race when Mr. Vance accused his counterpart of “stolen valor,” pointing to a past clip of Mr. Walz as he talked about his support for banning the kind of weapons “that I carried in war.”

Mr. Walz, like Mr. Vance, was never involved in a firefight on the front line of a battlefield. Mr. Vance was stationed in Iraq as part of a media relations team, and Mr. Walz was stationed in Italy during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

Four veterans who investigate claims of fraudulent military service told The New York Times that they did not believe Mr. Walz engaged in “stolen valor,” but that he did misrepresent or speak imprecisely about his record at times.

Mr. Walz was asked about his previous comments during a CNN interview and suggested he misspoke but did not explain exactly what he meant. “My grammar’s not always correct,” he told CNN.

Who wins in a clash over cultural issues?

While subjects like the economy are always top of mind for voters — and on that one, Mr. Trump has a clear advantage — a range of cultural issues have come to dominate the presidential campaign.

Both sides see opportunities.

Mr. Walz and his party are working to harness anger over far-reaching abortion restrictions into Democratic support, casting the issue as a matter of privacy and personal freedom.

“Mind your own damn business,” Mr. Walz is fond of saying.

Mr. Vance has found the subject of abortion rights difficult to navigate. He has also made comments in the past about women and families that have outraged even some in his own party — deriding “childless cat ladies,” for instance. Taken together, Mr. Walz may see an opening to play offense.

By contrast, Mr. Vance has shown a willingness to lace into the Harris-Walz ticket over immigration and border security, casting Democrats as ill equipped to handle the migrant crisis challenging American cities.

Mr. Vance also promoted the outlandish and debunked claim that Haitian migrants were eating house pets. In a recent CNN interview, he defended that baseless claim by saying he was willing to “create stories” by “creating the American media focusing on it.”

To Democrats, it was proof that Mr. Vance was knowingly pushing false information. To conservatives, it was an admirable example of pushing back on the mainstream news media.

What may matter most on Tuesday is how these clashes are perceived by the small but crucial group of voters who are undecided about whom to vote for — or whether to vote at all.