I didn't watch it all, but did some.

I doubt it will move anyone who has a "hard" position -- but it should.

You had two politicians on the stage: One who made his points and another who tried to play to emotion and, unlike what Harris did to Trump, the attempts to dig personally didn't work.

Walz lied in multiple specific places, including a couple that really do matter.  On the "botched abortion" issue he not only lied he ducked his own personal complicity in that Minnesota law used to require reporting on abortion attempts where there was an actual live birth and the care and results from same.  Walz was in office when that law was changed to remove the reporting and he signed it.  So yeah, it does happen, yeah, those children, and once born even during an abortion attempt that is a child by legal definition, have been left to die without even an attempt to provide comfort care (yes, I realize that most of the time that infant will die in that circumstance irrespective of care, but that doesn't excuse treating said prematurely-born infant as a piece of trash.)  The only reason to block reporting of results, of course, is that you don't think the public will like the record of "success" if they can see it.

Walz didn't answer the question, of course, as to whether he supported any sort of constraints on abortion.  And here is where I thought Vance, despite his personal convictions, came through: He accepted the will of the Ohio voters, even though they conflicted with his personal views.  That's his job, incidentally, and was his point: We should be seeking to persuade in the political conversation rather that demand, and when we fail to do so then the people have still spoken.

As for the two cases that Walz tried to use both were twisted lies.  I've read up on them.  Both were medication abortions that went bad.  This is a rare but known risk and there is no state in the US that prohibits a hospital (this is well beyond a simple office visit when it happens) treating a woman who has that occur.  These cases are extremely difficult and dangerous; there is no "abortion" issue when they occur because at that point there is no fetus.  Sepsis is a very dangerous thing no matter what induces it (in fact it has an extremely high mortality rate irrespective of the root cause; if you go into septic shock you have a 30-40% chance of death even with hospital treatment) and yet medication abortions are both safer and far less expensive than procedures.  Those are the facts but no medical intervention is ever risk-free.  To attempt to exploit this is an outrage and I think Vance did a good job of deflecting it without going after Walz's false characterizations directly, which IMHO was deserved but there were no points to be scored there.

Let's do guns.  What Walz refused to acknowledge (but Vance did in an oblique way) is that the changes in our society are environmental.  Well, what environmental changes?  Demographics, for one, and second psychoactive prescription drugs.  No, you don't get to grab guns and play that game after you import millions of violent people, destroy families among minorities in particular and drug a third of the population with mind-altering prescriptions that we know turn some small percentage of said people into violent rage monsters.  The answer to that isn't "ban guns" it is to ban DOCTORS prescribing that crap to kids and ban IMPORTING VIOLENT JACKASSES.  If you're not going to hang doctors who prescribe SSRIs to kids or imprison them when their patient turns into a rage monster, and ban importation of violent jackasses then the only remaining defense is more guns rather than less, and those guns have to be in the possession of school officials and teachers whether you like it or not.  Choose.

One of the most-telling parts of the debate, and where Walz fell flat, was on the housing and cost-of-living issues.  If you don't believe that admitting 20 million "migrants" puts upward pressure on all costs of living, including particularly housing when you say we're three million housing units short -- but you put nearly seven times as many people into the nation -- you're nuts.  Economics isn't a particularly complicated thing when you drill down into the basics, and the basics of supply and demand always hold.  Yes, labor issues are more-complex than a simple sound bite but supply and demand are the two basic immutable facts in all economic discussions; if you increase demand without a commensurate increase in supply prices rise.  Never mind putting ten+ million unskilled drivers on the road which wildly increases the crash rate and thus spikes car insurance that everyone needs to buy.  There are plenty of people who like this because they own said assets including rental properties and insurance firms.  Walz tried to play too-cute-by-half with personal anecdotes.  Vance was having none of that and on the facts he's right.

Vance cited a Federal Reserve paper on this as related to housing.  He wasn't lying:

Finally, there is a risk that strong consumer demand for services, increased immigration, and continued labor market tightness could lead to persistently high core services inflation. Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents, as additional housing supply may take time to materialize.

