Walz to grill Vance on Project 2025 in first vice-presidential debate

In a possible early preview of their debate in October, Tim Walz , the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has pushed back against an attempt by his Republican rival, JD Vance, to imply that abortion is not a “normal” concern for women voters.

Vance was asked by Laura Ingraham on Fox News how he would respond to suburban women who feared a national abortion ban. “First of all, I don’t buy that Laura,” he replied. “I think most suburban women care about the normal things most Americans care about right now.”

Walz posted the segment on Twitter/X and wrote : “It’s pretty normal to respect a woman’s right to make her own damn health care decisions.”

Related: Project 2025: rightwing manifesto’s key proposals and how they could affect you

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a senator from Ohio, have both accepted an invitation by CBS to take part in a one on one televised debate on 1 October.

Walz has vowed to use the debate to push Vance on his links to Project 2025 , the controversial rightwing blueprint to overhaul the US government.

“See you on October 1, JD,” Walz wrote on a bullish post on X after the network issued the invitations.

In a later email to fundraisers, Walz signalled his intentions to confront Vance about his connections to Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation thinktank that has drawn up Project 2025. The 922-page document foresees – among other things – sacking 50,000 civil servants and closing agencies like the Department of Education in the event of a second Donald Trump presidency.

“JD Vance shares Donald Trump’s dangerous and backward agenda for this country,” Walz wrote in the email. “Folks, I just agreed to debate JD Vance on October 1. Boy, I’ve got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy.

“Heck, he even wrote the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda. I am going to do my best to make sure everyone watching our debate knows just that.”

The latter comment referred to Vance’s penned forward for Roberts’ forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, in which the GOP nominee lavishes praise on both Roberts and the thinktank.

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes. “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

Vance’s foreword has undermined earlier attempts by Trump to disavow links to Project 2025, which also recommends an expansion of presidential powers, an aggressive offensive against “woke” ideology and a ban on sales of the abortion pill.

Trump has tried to neutralise Democrats’ efforts to draw attention to the project by claiming that he did not know the people involved and disagreed with its contents.

Walz’s comments on abortion also show his intent to put the focus on Vance’s views on that issue. The Republican has previously spoken in favour of a national abortion ban but has accepted Trump’s stricture that the matter should be left to individual states, following the US supreme court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v Wade, the 50-year-old court judgement that guaranteed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

Related: JD Vance agrees to October vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz

Vance has yet to formally accept CBS’s invitation and – in contrast to Walz’s gung ho approach – appeared skittish about the prospect in his interview with Ingraham, in which he tried to set out conditions and said he wanted to avoid “a fake new garbage debate”.

“We just heard about this thing three hours ago so we’re going to talk to them and figure out when we can debate,” he said.

“We want to look at the moderators, talk about the rules a little bit. I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates where they don’t actually have an audience.

“We’re going to do a real debate, and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it.”

Vance said on 7 August that he would debate Harris – now the Democratic presidential nominee but previously the vice-presidential candidate when Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket – but refused to commit to debating Walz because he was not certain that the Democratic ticket had been finalised.

In fact, Harris and Walz had been officially certified as the Democratic nominees the previous day after a virtual roll call of delegates to next week’s national party convention , which takes places in Chicago.