Democratic strategist James Carville said Tuesday he doesn’t think Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), former President Trump’s running mate, wants to get “within 50 miles” of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’s running mate, for a vice presidential debate.
In a CNN interview ahead of Harris’s first campaign event with Walz on Tuesday night, Carville said he was excited about the messaging opportunity for Democrats over the next three months and pushed back against the idea that Republicans had the “edge” in the race.
“Let’s get the convention behind us,” Carville said on “The Lead” with Jake Tapper. “I don’t think Trump wants to debate. JD Vance [doesn’t] want to get within 50 miles of Governor Walz, I can tell you that.”
“There’s a lot of football left to play here, and I’m excited,” Carville continued. “And I’m tired of banging my helmet against the locker. Let’s go out there and play some ball. We’re ready. We’re excited, Jake, we really are.”
Tapper asked what message Carville wants to see from the Democratic ticket in the coming months to push back against “the edge” Trump might have in the race “because it’s a change election and he has been leading in the polls.”
“Well, first of all, not call Trump a change candidate. He’s a backwards candidate. We’re not talking about four years from now. He wants to talk about four years ago. And I think that’s a pretty simple dynamic on our part,” Carville told Tapper when asked for his advice to Harris and Walz.
He stressed the importance of delivering an economic message.
“What I would like to see is come down tough on the side of consumers. Come down tough on corporate price fixing and price gouging. I think this would be something that would be eminently beneficial,” Carville said.
Walz, in his first appearance Tuesday night as Harris’s running mate, came out swinging against the Republican ticket, taking aim especially at his vice presidential rival, Vance.
“I just have to say it. You know it. You feel it. These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell. That’s what you see,” Walz said to raucous applause from the rally crowd in Philadelphia, using the viral new framing of the Trump campaign as “weird.”
“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on! That’s not what middle America is,” Walz said, adding that he “can’t wait to debate the guy.”
Last month, when Harris was the vice presidential running mate and President Biden led the ticket, Vance said, “Obviously we want to debate Vice President Harris because it’s important for the American people to see the contrast.”
The Hill reached out to the Trump-Vance campaign for comment.
The prospect of a debate between the two major candidates remains unclear, as of early August.
Trump over the weekend said his agreement to attend a Sept. 10 debate on ABC News had been “terminated” with Biden out of the race. Trump instead said he would be willing to attend a Sept. 4 debate in Pennsylvania hosted by Fox News with a full audience.
Harris’s team called out Trump for backing out of the ABC News debate and said the vice president intends to use that time to appear on the network regardless of whether he attends.
Trump in recent weeks increasingly has hedged about debating Harris, initially saying he would “absolutely” square off with the vice president, but later saying he could think of reasons not to do so.