What happened at the vice presidential debate?

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Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It is Thursday, the third of October.

I'm Sam, I'm emma.

Democrat Tim Waltz and Republican JD Vance have met for what was expected to be their only vice presidential debate ahead of the November election.

The VP hopefuls met in New York for a broadcast lasting over ninety minutes, where the candidates debated issues from the climate to the economy, immigration, abortion and gun rights, as well as their plan to lead America as second in command to the future president. Either Kamala Harris or Donald.

Trump will take you through what went.

Down in the debate in today's deep dive. But first Sam, what's making headlines.

Police have charged a nineteen year old woman for allegedly carrying a Heswela flag at a Sydney protest. It comes after thousands of demonstrators attended rallies across the country for a national Day of Action for Gaza on Sunday. Victoria Police have referred at least six reports of hate symbols

More than one hundred and twenty people have come forward alleging sexual misconduct by Sean Diddy Combs, the rapper and music producer, is being held in New York on sex trafficking charges. Prosecutors alleged he used his business empire to cover up decades of abuse. Combs denies any wrongdoing. A Texas lawyer, Tony Busby has come forward, claiming some three thousand, two hundred people have approached his officers with allegations relating

The UK has become the first major economy to end coal power production, marking a key step in Britain's transition to renewables. The Ratcliffe On saw Plant in England's Midlands, the last coal fired power station in the UK, has officially shut, marking an end to one hundred and forty two years of coal power in Britain. Energy Security Secretary Ed Milliband said it was quote a major moment in

And in today's good news, scientists are a step closer towards rolling out technology that could help speed up the diagnosis of conditions like cancer, diabetes and arthritis. According to findings published in the journal Nature, researchers from the University College London developed a handheld scanner which can create three D images of blood vessels below the skin. The new scanners can generate images more quickly than scanning technology currently

Well, I'd like to pretend that I was there doing the brave work for the Daily Os figuring out this US election, but no, I was there at the tail end of my honeymoon. That's why you haven't heard me on the podcast for about the last month. But I can give you a sense of what it's like in the US. Ye please, the election only five weeks away. I mean, granted I was in New York, which is traditionally a very Democrat aligned area, but it's really everything

About interesting well, I mean it's certainly dominated headlines here in Australia for what feels like an eternity. Now we are really nearing the pointy end. But we've been speaking a lot on the podcast in recent months about Donald Trump and Karmala Harris, less so about these vice presidential candidates.

So before we.

Really get stuck in where are we aut more broadly, you know, not only in terms of the political pulse of the American people, but what about the polls.

Well, we always take these polls with a large pinch of salts, because that haven't been exactly right in the past. Nonetheless, it is important to look at the polling and see what it says, and basically it says nothing. We are no closer to an answer than we were the last time you guys spoke about this on the podcast. Opinion Polling shows the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris remains neck and neck. Online polling Aggregator five point thirty eight.

So given that it's anyone's game, you know, every moment now over the next four and a bit weeks really does matter. Which brings us to the vice presidential debate.

And it's an interesting one because normally we don't talk about the vice presidents. We don't really focus on it. I mean TV audiences for vice presidential debate aren't normally big, but this one was different. Yesterday, Emma run me through a bit about both of these candidates.

Yes, so we've got jd.

Vance for the Republicans, Trump's pick and Tim Waltz Kamala Harris's pick for the Democrats. They were in New York for this debate yesterday, hosted by CBS News, and really it was a chance for them to tell us a little bit more about who they are as candidates, and you know, an opportunity for debate on policy, of course, in terms of who they are. Thirty nine year old Ohio Senator JD. Vance was announced as Trump's running mate

The past few years.

He grew up in Middletown, Ohio. That's a predominantly industrial area, and he's spoken really openly about a difficult childhood, growing up with a mother who has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. And this is something he's discussed in not only on the campaign trail, but in his twenty sixteen best selling memoir Hill Billy Elegy. We've heard a lot about that book in recent months. Vance also served in

It's crazy that that was only two years ago and here he is as the vice presidential pick for the Republican Party. You said before that he wasn't always this loyal Trump supporter. What did he say about the former president?

Yes?

So his book release back in twenty sixteen coincided with Trump's campaign against Hillary Clinton, and during interviews about the book, Vance said he was quote never a Trump guy, that he quote never liked him. In a now deleted tweet, Vance said Trump makes people care about afraid immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible.

Now.

JD.

Vance has really played that sentiment down significantly during the campaign trail, but it's a point of contention that Democrats have really leaned into over the campaign, so they continue to bring it up and those comments continue to I'm sure jade Vance feels haunt him.

