Pence, Harris face off in VP debate with diverging views of America

Highlights from the first and only matchup between Biden, Trump's running mates

With plexiglass and more than 12 feet of distance separating them, Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic nominee Sen. Kamala Harris of California debated in Salt Lake City in the first and only one-on-one matchup between the vice presidential candidates.

The showdown came as President Donald Trump and several in his orbit have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, raising questions on a transfer of power to the vice president were Trump at 74 -- or Democratic nominee Joe Biden at 77 -- to become too ill to serve.

The debate's format was divided into nine 10-minute sections with each candidate having two minutes to respond to the opening question in each segment and the remaining time allowed for follow ups. Moderator Susan Page, Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, did not release the topics in advance.

The sole vice presidential debate follows Trump and Biden's chaotic debate last week in Cleveland.


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FACT CHECK: Pence on COVID-19 testing, PPE

PENCE'S CLAIM: Pence said that Trump's decision to impose travel restrictions from China, ultimately "bought" the U.S. "invaluable time" to save hundreds of thousands of American lives, reinvent testing capacity and deliver billions of supplies to doctors and nurses.

FACT CHECK: Although the U.S. has conducted more COVID-19 tests than any other country, according to experts, testing capacity is still not vast or fast enough to serve all the people who need to get a test.

Additionally, although billions of items of personal protective equipment, or PPE, have been delivered to frontline workers across the country, the United States continues to experience shortages of PPE and testing supplies, according to a Sept. 21 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

In April, Trump said that the U.S. would be conducting up to 5 million tests per day, "very soon." However, the national 7-day average of coronavirus tests has yet to surpass 1 million, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

To date, the U.S. has conducted over 120 million COVID-19 tests, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 
More testing will, of course, identify more cases.

However, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, there are several countries that have conducted more testing per capita than the U.S., but also have fewer cases per capita than the U.S. does -- such as the U.K., Spain and the United Arab Emirates. Those figures reflect all-time averages of daily tests conducted per capita -- and the daily percentage of tests that come back positive, which is known as the "positivity rate" or the "percent positive rate."

Despite having one of the highest rates of tests per capita, the U.S. faces the largest outbreak in the world and new cases continue to trend upward in many states. The percent positivity in the U.S. remains over 4.7%, when other countries with high testing figures report a significantly lower percent positivity rate, according to Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, the shortages of PPE and testing supplies are due to high global demand and the fact the domestic production of supplies is limited. According to the Government Accountability Office, "testing supply shortages have contributed to delays in turnaround times for testing results.

ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos

"Delays in processing test results have multiple serious consequences, including delays in isolating those who test positive and tracing their contacts in a timely manner, which can in turn exacerbate outbreaks by allowing the virus to spread undetected," the report read.

--ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos


Final candidate speaking times 

ABC News calculated of the candidate's approximate speaking times during more than 90 minutes on the debate stage, :

Pence: 35:22
Harris: 38:48

ABC News also calculated the approximate speaking times spent on each topic including moderator speaking time:

COVID-19:-11:58
Role of the vice president: 9:27
Economy: 9:20
Climate change: 9:23
Foreign policy: 12:34
Supreme Court: 10:02
Race: 10:35
State of the election: 6:52

--ABC News' Kelsey Walsh


Trump tweets Pence ‘WON BIG!’

Shortly after the debate wrapped, Trump -- known to enjoy his time in front of the television -- signaled his approval of Pence's performance and declared him the winner in a tweet.


The Trump campaign also released a statement in which Pence's chief of staff Marc Short said the vice president made the argument to the American people that Trump is "the clear choice to rebuild the economy."

--ABC News' Terrance Smith


Pence’s pink eye and an errant fly grab social media attention

Social media users clamored to point out that Pence's eye looked red and enflamed, which led to speculation about his health after being exposed to COVID-19 from the president.

ABC News' Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton weighed in, saying that pink eye has been reported in anywhere from 11% to 30% of COVID-19 cases. But as always, Ashton said that it is not possible to diagnose anyone from television and that it was a possibility that it could just be that he just had "some makeup in his eye."

An errant fly that landed on Pence's head during the debate also grabbed the attention of social media users. The Biden campaign immediately seized on the moment, using it as an opportunity to fundraise, posting a tweet asking for donations to "help this campaign fly," along with a photo of Biden holding a fly swatter.


On the economy, Harris and Pence go back and forth on 2017 Trump tax act

Opening the night's discussion on the economy, Harris said firmly that Biden would repeal Trump's 2017 tax cuts "on day one."

"He'll get rid of it," she said. "And what he'll do with the money is invest it in the American people and through a plan that is about investing in infrastructure, something that Donald Trump said he would do, I remember hearing about some infrastructure week, I don't think it ever happened."

"But Joe Biden will do that. He'll invest in infrastructure. It's about upgrading our roads and bridges but also investing in clean energy and renewable energy," she added.

Pence responded by attacking the state of the economy after the Obama administration and tried to tie Biden and Harris to the Green New Deal proposal.

"When President Trump and I took office, America had gone through the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression," he said. "Because when Joe Biden was president, they tried to tax and spend and regulate and bail our way back to a growing economy."

When Harris responded again during the open discussion section, she underscored that her and Biden's plan would only raise taxes on wealthy Americans.

"We saw enough of it in last week's debate, but I think this is supposed to be a debate based on fact and truth," she said.  "And the truth and the fact is, Joe Biden has been very clear, he will not raise taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000."

Pence argued that the Trump tax plan lowered taxes for average Americans and that a repeal would mean higher taxes for everyone, not just the wealthy.

"It would be important if you said the truth. Joe Biden said twice in the debate last week that he's going to repeal the Trump tax cuts," he said. "That was tax cuts that gave the average working family $2,000 in a tax break every single year."