Live coverage begins today at 8 p.m. ET for the .

The first rule of deciding who won a major political debate is that nobody wins a major political debate. There is no final score as the buzzer sounds, no final wink to be tiddled, it is a purely subjective matter. And that will be true of the vice-presidential debate between Republican nominee JD Vance and Democratic nominee Tim Walz.

That having been said, I’ve recently adopted a method of scoring debates from the world of pugilistics, that I think actually gives a pretty decent assessment of what most American voters see. 

My advice in picking a winner is to borrow the scoring system of a boxing match. The basic rules are relatively simple. In each round the boxer who wins the 3 minutes gets 10 points, the loser gets 9, unless there is a knockdown or it is overwhelming, in which case the round is scored 10-8. A tie is 10-10.

Obviously, a knockout ends the fight.

I first tried this approach last month with the Trump vs. Harris debate. And I wound up with Trump winning 157 to 150. It wasn’t the only reason I thought and wrote that night that Trump won the debate, despite overwhelming media insistence that girl boss Kamala had kicked ass. But it was part of it. 

And with polling showing no significant bump for Harris since their face-off and the fact that we’ve even seen some Trump swing state surge since their debate, my ostentatious declaration of a Trump victory looks a little less crazy today.  

The legacy news media, who wanted any excuse to hand Harris a W anyway, viewed the tête-à-tête as a kind of Lifetime movie in which Harris had finally spoken truth to power, but I find in most of America that narrative doesn’t have a whole lot of purchase. The voters want answers.

That’s where boxing scoring comes in. If openings, closings, and each question, are the ’rounds’ of the debate, you wind up with about 15. See what I’m saying? The incremental 10-9 or 10-8 scores of each, mirror the nuance of how swayable voters watch the event.

The basic philosophy behind boxing scoring is that the primary job is to survive the round, so if you manage that, you get an automatic 8 points, winning the round, and can only bump that up by at most 2. 

One could argue there is a fundamental unfairness here, that if I am 40 percent better at landing punches in a round than my opponent, I only get a 10 percent point advantage in scoring, but that is also the beauty of the system. Fights aren’t just about math.

This actually tracks very well with how political debates work. 

The audience, which is to say the voters, do tend to see each question or issue as one round, and if Walz can get a 10-8 on abortion, or Vance can on the border, that goes a long way towards the kind of 7 point win I gave Trump over Harris. 

Another way to think of this is that 90 percent of Americans likely already know who they are voting for, only 10 percent can be swayed, and boxing’s unique scoring system almost perfectly corresponds to this. 

Eighty to 90 percent we are just scoring as a wash.

There is, of course, the chance of a knockout, but these days, that chance seems remote. Back when Reagan said ‘There you go again,’ or Obama, in retrospect wrongly, told Romney the 1980s wanted their foreign policy back over fears regarding Russia, the possibility of something near consensus on the question existed.

Those days are no longer with us, if they aren’t over forever.

Nobody really wins a debate, but we can still score them, we can still pay close attention to who is and isn’t actually answering the questions, and that has a lot of value. 

So give a shot, grab a pad and paper, if you still have those, and just jot down your score for each question, 10-10, 10-9 or 10-8. Like a Ouija board your political leanings might push the pen a bit, but even so, you might be surprised by the results.

As Mike Tyson once put it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Let’s keep a close eye on the flying rhetorical hands of Tim Walz and JD Vance.

Hours before the vice presidential debate, former President Donald Trump addressed a crowd at his campaign rally in Wisconsin and bashed the Biden administration over Iran’s historic attack on Israel. 

‘A short time ago, Iran launched 181 ballistic missiles at Israel… I’ve been talking about World War III for a long time, and I don’t want to make predictions because the predictions always come true. We’re not going to make [predictions]… but they are very close to global catastrophe,’ Trump said. ‘We have a non-existent president and a non-existent vice president who should be in charge, but nobody knows what’s going on.’

Trump’s comments come after Israel said Iran launched 181 ballistic missiles at the country, marking the largest ballistic missile attack in history. 

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the attack was in retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon, in an Israeli airstrike late last week and the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, according to Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned in a statement released by Iranian state media that if Israel responds to the missile barrage, ‘it will face crushing attacks.’

Trump accused President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of weak leadership on the world stage.

‘That’s why Israel was under attack just a little while ago. Because they don’t respect our country anymore. The so-called enemy doesn’t respect our country any longer,’ Trump said.

Trump claimed Biden and Harris made Iran rich in a very short period of time.

‘They have $300 billion now. They’re rich. I mean, they pay 6 billion every time they have somebody that was kidnaped, it’s always $6 billion,’ Trump said.

