Jesse Jackson will be one of Tim Kaine's debate guests. | AP Photo Virginia Tech shooting survivor, Jesse Jackson headline Kaine's debate guest list

Tuesday's vice presidential debate will feature a lot less trolling by the candidates than the first presidential match-up.

Tim Kaine's guest list for the vice-presidential debate in Farmville, Va., reads like a compendium to Hillary Clinton's "Stronger Together" slogan: A professor denied housing on the basis of ethnicity, the first African American mayor of Richmond and activist Jesse Jackson, Sr. That marks a departure from last week, when the Clinton campaign invited Mark Cuban, a tech billionaire and frequent critic of Donald Trump. Trump threatened to retaliate by inviting Gennifer Flowers, one of several women Bill Clinton was involved with during his marriage to Hillary Clinton.


The Democratic vice presidential nominee will be joined by his parents, Al and Kathy, as well as his wife Anne Holton. The other guests, a Clinton campaign official said, "embody the policies and values that Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton will work to uphold and strengthen while in office."

Those guests include the prominent civil rights leaders Jackson Sr., a "personal friend" of Kaine's, the aide said, as well as Henry Marsh, the first African-American mayor of majority-black Richmond. But Kaine is also bringing along lesser known people from his life story to help accentuate the contrast with Mike Pence at Longwood University.

Also in attendance will be: Okianer Christian Dark, who Kaine represented as a housing lawyer after she was denied an apartment; Mary Townley and Carol Schall, who were plaintiffs in a case overturning Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage, along with their daughter Emily Schall Townley; and Lily Habtu, a survivor of the mass-shooting at Virginia Tech that occurred when Kaine was governor.

Townley, Schall and Habtu's presence speaks to the difference between Kaine and Pence on policies. Pence long spoke against same-sex marriage, found himself in hot water over his state's religious freedom law and opposed new gun restrictions, while Kaine took on the NRA as governor, supported new gun background checks as a senator and fought the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage 10 years ago.