Vance lashes out at Harris, Walz as he tries to regain momentum | US Elections 2024

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance took swipes at Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during a whirlwind tour of political shows on Sunday as he tried to rebuild the momentum of his own faltering campaign.

The Ohio senator claimed the two Democratic presidential candidates were “uncomfortable” about their policy positions ahead of the November election.

He also criticized Harris and Walz for what has become an increasingly successful line of attack of their own: calling Vance and Republican candidate Donald Trump “weird” because of their extremist positions on policies including abortion and gun control.

“I think they are two people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who are uncomfortable in their own skin because they are uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people,” Vance told host Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union program.

“And so they just call me names instead of telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better. I find that strange, Dana, but look, they can call me whatever they want.”

Vance seemed oblivious to Trump’s penchant for belittling opponents with childish name-calling, and he portrayed the “odd” line Walz first uttered as “basic schoolyard bullying.”

Shortly after the interview, and without any irony, Harris was labeled a “copy cat Kamala” in a Trump-Vance campaign memo for imitating a policy that promised to make tips in the service industry tax-free.

Vance spoke as Harris and Walz wrapped up a strong first week of their joint campaign, with new polls showing them catching up to or even surpassing Trump in several key swing states.

Vance also appeared on ABC’s This Week and CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, amid mounting criticism of his own recent appearances, including a pushback against comments he made calling prominent Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies.”

The embattled senator insisted this week that his comments, which were happily picked up and circulated by Democratic supporters, were sarcasm and part of a media-orchestrated campaign to hurt him.

Vance struggled to create a new narrative after the controversy and tried again Sunday to shift the focus back to Harris and Walz, the Minnesota governor she announced as her running mate on Monday.

On CNN, he insisted that Democrats were “insulting” the intelligence of Americans by refusing to present an agenda if they won in November.

“If you go to Kamala Harris’ campaign page right now, they still don’t have any policies (or) policy positions on what they’re going to do,” Vance said.

“I find that really insulting to Americans.”

Conversely, after criticizing Harris for a lack of policy, he claimed that she “is really the one making the decisions” for the Biden administration because “Joe Biden is clearly not capable of getting the job done.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Sunday, Harris said she would roll out her official policy platform “next week,” saying, “It will be focused on the economy and what we need to do to reduce costs.”

During his CBS interview, Vance attempted to link Harris to a number of policy failures plaguing the country. They included a claim that the not-yet-existent “Harris administration” was responsible for allowing people on the U.S. terrorist watch list into the country.

Harris, he said, was also responsible for Americans’ addiction to fentanyl.

“If Harris applied the right pressure on the Chinese and Mexican drug cartels, we wouldn’t have so many of them,” he said.

“You walk into Beijing, you talk to (Chinese President) Xi Jinping and you say, ‘Your entire economy is going to collapse if you don’t get access to the American market. You have to take this fentanyl seriously, or we are going to impose severe tariffs and economic penalties for not following our laws and not helping to stem the flow of this deadly poison.’”

Vance also defended Trump for calling Xi and Vladimir Putin “nice individuals” at a rally in Montana on Friday.

“President Trump has a good rapport with world leaders. There’s nothing wrong with him complimenting them as people if that makes him more effective diplomatically,” Vance said.

Republicans have also attacked Harris for not holding a press conference since appointing Walz, a point Vance reiterated on Sunday.

He claimed he was confused by Democrats’ criticism of his position on expanding the child tax credit, telling Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan: “They should clarify it, maybe in an interview with you. But of course Kamala Harris refuses to do interviews with anybody.”