YORK, Pennsylvania — Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) shed his nice Midwestern persona Wednesday and unleashed sharper criticism against his rival, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), a day after the vice presidential debate.
A day earlier, Vance and Walz engaged in a civil debate on substance, in which the two men often found agreement in an attempt to appeal to swing state independent voters. Debate experts widely gave Vance higher marks for his smooth delivery and ease during the debate, whereas Walz stumbled out of the gate and didn’t make the case against former President Donald Trump until the end of the first and only showdown between the vice presidential candidates.
But Wednesday, as part of a broader media blitz, Walz didn’t hesitate to go on the offense against Vance, accusing Trump’s running mate of trying to mislead voters on the former president’s record.
“You can’t rewrite history,” Walz told a crowd at the York Exposition Center’s UPMC Arena. “Trying to mislead us about Donald Trump’s record, that’s gaslighting. That’s gaslighting.”
“‘Donald Trump tried to save Obamacare.’ Are you kidding me? He spent his entire presidency trying to eliminate it,” he said.
After his arrival in nearby Middletown earlier Wednesday, Walz spoke with reporters at Harrisburg International Airport about his past misstatements regarding being in China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre when he was in Nebraska. In one of the most viral moments of his debate with Vance, Walz admitted to being a “knucklehead” who sometimes misspeaks.
“Yeah, look, I have my dates wrong,” he said, saying he “was in Hong Kong in China” in August of 1989.
“It was profound for me — that was the summer of democracy,” he said.
Walz also addressed his other mistake from the debate, in which he said he had “become friends with school shooters” in an answer about gun control instead of the loved ones of school shooters’ victims.
“I need to be more specific on that, but I am, I am passionate about this,” he said on the matter of gun violence. “I speak like everybody else speaks.”
In Michigan, another blue-wall state, Vance also took a more aggressive approach and dinged his opponent for the school shooter gaffe.
“That was probably only the third- or fourth-dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said Wednesday, telling a crowd in Michigan he did not notice the remark in real-time.
The Harris campaign has been spinning Walz’s performance as a win, contending the audience saw the governor’s authenticity compared to Vance’s slickness. The campaign has already clipped the election question moment for an ad called Vance’s “damning non-answer.”
As part of his post-debate Pennsylvania bus tour, Walz underscored pressing Vance on whether Trump won the 2020 election, to which the senator replied he was looking to the future not the past.
“I was speaking to the American people last night,” he said. “It felt especially in that moment for me that Sen. Vance was speaking to an audience of one.”
In contrast to Tuesday, Walz criticized Vance’s gun policy positions and the senator’s scrutiny of the moderators for fact-checking him.
Walz, who entered the arena on his bus, started by acknowledging the damage caused by Hurricane Helene. Vice President Kamala Harris was also scheduled to be in York on Tuesday but ended up traveling to Georgia to assess the storm damage and the federal government’s response.
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Walz’s bus tour, which features Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), a former President Joe Biden supporter, as a special guest, will also stop in Reading.
Walz’s more aggressive post-debate travel will include rallies, smaller events, fundraisers, and targeted interviews in Arizona, California, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington. His media engagements will range from two national TV interviews, a late-night appearance, and sit-downs with sports content creators and podcast hosts.