There’s never been an issue more tailor-made for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s now-trademark rejoinder to the GOP’s abortion cruelty, “Mind your own damn business,” than his opponent JD Vance’s known support for so-called “menstrual surveillance programs.” In case you haven’t been paying attention, “menstrual surveillance,” a priority of the far right, would give red-state authorities tools to figure out if women there might somehow have missed a period or two and might be looking for medication abortion, or a way to travel to a state where abortion is legal.

When the Biden administration issued new health privacy law guidance to prevent law enforcement from engaging in such surveillance, Vance was one of only eight GOP senators to sign a letter opposing the move (20 House members joined, members of the far-right Freedom Caucus). The letter said the regulation “unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws” and “creates special protections for abortion that limit cooperation with law enforcement.”

Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller recently made it clear that his boss is also fine with the move. It’s “going to be up to the states” whether they set up regimes to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute them for getting out-of-state abortions, he told Newsmax on Thursday. (Miller has been accused of putting an abortion drug into a mistress’s drink to terminate her pregnancy, which he has denied. Mind your own damn business, indeed.)

Current Issue

December 2024 Issue

Can Tim Walz get Vance to talk about the sick reasoning behind menstrual surveillance? Let’s hope so.

But wait: Is it better for Walz to home in on the latest revelations about how Vance trashed Trump, as late as 2020, when he has claimed he was supporting him? Vance insisted that he’d dropped his Never Trump stance, which included calling the disgraced former president “hillbilly heroin” and potentially “America’s Hitler,” because he was swayed by Trump’s performance in office. But The Washington Post reported Friday that in 2020 he told a friend in Twitter DMs: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” Vance wrote later: “I think Trump will probably lose.” When the friend asked if Vance expected an appointment by the man he called “Emperor Trump,” Vance replied in the same tone. “I’ve already turned down my appointment from the emperor,” Vance wrote—“adding a winking emoji,” the Post reported. Does he still believe Trump’s economic populism was a failure?

Vance provides Walz with a cornucopia of examples of extremism, hypocrisy, and just plain old weirdness. Where does he begin?

Should Walz attack Vance on his appearance, just this past Saturday, with Lance Wallnau, the far-right New Apostolic crackpot (and January 6 attendee) who has called Vice President Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” who used “witchcraft” to defeat Trump in their debate last month? Maybe ask Vance if he thinks Harris is a Jezebel, or a witch? Or “mentally disabled,” which Trump himself called her Saturday night? (Can you say “projection”?)

Or should Walz focus on right-wing racists’ attack on Vance’s immigrant wife, Usha, and their brown children, and his weak-tea responses? “Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is,” he told Megyn Kelly. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just… I love Usha.”

“Obviously, she’s not a white person.” What does that even mean? Is it a kind of apology for loving someone who isn’t white? An acknowledgment that it’s kind of…weird? (Of all the weird things Vance has done, that is the least weird.)

Of course, Vance has crusaded cruelly against immigrants—not Indians, specifically, but Haitians and Latin Americans. But racists have been known to target generic “brown” people in their pumped-up rage. (Indian Sikhs regularly got mixed up with Muslims in the spree of Muslim bashing that followed the 9/11 terror attacks.) Should Walz ask, with the Lincoln Project, “What kind of man stirs up hate that could turn on his own children?”

Walz (and Vance too) will each have more latitude to challenge their opponent because, unlike in the Harris-Trump debate, their mics will be on (although CBS reserves the right to cut them off if the cross talk gets unmanageable).

Maybe Walz doesn’t have to ask, as a Fox reporter once did, why Vance is so unpleasant. The reporter was more diplomatic than that, asking the angry-seeming wealthy husband and father, “What makes you smile?” Vance responded with typical peevishness: “I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man.” What a charmer. He followed it up with an obviously forced, false guffaw, almost as though the internal engine that starts our laughs refused to turn over for JD (maybe because he doesn’t use it enough).

Perhaps the best tack on that one is for Walz to be his ebullient, girl-dad, Gus-dad, “Coach Walz” charmer, up against a man who looks like it hurts when he smiles. That connects to the other clear contrast, of course, on biography and character. Vance, who has exaggerated his family’s hardships, fled Ohio (not Appalachia) for Yale and Silicon Valley and great wealth; Walz more truly embodies the Midwestern, small-town family values Vance purloined in his best selling part-fiction Hillbilly Elegy. Walz stayed in small-town Nebraska, went to Chadron State College there, taught high school and coached football in Alliance, Nebraska, married his wife, Gwen, also a teacher, and moved to Mankato, where again he taught high school and taught football. As football coach, he also was faculty adviser to the school’s LGBTQ alliance. (Even a recent New York Times/Siena poll found that Ohioans viewed Walz as more “honest and trustworthy” then their own senator. Ouch.)

For his part, expect Vance to continue to lie about and distort Walz’s 24-year record in the Minnesota National Guard. As David Frum correctly notes, Vance could attack Walz’s liberal record as Minnesota governor. But he’s gone for the “he’s a phony” attack, “because Vance himself believes that the ‘phony’ charge is the most powerful one he can fling. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme phony.”

Indeed.

I’ve been looking forward to the Walz-Vance debate since Kamala Harris chose the Minnesota governor. The contrast between a genuine son of the working class who’s held on to his values with Vance, who sold out to Peter Theil and other billionaire autocrats, and who is pursuing a creepy crusade against childless women, is stark.

But Vance is mean as a snake and shape-shifting as a chameleon. How does Walz home in on his biggest vulnerabilities—and avoid getting bitten by the amoral snake? I’ll bet the Coach has a playbook for that. I can’t wait to watch.