Senator JD Vance of Ohio on Monday accused Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota of misleading the public about their records and taking relatively few questions on the campaign trail.
But Mr. Vance’s attacks, made to supporters at an appearance in Philadelphia, also trained the spotlight on his own less-than-direct answers to specific questions, including whether he and former President Donald J. Trump would support an increase in the federal minimum wage and whether his own opinions have changed on the need for a federal abortion ban.
Some of Mr. Vance’s evasiveness could be chalked up to smart politics, such as refusing to say which Philadelphia eatery he preferred for cheesesteaks. Still, his elusiveness on more serious policy questions gave an opening to his Democratic opponents to call into question his own resolve on crucial issues.
Mr. Vance said Ms. Harris was only “pretending to run” for president, describing her as overly scripted and suggesting the former senator and California attorney general was fearful of answering questions from the news media. He criticized Mr. Walz for not agreeing to a second vice-presidential debate and accused him of lying about his military service.
“Even though he says he carried a weapon in war, the closest Tim Walz has ever come to combat is when he let rioters burn Minneapolis to the ground a few years ago,” Mr. Vance said, a reference to the protests in 2020 after a police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck.
But when Mr. Vance took questions from the reporters on Monday, the start of a busy week of campaigning, he would not say whether he and Mr. Trump supported boosting the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour, where it has remained since 2009. Instead, Mr. Vance pivoted to the campaign’s position on immigration.
“Whether you have a higher minimum wage or a lower minimum wage, the way to destroy the wages of American workers is to import 20 million illegal aliens and let them stay here with work visas,” Mr. Vance said, inflating the number of undocumented immigrants in America and misstating Biden administration policy. There are roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in America, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. While the Biden administration has faced pressure from certain local leaders to speed up the work permit process for asylum seekers, Ms. Harris has not called for blanket approval for all undocumented immigrants.
When asked whether his thinking on abortion access had changed, Mr. Vance repeatedly referred to Mr. Trump’s position, which has been to avoid making a decision and instead leave the issue to state legislatures. Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump’s approach as an attempt to “find some common ground in this country that has been divided by this question for 50 years.”
A spokesman for Ms. Harris said that Mr. Vance’s reluctance to answer the question on the minimum wage signaled that the Republican ticket was aligned with “their billionaire buddies and corporate megadonors.”
“A Trump-Vance administration is a guaranteed disaster for families across the country — with a $3,900 tax hike, higher rent and health care costs and, apparently, no raise for the minimum wage,” said Ammar Moussa, the Harris campaign’s director of rapid response. The so-called tax increase refers to a recent estimate from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the research arm of a Democratic-aligned think tank, on what Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost American consumers.
Ms. Harris earlier this month called for an increase in the minimum wage.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.