The vice presidential debate Tuesday between Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will likely be your last chance to see the two campaigns square off before the election.
With the two running mates not as well-known as the tops of the tickets, many people will be watching just to get to know them. Others will be looking for how they represent the tickets.
So what should you watch for?
We asked some MSNBC analysts to weigh in on what they will be watching for during the debate. Here’s what they said.
Follow live updates covering the 2024 vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.
Steve Benen
There’s an underappreciated point of distinction between Walz and Vance: At their debate, one will find it vastly easier to defend his running mate.
When the vice presidential nominees share the stage, I’ll be watching to see just how much the Republican senator struggles, not only to defend Donald Trump’s latest scandals, lies and missteps, but also to distance himself from his own condemnations of the former president — some of which he reportedly voiced as recently as 2020.
It’s a challenge the Minnesota governor won’t have to worry about.
It’s a challenge the Minnesota governor won’t have to worry about: He and Kamala Harris were, are and almost certainly will remain on the same page.
Walz has lived a charmed existence since being tapped for VP, but we’re about to learn whether he can take a punch. It will be very interesting to see how he handles real scrutiny and tough questions, which he’s so far been able to avoid. Walz’s superpower is his relatability. Vance’s biggest liability is his inability to connect with human beings. I’ll be looking out for Walz to exploit that difference, especially by highlighting some of Vance’s more extreme positions on abortion, marriage, reproductive rights and more. We’ll see if Vance is suddenly going to run away from all of those Christofascist views that he was so quick to espouse on the right-wing podcast circuit before he became the Republican vice presidential nominee. My guess is that he’ll certainly try. Vance has a hard choice to make: try to show balance and get his historically low favorability numbers up or please Trump. This means he will have to attack but not cough up a hairball. Gov., aka “Coach,” Walz must show that he is more than just a nice guy. He must show command of the issues and not fumble the ball. Quite simply: Will CBS fact-check the candidates, or will it outsource that to the candidates themselves? This seems like an especially important question given JD Vance’s serial lies about Haitian immigrants, but it also goes to the question of whether the media has been browbeaten into eschewing its most important function: the dissemination of truth.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
Brendan Buck
Brian Tyler Cohen
Susan Del Percio
Charlie Sykes
