Walz is not the first Minnesotan to debate for the vice presidency. Take a look back at Walter Mondale’s historic 1976 debate

CATHY WURZER: Now, 48 years ago this month, a different vice presidential candidate from Minnesota took the national stage for a debate. Walter Mondale, a 48-year-old US Senator from Minnesota, was running alongside newcomer Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia. Mondale's 1976 debate against Republican vice presidential nominee Bob Dole was the first time two vice presidential candidates met up for a live televised debate.

It was a fiery political moment. President Richard Nixon had resigned just two years earlier over the Watergate scandal, and Americans were disillusioned by the war in Vietnam. Part of Mondale and Dole's exchange left a mark on the rest of Bob Dole's career, and it came about an hour or so in. Let's listen.

JAMES HOGE: Gentlemen, we have about five minutes left for short questions and short answers. Each sequence from now on will consist only of the question, the answer, and the other candidate's response. We'll drop the further response. The first question is from Mr. Mears to Senator Dole.

WALTER MEARS: Senator Dole, 10 days ago when Senator Mondale raised the issues of Watergate and the Nixon pardon, you called it the start of the campaign mudslinging. Two years ago when you were running for the Senate, you said that the pardon was prematurely granted, and that it was a mistake.

You were quoted by the Kansas City Times as saying, "You can't ignore our tradition of equal application of the law." Did you approve of the Nixon pardon when President Ford granted it? Do you approve of it now? And if the issue was fair game in your 1974 campaign in Kansas, why is it not an appropriate topic now?

BOB DOLE: Well, it is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it's not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be or World War II or World War I or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century. I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it'd be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.

If we want to go back and rake that over and over and over, we can do that. I assume Senator Mondale doesn't want to do that. But it seems to me that the pardon of Richard Nixon is behind us. Watergate is behind us. If we have this vision for America, and if really concerned about those people out there and their problems, yes, and their education and their jobs, we ought to be talking about that.

I know it strikes a responsive chord for some to kick Richard Nixon around. I don't know how long can keep that up. How much mileage is there in someone who's been kicked, whose wife suffered a serious stroke, who's been disgraced in office and stepped down from that office? And I think after two years and some months, that it's probably a dead issue. But let them play that game. That's the only game they know.

JAMES HOGE: Senator Mondale?

WALTER MONDALE: I think Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight by implying and stating that World War II and the Korean War were Democratic wars. Does he really mean to suggest to the American people that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the war to fight Nazi Germany?

I don't think any reasonable American would accept that. Does he really mean to suggest that it was only partisanship that got us into the war in Korea? Does he really mean to forget that part of the record where Mr. Nixon and the Republican party wanted us to get involved earlier in the war in Vietnam?

And long after Mr. Nixon and the Republican party promised to finish the war in Vietnam, they kept urging us forward, and that, in fact, it was the Democratic Congress that passed the law, ending the war in Vietnam and preventing a new war in Angola? Now, in Watergate, we're not charging-- and he knows that-- his involvement in Watergate. What we're saying is that they defended Mr. Nixon up to the last.

CATHY WURZER: A little more context on that. Mondale mentioned that Bob Dole had earned his reputation as a hatchet man. Dole emerged on the national stage back then as Nixon's so-called hatchet man because Dole staunchly defended the president through the early stages of Watergate. That first televised vice presidential debate occurred in October of 1976. Mondale and his running mate, Jimmy Carter, went on to defeat incumbent Gerald Ford in the presidential election that November.