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Debate Bingo, VP edition: Tim Walz v. JD Vance
Tim Walz and JD Vance are set to face off in their first vice presidential debate of the 2024 US election campaign on Tuesday, October 1. You know what that means: it’s time for another round of DEBATE BINGO!
Tuesday's 90-minute debate will be broadcast live on CBS at 9 PM ET and will be moderated by CBS News anchors Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Garrett. It will take place at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. As the running mates of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Walz and Vance could inject fresh momentum into their respective campaigns, which have been in a lull following the Harris-Trump face-off on September 10. We'll soon see whose debate performance proves more effective in swaying voters.
Some tips on DEBATE BINGO: you can make it a competition with your fellow politics nerd pals by printing out GZERO Media's debate bingo cards. Or just screenshot them and share with your friends to compare online. There are four different cards so that each player can have a unique board. Every time one of the candidates says one of these words or terms, X it on your card. The first player to get five across wins. And if you really want to jazz it up, you can mark each of your words by taking a swig of your favorite beverage, doing five burpees, or donating to your favorite charity or political candidate.
Enjoy! Follow our coverage of the debate with us on social media too - we'll be on X @gzeromedia.
Walz Vance Debate Bingo Card 1
Walz Vance Debate Bingo Card 2
Walz Vance Debate Bingo Card 3
Walz Vance Debate Bingo Card 4
Remember, there's more going on in the world than just the US election, so subscribe to GZERO Daily, our newsletter on global politics, and watch our weekly show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer right here and on public television.
- Debate Bingo: Welcome to the 2024 Biden-Trump showdown ›
- Debate Bingo: Kamala Harris v. Donald Trump ›
- Harris wins debate ›
- Harris chooses Walz, Canada makes things 'weird' ›
- What Tim Walz adds to Kamala Harris' campaign ›
- Bloc by bloc: Can Dems win back the working class? ›
- Elon Musk and the Political Power of Young Men ›
Former US President Donald Trump leaves the courthouse after a jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts in his criminal trial at the New York State Supreme Court on May 30, 2024.
No one above the law?
Speaking at a campaign rally in Iowa in December 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump speculated, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Among the many Trump remarks that jolted the news cycle over the past eight years, this one springs to mind in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction in New York state court on 34 felonies relating to falsified business records.
As is clear from the counts, this is purely a paper crime, as no violence was alleged to have been committed. Still, observers from abroad are left to wonder if the verdict will be just another dynamic of US politics that Trump normalizes – and whether a candidate convicted of felonies could now become the American president.
No constitutional safety breaks
Nothing in the US Constitution precludes Trump from running for president. While each charge carries a maximum of four years in prison, the case will now get tied up in appeals likely to be decided after the election.
According to the current consensus among legal experts, should the convictions stand, any sentencing (scheduled for 11 July) is likely to be weighted more toward fines than prison time. Barring additional unforeseen circumstances, Trump will become the Republican nominee for the US presidency this summer.
This raises the question: What does Trump’s conviction really mean? Is this just a tale full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing?
Biden’s strategy is key
Much now depends on President Joe Biden. This election season has been a bruising one for the current administration, and it is just getting started. Headlines have been filled with news of the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict and domestic campus protest movements – neither of which are gaining Biden votes.
According to polling from May, only 34% of registered voters approve of Biden’s approach to the war in Israel. And on inflation and the economy, the top issues among voters, Biden’s outlook is equally grim.
On these leading issues, polling from late May finds that voters trust Trump more than the current president by a double-digit margin. For Trump’s conviction to matter in November, for it to have a half-life beyond the next few weeks, the Biden campaign needs to refocus the attention and capitalize on the potential tailwind offered by the New York conviction by making the election a referendum on Trump and not, as it currently is, a referendum on Biden.
A tight race with few persuadable voters
Otherwise, November’s election will be run amid calcified partisan politics in America. The election will turn on a handful of swing states – Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – where there are just a small number of undecided voters.
According to recent polling, those leaning toward Trump are particularly unlikely to change their minds. Even post-verdict polling has found Republican voters to be “sticky,” with only 16% saying that Trump should end his campaign as a result of the conviction.
Voters standing in the middle may be more flexible, but this election will not just turn on the independents in the center. The greater risk is voters disaffected by a rerun of 2020 stay home – or seek to undermine the electoral process and its results by resorting to political violence. We will likely look back to May 30, 2024, in the election post-mortem, to assess whether the New York conviction moved the needle with these voters.
Trump’s exclusive cohort
And for those observing from abroad and scratching their heads, with a sense of “how can this all be?” it feels only appropriate to point out that Trump, already in a rare group as a state leader, now joins an even rarified, more exclusive cohort – the convicted former leaders club.
From Malaysia’s Najib Razak to South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, and Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the world is populated by former leaders who fell afoul of the law mostly on financial or corruption charges. This is also something Europe knows a bit about with former French President Jacques Chirac convicted of corruption in 2011 (four years after he left office) and the specter of the oft-charged, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi still hanging over Italy.
