Tim Walz and J.D. Vance took the stage Tuesday night for a vice presidential debate that provided less drama than September’s presidential debate but did present revealing disagreements on abortion, school shootings and immigration.

Three weeks ago, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump endured a contentious hour and a half, prompting an emotional Trump to rant about the number of people attending his rallies and calling the vice president a “Marxist.” before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief rise in the polls from that performance.

But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, instead focusing their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates, but one with a few blunders that could overshadow some of the content in the coming days.

In a major discussion about abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’ example by using personal stories.

Trump “boasts about how great it was that he got the judges involved and overturned Roe v Wade,” Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who was abused by her as a child was raped. stepfather and became pregnant.

“If you don’t know (women like this), you will know soon. Their Project 2025 will have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance refuted.

Walz also criticized Trump and Vance’s position that states should decide whether women have access to abortion.

“That’s not how this works. These are basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality in Texas skyrocket, surpassing many other countries in the world,” he said.

When Harris was considering Walz as her vice presidential candidate, he reportedly told her he was a bad debater, and at first, dressed in a sharp blue suit, pink tie, lots of makeup and hair gel, Vance looked like the best. more polished artist. Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, cut a livelier figure in a loose black suit.

Vance, the Ohio senator who has been a regular on right-wing news channels for years, was polished from the start, comfortably dodging questions about whether he believes the climate crisis is a “hoax” to lamenting how much money has been spent on solar panels. .

Walz achieved the vice presidential nomination in part thanks to his confident performances on cable news — from there his famous “weird” characterization of Vance and Trump was born — but he initially seemed nervous and did not repeat his sharp criticism. of his opponents.

Both men also often referenced their upbringings in the Midwest.

“I’ll be the first to tell you that I’ve poured my heart into my community and tried to do the best I could, but I haven’t been perfect and sometimes I’m an idiot,” Walz said, trying to navigate a question about his time in China. “But (Minnesotans) elected me to Congress for 12 years.”

Walz also criticized Trump and Vance for demonizing immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — the two have falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, actions that have led to bomb threats and children in the city being ordered to school by police guided.

When asked about immigration, one of the top issues in November, Walz discussed Harris’ history in California, demonstrating that the real goal here was for both he and Vance to talk about their bosses’ records rather than their own. to sell.

“Kamala Harris was the attorney general of California’s largest border state. She is the only person in this race who has prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug interventions,” Walz said.

Vance blamed Harris for the number of people crossing the border under the Biden administration, prompting Walz to raise the issue of a bipartisan border bill passed by the National Border Patrol Council, which Trump signed earlier this year was torpedoed.

“As soon as that was about to be passed and actually address this, Trump said ‘no’ and told them to vote against it because it created a campaign problem for them,” Walz said.

The immigration conversation led to an awkward moment for Vance. Trump has said that if elected he would carry out “the largest deportation in the history of our country,” but in a country where the children of some families may be U.S. citizens born to noncitizen parents, he has not explained how that would work.

Asked whether a Trump administration would separate immigrant parents from their U.S. children, Vance twice declined to answer.

Walz’s missteps, meanwhile, have been largely style rather than substance, but could prove fodder for the right in the coming days. He was asked about his false claim that he was in Hong Kong “when Tiananmen happened”, referring to the anti-government protests that culminated in the massacre of hundreds of people in June 1989. This week it emerged that Walz had traveled to China in August , two months later.

“Look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400 people, a town where you rode your bike with your friends until the street lights came on, and I’m proud of that service,” Walz’s response began, as he tried to avoid the question completely.

Pressed further, Walz said, “I got there that summer and made a mistake about it. So I’ll just… that’s what I said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the anti-democracy protests. And from that I learned a lot about what needs to be done in the administrative field.”

As the debate came to a close, both men were asked about the issue of school shootings and whether AR-15-style weapons, which have been used in several mass shootings, should be banned.

Vance called school shootings “terrible things” before moving to blame Harris for gun violence. He claimed there has been “a huge influx in the number of illegal weapons controlled by the Mexican drug cartels” – even though in most school shootings the weapons used were purchased legally. Democrats have pushed for stricter gun controls to curb mass shootings, but Vance took a different approach.

“What do we do to protect our children? And I think the answer is, and I say this without liking the answer, because I don’t want my kids to go to school in a school that feels unsafe or where there are visible signs of safety, but unfortunately I think that we need to do that to increase safety in our schools. We need to close the doors better. We need to make the door stronger. We need to make the windows stronger,” Vance said.

Walz was more candid. He said he met with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting and said “our first responsibility is to our children,” detailing his red flag policy in Minnesota.

“I ask all of you: your schools have been hardened to resemble a fortress – is that what we have to go through?” he said.

‘I think we’ll end up looking for a scapegoat. Sometimes it’s just the guns.”

But his strong response to gun reform was overshadowed on social media when he accidentally said he “friended school shooters” instead of victims.

Vice presidents and their debates are generally considered unimportant, and it remains to be seen how much of an impact this debate will have. But with the election expected to be extremely close, the hour and a half of research and even the blunders will have been worth it if Vance or Walz managed to convince a few voters.