‘Iran was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had no money left. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for Hezbollah. The people they’re fighting now, they would have been willing to make any deal. You could have made any deal. But Kamala flooded them with American cash and everything. Now, I mean, they’re flooding them with cash. It’s honestly not even believable,’ Trump continued.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the Iranian missile attack on Israel was ‘defeated and ineffective’ and that the U.S. military coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to repel the strikes. 

‘U.S. naval destroyers joined Israeli Air Defense units in firing interceptors to shoot down inbound missiles. President Biden and Vice President Harris monitored the attack and the response from the White House Situation Room, joined in person and remotely by their national security team,’ Sullivan said. 

Sullivan characterized the attack as a ‘significant escalation’ while speaking at a White House briefing on Tuesday.

Sullivan said no deaths were reported on the Israeli side, although the White House is monitoring the reported death of a Palestinian civilian in Jericho in the West Bank.

‘We do not know of any damage to aircraft or strategic military assets in Israel. In short, based on what we know at this point, this attack appears to have been defeated and ineffective. The word fog of war was invented for a situation like this. This is a fluid situation,’ he said.

Many missiles were intercepted by Israel’s missile defense systems, while others did hit the ground. 

The Pentagon says the U.S. fired approximately 12 interceptors against Iranian missiles.

Fox News’ Michael Dorgan, Stephen Sorace, Liz Friden, Nicolas Rojas, Greg Norman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz sparred on the issue of immigration in their debate Tuesday night, and Vance called out the immigration policies of VP Kamala Harris. 

‘First of all, the gross majority of what we need to do to the southern border is just empowering law enforcement to do their job,’ Vance said during the Tuesday night debate on CBS during a discussion on the Haitian migrant surge in Springfield and immigration overall. 

‘I’ve been to the southern border more than our ‘border czar’ Kamala Harris has been. And it’s actually heartbreaking because the Border Patrol agents, they just want to be empowered to do their job.’

Vance continued by saying that, ‘of course, additional resources would help,’ but that the issue is mostly about the Biden administration not empowering law enforcement to say ‘if you try to come across the border illegally, you’ve got to stay in Mexico’ and ‘go back through proper channels.’

‘Now, Gov. Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he’s very worried about the things that I’ve said in Springfield,’ Vance said. ‘Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed. You’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed. You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.

‘The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’ open border. It is a disgrace, Tim, and I actually think I agree with you. I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.’

Walz repeatedly made the case that Trump shut down the Senate immigration bill earlier this year that VP Harris has said she will sign in a move he believes would have made strides at the border.

‘It is law enforcement that asked for the bill,’ Walz said. ‘They helped craft it. They’re the ones that supported it. It was because they know we need to do this. Look, this issue of continuing to bring this up, of not dealing with it, of blaming migrants for everything.

‘On housing, we could talk a little bit about Wall Street speculators buying up housing and making them less affordable, but it becomes a blame. Look, this bill also gives the money necessary to adjudicate. I agree it should not take seven years for an asylum claim to be done.

‘This bill gets it done in 90 days. Then, you start to make a difference in this, and you start to adhere to what we know, American principles. I don’t talk about my faith a lot, but Matthew 25:40 talks about to the least amongst us, you do unto me. I think that’s true of most Americans. They simply want order to it. This bill does it. It’s funded. It’s supported by the people who do it, and it lets us keep our dignity about how we treat other people.’

Vance referred to the Biden-Harris record on immigration as a ‘disgrace.’

‘Look, what Tim said just doesn’t pass the smell test,’ Vance said. ‘For three years. Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump’s border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country.

‘And now that she’s running for president or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cares a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the vice president, when she became the appointed border czar was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border. This problem is leading to massive problems in the United States of America. Parents who can’t afford health care, schools that are overwhelmed. It’s got to stop. And it will when Donald Trump is president.’

A Harris campaign official told Fox News Digital that its focus group of undecided voters watching the debate reacted more strongly in favor of Walz’s comments.

‘Overall, Gov. Walz outperformed JD Vance in the immigration section, and the highest rating for Gov. Walz of the night so far was when he reminded viewers of Donald Trump’s failed promise to build a wall, only building 2% of it,’ the campaign said. 
 

Democrat vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was forced to answer questions about his controversial travel to China, and misstatements about those trips, during Tuesday night’s debate. 

Walz has said he was in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are now reporting that Walz actually did not travel to China until August of that year. 

CBS News moderator Margaret Brennan asked Walz to explain the discrepancy. 

‘Look, I grew up in a small rural Nebraska town, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service,’ a visibly-shaky Walz said. ‘I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher.’ 

Walz said that as a ‘passionate young teacher’ he had ‘the opportunity in the summer of ’89 to travel to China—35 years ago.’ 

‘I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China,’ Walz said, noting the trips were ‘to try and learn.’ 

 ‘Look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community, and I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect,’ Walz continued. 