Trump will be hoping that his prospects look like another fellow traveler along this path – current Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula saw his corruption charges related to the massive Operation Lava Jato annulled in 2021, paving the way for his reelection in 2022.
With a staggering $52.8 million of funding coming through the door in the 24 hours post-verdict, including a third sent through by first-time donors, Trump may be feeling like he lost on Thursday but will win on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump gestures at a watch party event to mark the Super Tuesday primary elections at his Mar-a-Lago property, in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 5, 2024.
Super Tuesday results shock no one
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump cemented their leads in the 16 primary contests yesterday, and a rematch of 2020 now looks inevitable.
Trump won at least 13 of the votes and is set to clinch the nomination as soon as next week. His biggest competition, Nikki Haley, carved out a surprise win in Vermont, bringing her delegate tally up to 89 compared to Trump’s 995. But she opted out of a victory speech in the Green Mountain State – and is reportedly planning to suspend her campaign.
But her showing in North Carolina signaled that anti-Trump sentiment is alive and well, especially among independents and college-educated Republicans. Trump only narrowly carried Republican primary voters with college degrees in North Carolina, 51% to 45%, and roughly one in four Republicans in the Tar Heel State said they would feel dissatisfied if Trump won the nomination.
Biden blew his rivals out of the water. The president won every race apart from the American Samoa, where he tied with entrepreneur Jason Palmer.
But the trend of Democratic voters choosing “uncommitted” in protest of US policy in Gaza continued on Super Tuesday. Uncommitted earned 19% of the votes in Minnesota, mirroring the results in Michigan last week and potentially threatening the Midwestern “blue wall” that was critical to his victory over Trump in 2020.
Other key races: In the California Senate race, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff boxed out his Democratic rivals and is likely to replace the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein when he faces off against the GOP candidate in the dependably blue state. In Alabama, newly drawn districts look likely to lead to the red state sending two Black representatives to Washington for the first time.
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Are you wondering about other elections around the globe this year? Check out GZERO's guide to the most pivotal votes of 2024.
Ian Explains: How the US turned red and blue
Do you live in a red state or a blue state? Until fairly recently, such a question would have been nonsensical in the US. Ian Bremmer rolls back the clock on GZERO World to take a look.
On November 4, 1980, NBC News became the first major network to call the presidential election for Ronald Reagan. What stands out about this clip is not the absolute drubbing that President Carter received, but those colors on that map. States that had gone for Reagan are blue, states yet to be decided are that sickly 1980s yellow, and lonely little Georgia, which native son Jimmy Carter had managed to hold on to, is red.
It wasn’t, in fact, until the contested 2000 election between then Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W Bush that major news networks agreed on a standard red-state-Republican // blue state-Democrat map scheme. That’s right, one of the most iconic signifiers of Republican or Democrat identity—second only to the elephant and donkey—is a modern invention, and one borne out of confusion.
Al Gore’s legacy will forever be tied to his fateful decision to put the peaceful transfer of power over his personal ambitions. He was also acknowledging a shared reality, as unpalatable as it might have been for himself, where George W Bush would be the next president of Red and Blue states, alike.
Watch the full GZERO World episode: Al Gore on US elections & climate change
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Democratic presidential candidate US Representative Dean Phillips greets supporters at a campaign event ahead of the New Hampshire presidential primary election in Rochester, New Hampshire, on Jan. 21, 2024.
AI has entered the race to primary Joe Biden
For a brief moment this week, there were two Dean Phillips – the man and the bot. The human is a congressman from Minnesota who’s running for the Democratic nomination for president, hoping to rise above his measly 7% poll numbers to displace sitting President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee.
But there was also an AI chatbot version of the 55-year-old congressman.
A political action committee that’s raised millions to finance Phillips’ longshot bid for president from donors like billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, released an AI chatbot called Dean.Bot last week. It only lasted a few days.
The bot, which disclosed it was artificial intelligence, mimicked Phillips, letting voters converse with it like it was the real congressman.
The 2024 presidential election has seen AI-generated videos and advertisements, but nothing in the way of a candidate stand-in — until now. And for good reason: OpenAI, the company with the most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, doesn’t allow developers to adapt its software for political campaigning.
OpenAI took action against Dean.Bot, which is built on ChatGPT’s platform. The company shut down the bot and suspended access for its developer on Friday, saying the bot violated its terms of use. Funnily enough, the PAC behind the bot is run by an early OpenAI employee.
There are no current federal regulations prohibiting the use of AI in political campaigning, though legislation has been introduced intended to curb the politically deceptive use of AI, and the Federal Election Commission has sought public comment on the same issue.
Phillips the man, meanwhile, has had to resort to campaigning in the flesh in New Hampshire ahead of today’s primary since his AI doppelganger is nowhere to be found.
3 themes to watch as US election season begins
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
With the Iowa caucuses coming up, what are the big themes to watch in American politics this year?
Monday of next week is the first day the official kickoff of the US presidential campaign season, even though it feels like it's already been going on for six years. It really only starts on next Monday with the Iowa caucuses begin. Donald Trump has a big lead in the Republican primary. Nobody's challenging President Biden on the Democratic side. And so here are three themes to watch throughout this election year.