And it was interesting when those comments were put to Jade Vance in the debate yesterday. Jade Vance delivered the same response he's kind of delivered throughout this campaign, which was he was wrong about Trump and that he had consumed the same false media narratives. Those are the words that he uses about the former president. He was misled by the media, and now that he has kind of seen the light about who the former president really was, he knows that he's a good guy now. So he's

Yeah, so Tim Walls was announced as Kamala Harris's pick the VP in August. That of course followed this reshuffle of candidates after Joe Biden dropped out of the race. And Tim Waltz is a sixty year old He is the governor of Minnesota. He was elected to governor there in twenty nineteen, you might have heard him referred to as coached him.

Now.

That's because he taught high school geography in his home state of Nebraska. He also led the football team at that school to its first American football state championship. So the Democrats have kind of leaned into that sentiment of coach Tim.

He's the daggy dad.

He's the daggy dad. He's just like you. He was your teacher, he was your coach. You know him. He previously represented a rural district in the US House of Reps from two thousand and seven to twenty nineteen, so he has had this long career, or longer career in politics than Jade Evans. One thing about Walls is that he gained a lot of attention after he called Trump and jd Vance weird.

These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room. That's what it comes down to it. Don't get sugarcoating this. These are weird ideas.

Now this has really caught on across the Democrats. It's created a shift in how the Dems have spoken about Republicans. These clips of Walts using weird to describe Trump have really gone viral. And another thing to note about him is that he was governor of Minnesota at the time of the murder.

Of George Floyd by police in twenty twenty.

He has been criticized for his response to the protests that occurred after that murder and for not doing more to prevent the damage that followed.

And so that brings us to the vice presidential debate this week. It was on yesterday about eleven am Australian is in standard time for us in the office in Sydney. We can talk more about the policy side of things in a sec but we watched it together. What were your general impressions of the debate?

Yeah, I think something that really struck me right out of the gates was how nervous Tim Woaltz appeared to be. He was the first of the two candidates to answer a.

Question which is decided by a coin toss exactly. Yeah, that interesting one.

And people really use those first.

Moments of each candidate's response as a bit of a metric of how it's going to go. Who appears to be the more confident candidate. Now, it was a really serious one from the get go. On the developing situation in the Middle East. I think it's fair to say neither of them really answered the question, but Walls did seem to stumble over his words a fair bit more took a little longer to find his footing, whereas Vance

But commentators have noted that JD.

Vance, you know, he might have a bit of an edge when it comes to media training. He did a national tour of his book, He's done a lot of interviews, and that might have showed on the debate floor.

Okay, so that's kind of the manor side of the debate. Why don't we go now to the matter and the real meat of what they talked about. We saw a huge focus on immigration during the recent presidential debate between Harris and Trump. Did the vice presidential debate follow that same pattern.

Yeah, it was certainly a focus of the debate, but the temperature was turned down a little this time compared to that Trump Harris debate. So you might remember Trump making those viral comments alleging Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, where eating people's domestic pets. Now, these comments have been broadly condemned as entirely untrue, but they certainly added to a kind of panic about immigration. Jdvance didn't go as far as Trump in the VP debate, but he did

You've got schools that are overwhelmed. You've got hospitals that are overwhelmed. You have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes. 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.

Now.

Vance focused on this sort of need to empower law enforcement. He took aim at Kamala Harris for failing to control the US border at Mexico early on when that was within her portfolio in the Biden administration. And that is echoing the sentiments that we've heard from Trump.

And when those games were put back to walles. How did he handle the fact that he's representing the party that's currently in the White House. It's their immigration record that's being challenged, and it's his potential boss that is being held responsible.

Yes, so he was defensive of Harris naturally, and rather than kind of dwell on what she may or may not have done during her time in the White House, he referred to her history as the Attorney General of California. So we know that Karmala Harris was a public prosecut previously before politics, and as ag of California, you know that is a large border state.

Here's a bit of what Timwoll said.

She's the only person in this race who prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug interventions. But look, we all want to solve that. Most of us want to solve this, and that is the United States Congress, that's the border patrol agents, that's the Chamber of Commerce, that's most Americans out here.

It kind of feels to me like there are three primary buckets of policy being debated in this US election. Immigration, as we've talked about the economy, which just keeps coming up over and over again, and abortion. I want to talk about that. Now, give me a sense of how that discussion played out.

