When Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz take the stage in New York for Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, it will be their first in-person meeting.

But Vance and Walz have been nibbling from afar for weeks, playing their customary role of attack dog on opponents’ tickets.

The stakes in their 90-minute debate, hosted by CBS News and scheduled for 9 p.m. ET, are unusually high for an undercard start. According to recent polls, the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is tight across the country and in battleground states. Given that Trump has not agreed to a runoff with Harris, the Vance vs. Walz debate may very well be the last debate before Election Day.

Polls also indicate that Vance still has some work to do after making a poor first impression. In a recent national NBC News poll, 45% of registered voters said they viewed Vance negatively compared to 32% who said they viewed him positively, making him one of the least liked vice presidential candidates in 30 years. Walz, on the other hand, was rated positively by 40% and negatively by 33%. And with his baseless claims that Haitian immigrants eat pets and his tendency to overtake Trump on policy, Vance has already attracted more attention than any other vice presidential candidate since another Republican, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, came on the scene in 2008.

With all this in mind, here are some things to watch out for as Vance and Walz face off in New York:

Will Walz win the expectation game?

When Harris tapped Walz at a rally in Philadelphia in early August, he sounded delighted at the prospect of facing Vance on the debate stage this fall.

“I can’t wait to debate this guy,” Walz said, before referring to a vulgar, false claim about Vance online. “That is, if he wants to get up off the couch and show himself.”

Less than two months later, Walz and his allies were trying to temper expectations for their own performance while trying to raise them for their opponent by emphasizing Vance’s pedigree at Yale Law School.

“Listen, he’s a Yale Law graduate,” Walz said on MSNBC after the Trump-Harris debate last month. “I am a public school teacher. So we know where he stands on this issue.”

“I will work hard,” he added. “That’s what I do. I fully expect that Senator Vance, as a United States senator and a Yale lawyer, will be well prepared.”

It’s a story as old as time: candidates and their campaigns try to sound more menacing before the debates, their opponents try to increase the impact of great performances and blunt the power of disappointments. Case in point: Trump’s team also tried to raise expectations for Walz’s performance.

“Walz is very good at debates,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said on a call with reporters on Monday. “I want to do it again. Tim Walz is very good at debating. Really good. He has been a politician for almost 20 years. He will be very well prepared for tomorrow evening.”

Race card

“Are you a racist?” Pointing at the camera with a smile, Vance asked in a campaign ad that aired at the beginning of his successful Senate bid two years ago.

The question was Vance’s attempt at rhetorical sarcasm, and it articulated a leading thesis of his young political career: that you can be angry about U.S. immigration policy and border security without being a racist.

Vance recently addressed a debunked rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. That raises the possibility that Walz will turn on him on stage Tuesday with another variation of Vance’s question: Is He racist?

Vance is prepared for such a scenario.

His advisers often talk about how he handled a tense 2022 debate against his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, then-Republican. Tim Ryan accused him of promoting racist conspiracy theories. Vance quickly focused on his three biracial children – his wife, Usha, is Indian. Vance lamented that his family had been “attacked by scum online and in person because you want political power so badly that you would accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial children, of engaging in racism.”

Usha Vance was part of a small group that helped Vance prepare for the debate.

The battle for men and the fight for the future of masculinity

Both the Trump and Harris campaigns are targeting a group of voters who could decide who wins the White House in November: young men.

Both Walz and Vance were in the vanguard of this fight. For Walz, that meant heavily promoting his experience as a high school football coach, hunter and top Midwestern dad. For Vance, who would be the youngest man in generations to hold the vice president position, the most important thing is his knowledge of many online spaces dominated by younger men.

They offer competing visions of masculinity, whether it is Walz’s vision of traditional masculinity combined with his support for LGBTQ rights and comfort with talking about reproductive issues, or Vance’s ideas about masculinity as presented in his memoir and the ways he promotes starting a family. This was the subject of attacks on each of them. Vance was considered a weirdo and Walz was ridiculed for his mannerisms.

“She won’t be that wildly gesticulating, effeminate caricature that we see at rallies, pointing at Kamala Harris and dancing on stage,” Miller said in a telephone interview Monday.

Expect the concept of masculinity – and how Walz and Vance have different ideas about what that means – to be an undercurrent in their message.

The crossover speaks

Before carving out a more progressive identity as governor, Walz was known as a moderate congressman representing a turbulent district. As a vice presidential candidate, he presents himself as a mainstream Midwesterner who enjoys Central American pastimes. Harris’ campaign clearly sees him as someone who can appeal to heartland voters who have abandoned Democrats in recent cycles.

Vance is nowhere near his days as an anti-Trump pundit, but his decidedly right-wing shift toward Trump remains steadfast. As Trump’s running mate, he has done little to court voters who are fans of his best-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and, like Vance once, are skeptical of Trump.

On Tuesday evening, Walz will rather fight for the midfield. Vance is more likely to cast aspersions on every such attempt.

Rep. Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, who played Walz during Vance’s debate prep, compared his state’s governor to the liberal governor of California.

“The American people,” Emmer told reporters during Trump’s Monday conference call, “will start to see what we in Minnesota have known for a long time: that Tim Walz is just Gavin Newsom in a flannel shirt.”

Does Vance’s performance – good or bad – encourage Trump to change his mind about the next debate?

Trump said he would no longer debate Harris, noting early voting was already underway. Meanwhile, Harris has committed to a debate with CNN on October 23.

But will Trump change his mind? Vance’s performance could play a big role in whether that happens.

If Vance does well and creates positive campaign buzz, a jealous Trump may decide he wants to be in the debate spotlight once again. If Vance performs poorly, Trump may feel he has no choice but to resume the debate. Either way, it would be very out of character for Trump to feel comfortable letting his running mate have the last word.

And no matter what happens next, Trump announced on Monday that he would provide live debate analysis from his Truth Social account in a bid to get Vance’s attention.