Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said Wednesday that he wants to debate Vice President Kamala Harris — days after Donald Trump backed out of a scheduled presidential debate in September.
Vance told reporters he would debate Harris on Aug. 13, a date floated for a possible meeting of the vice presidential candidates before President Joe Biden exited the presidential race last month. The 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 Aug. 13, I’ll do it,” Vance said at 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.
Earlier, Vance crossed paths with Harris’ Air Force Two on the tarmac in Wisconsin and called her out for dodging reporters’ questions the last two weeks.
Democrats officially nominated Harris and Walz on Tuesday, hours after she announced him as her running mate, so it’s not clear how Democrats, as Vance suggested, would go about switching out either candidate at this point. Nor would they want to.
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 in Philadelphia. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Trump backed out of a planned Sept. 10 debate with Biden set to be hosted by ABC News after the president endorsed Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination. Instead, Trump has proposed a one-on-one with Harris on Fox News, which would be much friendlier turf for Trump. The Harris campaign responded by arguing that Trump is “running scared” from her and looking for Fox News to “bail him out.”
Trump reversed course Wednesday, insisting “I do want to debate,” though he offered few specifics on where or when it might happen.
The Democratic National Convention begins Aug. 19, giving the Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance campaigns vanishingly little time to debate before the Nov. 5 election.
“I don’t think Trump wants to debate. JD Vance [doesn’t] want to get within 50 miles of Gov. Walz,” Democratic strategist James Carville said Wednesday on CNN, arguing that Republicans are the ones who don’t want to face the Democrats.
As Harris and Walz embarked on a tour of battleground states, Trump’s campaign said 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,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.