The first is, can anyone beat Trump in the Republican primary? Right now, it's down to basically Trump, the top of a field of contenders. And then you have a distant second, former South Carolina governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. And in third place, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, with some also rans like Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don't really have a chance. Of that bunch, Haley is probably best positioned to make a deep run into the primaries because of her ability to consolidate the fundraising apparatus behind her in the last several months. DeSantis could still come on strong with a strong showing in Iowa, but it's really going to take a lot of money to last through the March Super Tuesday caucuses. And right now, Haley looks like the best bet. But to get there, she's going to need to win a state. Right now, she's behind in Iowa. She's close, but still behind in New Hampshire. And she’s still behind in her home state of South Carolina. So the thing to watch for is field consolidation in late January, maybe early February, And if Haley can actually get some momentum to beat Trump.
The second thing to pay attention to are Trump's criminal trials. And a major question for 2024 is how much do these things hurt him on the campaign trail? Certainly being prosecuted by the Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan and Biden's DOJ has helped Trump consolidate his position on top of the Republican field. But it seems like the conventional wisdom is that it probably hurts Trump in the general election. Now, this may or may not be true. Voters already have been accustomed to the fact that Trump's been accused of various crimes. Trump himself is running on delegitimizing the system that's put him on trial, and that's going to be a continued theme throughout 2024. And the question for the general election is right now, Trump is beating Biden in head to head polling matchups, which are not very reliable this far out. Does that advantage start to erode as Trump's criminal trial stay in the news throughout the summer? And what happens if he's eventually convicted of a crime? And the one to watch is probably the DC election interference case that the federal government has brought in the District of Columbia.
Final thing to watch for in 2024, what happens to the state of the economy? Biden's approval ratings are relatively low for an incumbent seeking reelection in the high thirties. That's a pretty bad sign. The economy's been fairly resilient so far with low unemployment and decent wage growth. But Americans are still saying they're very unhappy about the state of things. Inflation has been a huge part of that. High grocery prices, expensive services are all things that Americans are dealing with on a day to day basis. Does the economy flatline or tank in the first half of 2024, which would be a real disaster for the incumbent President Biden? Or does it continue to muddle along and potentially improve as inflation fades in the rearview mirror, which would be a tailwind for the incumbent? And you'd expect to see that in rising approval ratings throughout the spring and summer.
Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Ballot battle: Colorado vs Trump
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
Is the Colorado Supreme Court going to block Trump from appearing on the ballot there?
The answer is probably not, but they might. The Colorado Supreme Court, this week, ruled that former President Trump, cannot appear on the Colorado ballot on the grounds that he engaged in insurrection against the United States, which under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, bars a political candidate from appearing for federal office. Now, the Supreme Court is almost certainly going to take this issue up. This is a precedent that will be set for other states who are also trying to bar Trump from appearing on the ballot at all. And this puts the Supreme Court in a really difficult position. The court does not want to be in a position to intervene in what it sees as very political questions.
The most prominent example of them getting involved was, of course, the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, which basically handed the presidential election to then President Bush as they had to resolve a very narrow set of differences over what counted as a legitimate ballot in Florida. And in this case, the court is once again going to be asked to make a very political decision about who can run for president. The courts would much prefer that the political branches of the government make this determination, including Congress. And one legal argument they've made is that the 14th Amendment is not self-executing, but would in fact require Congress to step up and define what it means to commit insurrection against the United States.
There are multiple paths for the court to defer on this question, including the idea that the Senate has already acquitted President Trump of inciting an insurrection against the United States. But this is not an obvious position for the court to be in. They are certainly going to come out of this looking more politicized one way or the other. Either they bar the most popular and prominent Republican candidate from appearing on the ballot, which Republicans are going to say, suggest that we live in a banana republic, or they're going to say that Trump can go ahead and appear on the ballot, which will make Democrats to say, well, the court is completely politicized because the six Republican-appointed judges will always obviously going to side with the Republican presidential nominee.
A decision in this case could come quite quickly as the Colorado ballot deadline is approaching in early January and the court is going to need to weigh in here in order to set precedent for other states that are looking at doing something similar to what Colorado did.
So yet another unprecedented piece of a Trump presidential story is this case and Trump's norm, destroying political career continues to challenge the very foundations of the American Constitution. So lots to watch here. Stay tuned.
Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis in a storm
Hurricane Idalia is set to make landfall on Wednesday in the US state of Florida. The storm will be the first of many this hurricane season, but it blows in at a sensitive political moment for state Gov. Ron DeSantis. The woke-bashing Republican is currently a distant second to Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, but he’s also fending off an increasingly stiff challenge from the youthful upstart conservative tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. (Poll numbers here.)
If DeSantis handles Idalia well, it’ll enable him to look experienced and presidential, drawing a contrast with Ramaswamy’s scant political experience. Of course, if DeSantis flubs it, Idalia could deal a crippling blow to his campaign.