GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance Sunday labeled his Democrat counterpart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as the one who is "weird," and said he wants to square off on a debate stage against him.
"I want to debate Tim Walz," the Ohio Republican senator and running mate of former President Donald Trump told CNN's "State of the Union," Sunday. "I think it's important, and I think that it goes to a very fundamental difference between the Trump-Vance ticket and our opposition.
"We believe in talking to the media. We believe in answering questions. We believe in debating."
Vance has attacked Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Walz several times for not conducting a formal interview in the weeks since President Joe Biden stepped away from the race, and told CNN's Dana Bash that media appearances are important.
"I'm asking the American people to make me their vice president," he said. "It's really important to stand before the American people to make that case, and I'm going to keep on doing it in whatever form I get the opportunity,” Vance, who also appeared on news programs on CBS and ABC Sunday, added.
Meanwhile, Vance told Bash that he does not believe Harris and Walz are "comfortable" in their own skins because they are uncomfortable with their policy positions.
"So they're name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they're going to make their lives better," he said. "I think that's weird, but look, they can call me whatever they want to."
Vance, in his ABC News' "This Week," appearance, argued with anchor Jonathan Karl about his past comments about "childless cat ladies" while trying to clarify suggesting that parents should have more political power than adults who do not have children.
In 2021, he told Tucker Carlson, who was still on Fox News, that the United States is being run "by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."
Karl pointed out that Vance was speaking about a proposal that would give "extra votes" to people with children, but the senator said Sunday that the phrase came out of a "thought experiment."
"Some Democrats had said, We're going to give children the right to vote," Vance told Karl. "But I said, 'Well, if we're going to give the rights to the children, then we should actually just allow the parents to cast those votes. I trust a parent more with a decision like that than I do, say, a 14-year-old.' So, it's a thought experiment."
However, he told Karl that he does believe that the country should become more pro-family.
"We have three little kids," he said. "We got these ridiculous surprise medical billings from the hospital because we had chosen an out-of-network provider, of course, at this most stressful of all imaginable moments."
Vance told Karl that he knew people would try misrepresenting his comments.
"I've been a senator for two years," he said. "Have I proposed any legislation to the effect? Of course not. Sometimes people make remarks in response to something that somebody else has said. If it was a policy proposal, I would have made the policy proposal in my two years in the United States Senate."
Vance said he does not regret his comments, but how the "media and the Kamala Harris campaign" has "frankly distorted them … they turned this into a policy proposal that I never made."