By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) -U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance and Democratic rival Tim Walz will debate on Oct. 1 on CBS, after Vance said in a post on X that he had agreed to the date.
Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, also said he had accepted CNN’s invitation to debate Walz, who is running alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, on Sept. 18. In his post, Vance wrote, “The American people deserve as many debates as possible.”
But the Harris campaign said there would not be a second vice presidential debate, though it confirmed that it was planning for a second presidential debate in October.
“Donald Trump’s campaign accepted our proposal for three debates — two presidential and a vice presidential debate,” campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said.
Harris and Trump are scheduled to debate on Sept. 10 on ABC News, and Tyler said their second clash would take place in October. The Trump campaign has not confirmed that timing, and a date and network have not been announced for a second debate.
Trump, who declined to attend debates during the Republican primary campaign, had suggested he might skip the ABC matchup after Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate. Last week, however, he agreed to participate in the ABC debate and proposed two more, on Fox and NBC, for September as well.
Trump and Biden had one debate in June, where the president’s performance was so poor that it ultimately led to his departure from the race.
Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, have exchanged barbs from afar since Harris named Walz as her running mate last week.
Harris’ entry into the race in late July has transformed the presidential contest. Opinion polls show Harris has mostly erased Trump’s lead in the half-dozen battleground states likely to determine the outcome of the Nov. 5 election, and the Democrat has raised hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to a re-energized party.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by David Ljunggren and Susan Heavey; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Jonathan Oatis and Alistair Bell)
