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WASHINGTON – Republican JD Vance entered Tuesday night's vice presidential debate with Democrat Tim Walz hoping to avoid a repeat of Donald Trump's disastrous debate performance against Kamala Harris last month in Philadelphia.

In this regard, Vance was clearly successful at the CBS News vice presidential debate in New York.

Vance accomplished what Trump could not, delivering a debate performance that largely avoided the verbal missteps and outrageous outbursts that marked the Republican presidential nominee's performance in his face-off with Harris three weeks ago in Philadelphia.

Vance seemed to have an advantage over Walz in terms of composure and command of politics.

Vance is a Republican senator from Ohio, but the debate was likely the first time many voters saw him on the national stage. He used part of his answer to the first question of the night to introduce himself to voters and remind them that he grew up middle class and went to college on the GI Bill after serving in Iraq.

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Walz, the Minnesota governor, seemed off on the wrong foot early on when he confused Iran and Israel when asked how he would advise the president about a preemptive strike by Israel against Iran.

“The ability of Iran, or I, uh, Israel, to be able to defend itself is fundamental,” he said first. Moments later, he said “the expansion of Israel and its proxies” was a fundamental necessity for the United States to consolidate leadership there.

At other times, Walz seemed nervous and unsure. He sometimes spoke so quickly that he stumbled over his words.

The two candidates met on the debate stage in New York as polls suggest the election is just 35 days away. Most national polls give Harris and Walz a small lead nationally, but the race remains a tie in several swing states that will determine the winner.

Harris and Trump debated each other in Philadelphia last month, a duel that Harris was widely considered to have won. Harris has pushed Trump to agree to another debate later this month, but so far he has been reluctant to commit to a rematch.

Tuesday's event between Walz and Vance is the only scheduled debate between the vice presidential candidates — and could potentially be the final debate in the presidential race.

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Even before the nominees took the stage, the Harris campaign tried to lower expectations for Walz, who reportedly claimed to be a poor debater and was nervous about his performance. Trump, on the other hand, seemed to raise expectations for Vance.

“He’s going up against an idiot. “A total idiot,” Trump said during an interview with Kellyanne Conway, who managed his 2016 campaign and worked as his senior White House adviser.

During the hour-and-a-half debate, both candidates found themselves on the defensive.

Walz was asked to explain why he said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in the spring of 1989. Recently uncovered news reports indicate that he was still in his home state of Nebraska and traveled to China to teach high school there in August 1989, several months after the Tiananmen Square protests.

Walz stumbled as he tried to explain the discrepancy, eventually saying he misspoke and calling himself “a jerk” at times. “I can get caught up in the rhetoric,” he said.

Vance found himself on the defensive over his past criticism of Trump, whom he once called “America's Hitler,” and his false claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs.

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“I was wrong about Donald Trump,” Vance said, blaming what he called dishonest media reports that he said distorted Trump’s record.

Vance repeatedly questioned why Harris hasn't already implemented many of the policies she advocates as a presidential candidate, considering she's been vice president for more than three years.

Presidents, not the vice president, set the policies of an administration. But Vance frequently referred to Harris' “wide-open southern border” and said some of her economic plans sounded “pretty good” – but that she could have implemented them already if she wanted to.

“If Kamala Harris has such big plans to address the problems of the middle class, then she should implement them now, not when she asks for a promotion,” he said. “The fact that she isn't shows how much you can trust her actual plans.”

Vance was evasive when asked whether Trump continued to make false claims that he won the 2020 election and whether a group of Trump supporters committed the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol that prevented Congress from attending wanted to confirm Joe Biden's victory.

Vance said he and Republicans wanted to focus on the future and accused Democrats of trying to censor the speech of people who criticize the electoral system.

Walz countered that the threat to democracy was real and warned that Trump and his allies were “laying the groundwork for more protests and another attempt to overturn the election if they lose in November.”

Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.

On By John Fenwick

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