Vance and Walz lean on their wives in different ways before the vice presidential debate and along the way

As JD Vance and Tim Walz prepare for their debate on Tuesday, the vice presidential hopefuls have several months of campaigning across the country behind them following their sudden rise to national politics. Two key players also help shape their messages and public image: their women.

While Usha Vance acted more as an advisor behind the scenes, Gwen Walz was on the campaign trail in key swing states as a spokeswoman for the Harris-Walz campaign in the months before the election.

Gwen Walz is originally from Minnesota and was a longtime public school teacher. She always played a big role in her husband’s political career. “We’ve always worked together as a partnership,” she told the “What If It Works” podcast in an interview in July. “We work really closely together and there are issues where I do a lot of the work and share my thoughts and briefings with him.”

Usha Vance, who built a distinguished career as a lawyer before and during her husband’s entry into electoral politics, has been less present in front of the cameras — she has not delivered remarks at a public event on behalf of the Trump-Vance campaign since introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. But the Vances use each other as sounding boards and partners to think things through, she said in a rare interview.

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“I think he treats everything I say with great seriousness and respect. And that becomes part of his mindset, as it is with me,” Usha Vance said on Fox News a few weeks after the Republican National Convention. “The way he talks about things and the conclusions he draws from them really shape the way I think about things. So there’s a nice give and take, but I think it’s a pretty happy one.” Both potential Second Ladies were involved in preparations for Tuesday’s debate: Usha Vance helped her husband while he and his team of advisors were on his debate strategy, a source directly involved in the preparations told NBC News, while Gwen Walz joined the Democratic vice presidential nominee during his debate preparations in Harbor Springs, Michigan, last week.

Usha Vance often appears on stage with her husband when he opens belligerent state events – she is introduced together over loudspeakers as “the next vice president and second lady of the United States” – and travels with him and her family, where they provide that sound can plank. She typically travels light as the campaign boards and disembarks her planes and vehicles. However, when the couple’s three young children are on the trail, Usha Vance can be seen carrying loose toys into the cabin or helping Secret Service agents secure car seats in the SUVs in their motorcade. JD Vance, answering questions from attendees at a town hall-style event in suburban Pittsburgh, told an audience member who mentioned they homeschool their children that his wife had started “a little bit of homeschooling” with their 7-year-old son to make them travel. She left her law firm shortly after her husband was nominated for the Trump campaign.

Tim Walz’s daughter, Hope, often accompanies him on the campaign trail, while Gwen Walz has held several solo events in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. The Minnesota governor often tells the story that during his time in Congress, when Gwen was suffering from laryngitis, she stepped in to give a speech at a fundraiser.

“She should be the nominee,” he joked during a fundraiser in Bethesda, Maryland. When Walz isn’t attending events alone, he is sometimes accompanied by Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, who also travels across the country giving speaking engagements and raising funds for the Democratic nomination.

Gwen Walz’s events focused primarily on education, drawing on her and her husband’s experiences as teachers, and protecting reproductive rights, which she described as “personal” to her family.

“We had difficulty starting a family and we were only able to start a family because we had access to fertility treatments. And even then, it was quite a journey and took a long time,” she said during a solo campaign appearance in Lansing, Michigan, last week.

During the Democratic National Convention, Gwen and Tim Walz participated in an interview with Glamor in which they highlighted their struggles with infertility and their use of IUI (intrauterine insemination) to birth their children.

JD Vance took to social media to call out Tim Walz over past references to using IVF. “Today it emerged that Tim Walz lied when he claimed to be starting a family through IVF. Who lies about something like that?” Gwen Walz defended herself at her events: “I’m going to use my teacher voice here, my stern teacher voice, and I’m going to send you a message, Mr. Trump and.” Mr. Vance, please take care of it Your own business,” she said in Lansing.

Usha Vance also stepped out to defend JD Vance. In the Fox News interview after the GOP convention, she repeated her husband’s defense of criticism he drew from a 2021 comment in which he compared the Democratic leadership to “childless cat ladies,” describing the remark as “a joke in the service of making a point he wanted to make.” that was substantive and had actual meaning.”

“What he was really trying to say is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed to make it even harder,” she said.

Long before JD Vance became a senator and later Republican vice presidential nominee, Usha Vance was a longtime partner in his work.

In the acknowledgments to his oft-quoted memoir Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance wrote: “Last, but not least, the necessary feedback was provided by my beloved wife Usha, who read every single word of my manuscript literally dozens of times.” I didn’t want to!), supported me when I wanted to quit, and celebrated with me in times of progress.” He added that “much of the credit goes to both this book and the happy life I have Lead, you are due.”