Ohio Sen. JD Vance said he’ll debate Vice President Kamala Harris this month — days after Donald Trump backed out of a scheduled presidential debate in September.
Vance said he would debate Harris on Aug. 13, a date that had been tossed out for a possible meeting of the VP contenders before President Joe Biden exited the presidential race. That date was never finalized, however, and since then, Harris has replaced Biden at the top of the ticket.
“Here’s my offer to Kamala Harris. If she’d like to do a debate with me on August 13, I’ll do it,” Vance said during a campaign event Wednesday in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “I don’t think she wants to anymore because, one, she probably doesn’t even know that she’s going to be the Democratic nominee. And two, we don’t know who the vice presidential nominee is going to be either. He’s got a lot of skeletons that are coming out of the closet today, and we’ll see if the Democrats pull a bait and switch on Tim Walz or on Kamala Harris just like they did with Joe Biden.”
Vance didn’t mention the possibility of debating the Democrats’ new vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Democrats officially nominated Harris and Walz on Tuesday, hours after she announced him as her running mate.
The Harris-Walz campaign did not immediately respond to Vance’s remarks. But Walz said Tuesday he’s looking forward to debating Vance.
“I can’t wait to debate the guy,” Walz said at a rally in Philadelphia. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Trump backed out of a pre-planned Sept. 10 debate with Biden hosted by ABC after the president endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination. Instead, Trump has proposed a meeting with her on Fox News, which would be much friendlier turf for the former president. The Harris campaign said Trump is “running scared” from her and looking for Fox News to “bail him out.”
The Democratic National Convention begins Aug. 19, giving the Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance campaigns vanishingly little time to get something on the books before the election. It’s looking increasingly likely that, at least for Harris and Trump, the June 27 presidential debate may be the last one of the election cycle.
“I don’t think Trump wants to debate. JD Vance [doesn’t] want to get within 50 miles of Governor Walz,” Democratic strategist James Carville said Wednesday on CNN.
As Harris and Walz embark on a tour of battleground states, Trump’s campaign insisted they’re “not going to talk about couches or coconuts or whatever weird fetish KamalaHQ is into.”
“When we have something to say, we’ll say loud and clear. If Kamala is a coward, we’ll call her a coward. If Tim Walz is a liar, we’ll call him a liar,” the campaign said.