‘And I’m a knucklehead at times,’ Walz said. 

Walz said his commitment ‘from the beginning’ has been to ‘make sure that I’m there for the people.’ 

‘Many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life, I learned a lot about China,’ Walz said. ‘I hear the critiques of this.’ 

Walz said he would ‘make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us.’ 

‘I guarantee you he wouldn’t be, praising XI Jinping about Covid. And I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing,’ Walz said. ‘So this is about trying to understand the world. It’s about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it’s putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is.’ 

He added: ‘My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress. Those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.‘ 

But Brennan pushed back, reminding Walz of the question, and again asking him to explain the discrepancy. 

‘All I said on this was, as I got there that summer and misspoke on this,’ Walz said. ‘So I will just that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests went in and from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in in governance.‘ 

Walz’s ties to China have come under the microscope since becoming Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. 

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., launched an investigation into Walz’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party. 

Comer revealed that Walz has ‘engaged and partnered with’ Chinese entities, making him ‘susceptible’ to the CCP’s strategy of ‘elite capture,’ which seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural and academic circles to ‘influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans.’ 

Comer has pointed to reports that Walz, while working as a teacher in the 1990s, organized a trip to China for Alliance High School students. The costs were reportedly ‘paid by the Chinese government.’ 

Comer is investigating Walz’s 1994-created private company named ‘Educational Travel Adventures, Inc.,’ which coordinated annual student trips to China until 2003 and was led by Walz. 

The company reportedly ‘dissolved four days after he took congressional office in 2007.’ 

Comer said Walz has traveled to China an estimated ’30 times.’ 

Comer has now issued a subpoena for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, compelling him to produce DHS records related to Walz’s alleged ties to the CCP. 

Walz, meanwhile, during a congressional hearing in 2016, said he had ‘been to China dozens of times.’

‘I’ve been there about 30 times,’ Walz told an agriculture-focused publication in 2016. 

However, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson recently said to Minnesota Public Radio that the number was ‘closer to 15 times.’ 

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz kicked off his debate against Ohio Sen. JD Vance on shaky footing when he was first asked about his foreign policy platform in the Middle East. 

‘Governor Walz, if you were the final voice in the Situation Room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?’ CBS’ Margaret Brennan asked Walz on Tuesday evening in New York City during the CBS News Vice Presidential Debate. 

Walz thanked the moderators for hosting him before delivering a halting and stammering answer while calling for ‘steady leadership.’

‘Iran, our I, Israel’s ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental. Getting its hostages back, fundamental. And ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States to have to steady leadership there. You saw it experienced today where along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, able to stop the incoming attack,’ Walz responded, taking a few pauses between words. 

Earlier Tuesday, Iran launched more than 100 ballistic missiles at Israel. War broke out in Israel nearly one year ago on Oct. 7 when Hamas launched attacks on the nation.

‘What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter. It’s clear. And the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,’ Walz continued. 

Walz continued his response by taking shots at former President Donald Trump and his former administration officials. 

‘His chief of staff, John Kelly, said that he was the most flawed human being you’d ever met. And both of his secretaries of defense and his national security advisers said he should be nowhere near the White House. Now, the person closest to them… said he’s unfit for the highest office. That was Sen. Vance,’ Walz said, referring to Vance’s previous criticisms of Trump before he was elected to the White House in 2016.

Walz summed up his first response by arguing Vice President Kamala Harris has shown ‘steady leadership’ on the world stage. 

‘What we’ve seen out of Vice President Harris is we’ve seen steady leadership. We’ve seen a calmness that is able to be able to draw on the coalitions, to bring them together understanding, that our allies matter. When our allies see Donald Trump turn towards Vladimir Putin, turn towards North Korea, when we start to see that type of fickleness around holding the coalitions together, we will stay committed. And as the vice president said today, we will protect our forces and our allied forces, and there will be consequences,’ he continued. 

Voters in Fox News Digital’s debate dial group had mixed reactions in real time to VP Harris’ runningmate, Gov. Tim Walz’s argument in favor of abortion during the CBS News Vice Presidential Debate against Sen. JD Vance.

When Walz was asked whether he supports abortion up until the ninth month supported as Minnesota is one of the least restrictive states for abortion, he responded, ‘That’s not what the bill says.’

While Republican voters dipped significantly as Walz spoke, independent and Democratic voters stayed mostly in the approval zone.

‘What we did is restore Roe v. Wade, we made sure that we put women in charge of their healthcare,’ Walz said.

Independents dipped slightly in approval while Democratic voters shot up during his statement. The two eventually evened out and stayed in the approval zone. 

‘This is a basic human right,’ he later said.

The independent voters stayed slightly under the Democratic approval line, as Republicans significantly disapproved.