Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has given his verdict on the vice presidential debate, and questioned the Democratic Party’s rationale for choosing Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
On Tuesday evening, the Minnesota governor faced off against Ohio Senator JD Vance in New York. The encounter served as a stark contrast to the Sept. 10 debate between Harris and Trump, and remained a largely civil battle centered on the pair’s policy disagreements and competing ideologies.
At the end of the 100-minute debate, which Carlson called “a pure joy to watch from beginning to end,” Vance’s polished answers and even tempered demeanor were widely credited with handing him a slight victory over Walz.
“It is never a good idea to choose anybody for any position on the basis of demographic qualifications,” Carlson said, during his Spotify podcast following the debate. “Tim Walz was chosen by the Harris campaign because he’s a white guy – he’s an affirmative action hire.”
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Newsweek contacted the Harris-Walz campaign for comment.
Carlson, who hosted his own show on Fox News from 2016 to 2023, said that Walz came across as “sad, but also very creepy” during the debate, despite benefiting from the support of the CBS moderators, whom he called “shrieking liberal narcissists.”
In one of the more memorable episodes from Tuesday night, Vance was interrupted by CBS’s Margaret Brennan while speaking about Haitian immigration into Springfield, Ohio, despite the network’s previous pledge to avoid live fact-checking.
However, Carlson directed the majority of his criticism at the Democratic party, and the choice to appoint Walz as Harris’s running mate over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a choice he argued was racially motivated.
“The Kamala Harris people think in terms of race about everything,” Carlson told his guest, Utah Senator Mike Lee. “I’ve got to think that they felt compelled to pick an older white guy because he was an older white guy.”
“That’s why [Harris] was chosen, that’s why Jackson was chosen for the supreme court,” he added, referring to the 2022 appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
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Carlson went on to claim that the party had made a mistake in not selecting Shapiro to run alongside Harris, though he claimed to have been “relieved” by this decision.
“I’m glad they didn’t choose Shapiro,” Carlson said. “I think he’s much more capable than Walz, and I think he’s probably a much worse person, even, than Walz, but he’s certainly a skillful politician.”
His guest went on to claim that a “well-circulated rumor” in Washington was that Shapiro had been passed over due to being “too Jewish” for Democratic voters.
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