US vice presidential nominees Tim Walz and JD Vance took part in their their first and only debate of the campaign, with Walz managing to pin Vance down on reproductive freedom and the safeguarding of democracy.

Hosted by CBS News, the event came as Donald Trump refused to agree to a second debate with Kamala Harris after their first face-off saw her widely credited with humiliating him.

Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, appeared nervous as he answered the opening question on whether he would support a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran. Vance, by contrast, appeared relatively steady, insisting that “Donald Trump made the world more secure” and referring to the Biden administration as “the administration of Kamala Harris”.

However, Walz gained more confidence when the discussion moved to climate change and Hurricane Helene, which has killed well over 100 people in the southeastern US and left many communities in ruins.

Where Vance used the question to pivot to misleading claims about the offshoring of energy production and manufacturing, Walz reminded voters that Trump has previously dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and suggested it will open up “more beachfront property”.

However, Walz made a bigger dent on the issue of abortion, one of the campaign’s central issues.

Raising the cases of women who were denied healthcare after lethal pregnancy complications or in one case rape by her own father, he pointed to his own state’s record — and contrasted it with proposals from Vance and others on the right that would restrict various fertility treatments, as well as potentially monitoring pregnancies to prevent women travelling from states that bar them from seeking abortions to those that permit them.

“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, referencing a radical and highly controversial right-wing policy platform that Trump has tried to distance himself from. “It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception, and limit access, if not eliminate access, to fertility treatments.”

“For so many of you listening out there, me included — infertility treatments are why I have a child. That’s nobody else’s business, but those things are being proposed.”

Beyond denial

Walz also hammered Vance on the result of the 2020 election, which Trump has long insisted was stolen from him despite a total lack of evidence.

“He lost the election,” Walz said. “It’s not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”

“When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage. What I’m concerned is: where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president’s not going to stand to it.”

“Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn’t?”

Vance has previously said that had he been in Pence’s position as vice president, he would have gone along with the plan to refuse to certify electoral votes from states Trump had lost but claimed to have won.

That failed plan has been widely condemned as illegal, and criminal charges relating to it have been brought against Trump and numerous alleged co-conspirators. Pence had to be evacuated from the US Senate chamber on 6 January 2021 when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, some of them chanting, “Hang Mike Pence”.

“This was a threat to our democracy in a way we have not seen,” Walz said, “and it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say — he is still saying he didn’t lose the election. Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance said. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”

“That’s a damning non-answer,” Walz replied.

Euronews