I tire of the "climate" nonsense.  You can listen to my two podcasts on the other side from recent days if you'd like, or just look up 1916 and the floods in Asheville occasioned from same.  Then, in case you think this is all "unexpected" or "human caused without precedent" go pull the flood zone maps from FEMA (which they conveniently do produce) and look at Asheville specifically.  Bluntly everyone had fair warning because it had happened before long before there were SUVs and the atmospheric combination that led to that outcome is relatively rare (good) but hardly unprecedented and thus that it would eventually occur again was fact.  The additional rainfall over the area (which indeed was extreme) was due to the strong cold front that preceded the storm and that same front, which just happened to come through at the time it did, left a cut-off low behind which is what resulted in the near-straight-northward motion and a bunch of additional moisture wildly adding to the rainfall totals.  We as humans like living in places that we think are pretty but they're often prone to these events and if we do not learn from history and at least do the engineering work to keep our infrastructure operational when they happen (and yes, it is possible) then the outcomes are worse, especially if we start bidding up said land and putting really expensive real estate on it.  This is similar to the couple of years ago fiber cut over in this area that was from a contractor who dug it up: There was no redundant pathing in the area at all for cable Internet, which is a monopoly here at present, and as a result virtually every store in the area couldn't take a credit card for a couple of days until they got it fixed.  If you don't spend the effort on engineering along with required redundancy and resilience then when the bad thing comes the outcome will be worse -- maybe catastrophically worse.  If there is just one legitimate job that Government has at all levels it is preventing this sort of cost-cutting and engineering malfeasance whether through ignorance or simply to pocket the money that should have been spent.  Government failed here just as it has many times before and then of course none of the politicians want to accept their piece of the blame for it and much of it was politics.  FEMA, for example, could have trivially bought and stored a thousand Starlink terminals which can blanket an impacted area with usable signal and they require only a modest amount of power to run, even when all other infrastructure in an area has been destroyed.  That would cost less than a million dollars including a small generator to power each and they have a zero recurring cost until they're needed, and then once the disaster is mitigated they can be boxed back up and await the next need.  Private parties are doing exactly that right now in the impacted areas.

One place where I thought both candidates were horridly weak was on health care generally.  Simply put if you don't enforce anti-monopoly laws there is no answer and the grab-bag of Obamacare, no matter how you slice it, is unsustainable and will collapse.  The answer to a huge part of this problem has been on the books for one hundred years and yet neither candidate went to where the Executive is obligated -- that is, to evenly enforce all the laws as written.  Walz kept trying to come back to "pre-existing conditions" but tell me, ladies and gentlemen, what you'd have to pay for fire insurance if you didn't buy it until after your house was already on fire.  Obviously in that situation it will be cheaper to simply eat the rebuilding cost because it takes the middleman out of the money transaction; either way the house is destroyed and the expense will occur.  IF your answer is that you have a right to force others to rebuild your house when in fact you set it on fire, whether through foolishness or even intentional conduct then just say so and we can proceed from there.  This is a conversation we must have; if your position is that we can ignore the root cause of the wild-eyed explosion in chronic and very expensive conditions, then simply demand everyone buy into it, you're going to preside over a government and financial system collapse.  The economics are clear and neither side has put forward an answer.  You may think RFK is a lunatic and in some ways I would agree but he is drawing attention to the fact that we need to address root causes because simply attempting to suck up more and more money will fail and when it does those who have the worst medical problems will get the worst of the outcome.  We can't prevent all of that but we sure can mitigate a lot of it and none of that mitigation will happen until we stop treating this as a problem for which one simply blows more money as we have proved through the last three or four decades that all the additional spending has not slowed or reversed the trend; in fact its gotten worse.

In the closing area I don't believe there was a contest at all.  Walz and Harris have been proved to have taken actions that were clearly unconstitutional and they sought to hide them when it comes to censorship.  They got caught and even Zuckerberg himself has admitted he was wrong to knuckle under and that the Biden/Harris administration did take those acts.  Walz's "fire in a theater" defense was factually wrong and has been turned away by the Supreme Court; no, you cannot censor in advance but consequences for actual false statements remain after the fact.  This, folks, was where you saw the difference on display between one candidate who believes that the First Amendment is first because it has to be and underlies everything else, and without it we no longer are America, and a candidate who doesn't believe that should hold when he doesn't agree with the message.

Incidentally this article is on this side of the blog because bringing up the fact that "pre-existing conditions" is identical to demanding that you be able to literally light your house on fire and then force your neighbor to pay to have it rebuilt has gotten me censored by Google in the past.  IF Walz and Harris could force me to shut up about the truth of such a position they would.

I would hope that only one of those positions is acceptable in a person who might actually have the authority to execute on same during the next four years especially when the current Vice-President in fact did exactly that during the last 3-1/2.