Naomi Lim of the Washington Examiner highlights important aspects of this week’s lone vice presidential debate.

Vice presidential nominees don’t tend to decide elections, but they can tip them for or against the top of the ticket.

That’s the challenge for Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) when they confront one another on a debate stage Tuesday in New York City.

In what could be the last debate of the 2024 election and with voting already underway in several key states, Walz and Vance will try to do no harm to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, respectively, with this cycle’s battlegrounds all within polling margins of error and only weeks remaining of their campaigns.

But it is Vance who is contending with higher expectations ahead of the 90-minute debate on CBS amid Harris’s momentum and Trump’s uneven performance against her earlier this month.

“A strong Vance debate performance is probably not going to move the needle, but it will provide momentum to a campaign that has struggled a little bit since the Philadelphia debate,” University of Michigan debate director Aaron Kall told the Washington Examiner.

A recent example of a vice presidential nominee helping their presidential counterpart includes President Joe Biden’s debate against former House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2012 after former President Barack Obama’s disappointing opening matchup against Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Another instance is former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s debate in 1976 after former President Gerald Ford mistakenly said, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” during his debate.

“They can be a backstop and put some good winds in the sails of the campaign,” Kall said, adding they can also “change the news cycle.”

Vance’s debate could be complicated by his bumpy campaign so far, including criticism resurfaced from 2021 of the Democratic Party for being led by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” and a proposal from that same year that parents should have more votes than people without children. The first-term senator and former venture capitalist has defended his comments, adamant he was arguing that Democrats are “anti-family and anti-child.”