Tim Walz roasts JD Vance with couch joke during first speech as Harris’ running mate
Tim Walz has roasted Republican counterpart JD Vance by cracking a joke about that now-famous couch claim, during his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
Walz, who has been governor of Minnesota since 2019 and has a strong track record on LGBTQ+ rights, was named as Harris’s choice for vice-president on the Democrat ticket on Tuesday (6 August).
Addressing a crowd of supporters at Temple University’s Liacouras Center, in Philadelphia, that evening, Walz drew cheers and laughter when he referred to a viral claim that Vance had engaged in sex with a couch.
The claim, which was posted on X/Twitter by a now-deleted user, suggested there was a section in Vance’s 2016 memoir where he pleasured himself on the sofa.
The user wrote they “can’t say for sure but he might be the first VP [vice-president] pick to have admitted in a New York Times bestseller to f**king an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, pp. 179-181).”
The claim was quickly debunked, including in a since-redacted fact-check piece by the Associated Press, but that did not stop people running with it and even Harris’ campaign tweeted: “JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women.”
Walz told the crowd: “Like all regular people, I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. That’s not what Middle America is.
“I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy… that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.
“See what I did there?”
Telling her 12,000 supporters why she picked Walz, Harris said she had “set out to find a partner who can build this brighter future” and a “leader who can unite this nation and move us forward”.
She described the relatively unknown governor as a “patriot who believes, as I do, the extraordinary promise of America, a promise of freedom, opportunity and justice not just for some, but for all”.
In a nod to Walz’s track record on LGBTQ+ rights, Harris recounted how when he was a teacher and sports coach in the 90s – a time when the federal government banned same-sex marriage – he served as a faculty adviser for a high school gay-straight alliance group because he “knew the signal it would send to have a football coach get involved”.
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