So basically, The debate here surrounds the fact that the constitutional right to an abortion was ended in the US after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in twenty twenty two. That handed power to the states to determine their own law around how they wanted to regulate abortion. So what's become a key election issue now is this continuing debate over whether or not abortion should be a national issue, or whether or not the states should have

So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that's going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships. And we have got to earn people's trust back, making childcare more accessible, making fertility treatments more accessible, because we've got to do a better job at that, and that's what real leadership is.

And here is how Tim Walls responded.

I'm going to respond on the pro abortion piece of that. No, we're not. We're pro women. We're pro freedom to make your own choice. We know what the implications are to not be that women having miscarriages, women not getting the care, physicians feeling like they may be prosecuted for providing that care. We're pro children, but we don't like this or you guys are pro abortion. That's not the case at all. We are pro freedoms for women to make their choices.

Another topic that always is around US politics hasn't played as much of a role in this presidential debate as I actually thought it would, but it did come up in the discussion yesterday gun control. We know there's been more gun violence, a spike in mass shootings, there was even an attempted assassination or two on one of the presidential candidates. Did either of the vice presidential candidates say anything different about their approach to guns, perhaps that we didn't know before.

Yeah, I'm always personally interested in the conversation around gun violence because, as you mentioned, it's really just such a part of American life that's removed from what we experience here in Australia. But Vance was asked about the responsibility of parents in what was described as America's gun violence epidemic, and this was off the back of the parents of a school shooter in the US recently being charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Now JD.

Vance said, there's a difference between a child stealing a gun and being given access to one by a parent. He kind of deflected on the issue and he said schools needed to have better security, but he pivoted the conversation back to the immigration issue. He said that the majority of gun violence in the US was being committed by illegally obtained weapons and that those weapons came over the border illegally because of border control issues, which were, in his words, Kamala Harris's fault.

And then the discussion was moved to Tim. Did Tim Wolves lean into that immigration centric response or did he bring it back to guns well.

One of the more surprising moments of this debate was what happened next, which was that Tim Walls spoke about something his son went through that I had never heard him speak about. He said his seventeen year old son witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball.

Those things don't leave you. I sat in my office surrounded by dozens of the Sandiok parents and they were looking at my seven year old picture on the wall. Their seven year old were dead, and they were asking us to do something, and look, I'm a hunter, I own firearms. The Vice President is we understand that the Second Amendment is there, but our first responsibilities to our kids. I one hundred percent believe that Senator Vance hates it when these kids it's a borent and it breaks your heart.

I was really interested to see how Jedi Vance would handle questions around the transfer of power, because he's part of a presidential ticket that has January six hanging over its head, this idea of Donald Trump not perhaps showing that he's able to hand over power should he lose. Jade Vance was then asked that directly, you know, would you be compliant with the processes that US politics has in place. How did Jade Vance tackle that one?

Yeah, it has to be said that this is the moment I think he probably handled the worst throughout the night, and the commentary around it has been that this might have been his slip up in an otherwise pretty smooth debate. He has come under fire essentially for refusing to acknowledge that Trump lost that twenty twenty election. He was really pressed on this issue. Tim Waltz pressed JD. Vance near the end of the debate and continued to ask him to.

Answer the question.

Vance played it off, said that he was, you know, focused on the future, which Waltz called a damning non answer. Overall, though, you know, things were fairly formal and respectful. It's not the debate that we saw from Trump and Kamala Harris. It's not the debate that we are used to seeing from US political figures. But I wanted to finish on a grab from both of the candidates which did take a different kind of tone about respecting each other and accepting the outcome of an election.

This issue of settling our differences at the ballot box, shaking hands when we lose, being honest about.

It, We're going to shake hands after this debate and after this election, and of course I hope that we'll win, and I think we're going to win. But if Tim Wats is the next vice president, he'll have my prayers, he'll have my best wishes, and I'll have my help.

And when I was watching that go down at the end of the debate, it really did bring back to me some of the research that's come out of the US that show that there is a portion of voters that are just craving normality, and they're craving convention, and they're craving civil discussion, and that clearly both camps see leaning into that as a way to actually gain more votes. I mean, we have to look at everything that happened

Thanks for having me.

And that's all we've got time for on today's edition of The Daily Os. It's so nice to be back on the pod. I look forward to having more chats with you guys in the coming weeks and months ahead. If you enjoyed this podcast, would love you to leave a review on Spotify or podcast. You can give us a rating. You can share it with a friend, and if you're watching on YouTube, click that little subscribe button. It really does mean a lot to independent media. We'll speak to you again tomorrow.

My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung calcotton woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.