VP debate live updates: Vance thrived on stage while Walz struggled to find his footing

In response to Trump and Vance potentially overturning ACA, Walz reminds people that Trump did not successfully repeal the ACA while in office and the policy preserves healthcare coverage for those with preexisting conditions.

Walz, using his hands a lot, is passionately explaining why the ACA is important.

Supporting Trump’s mass deportation policies, Vance claims that migrants are contributing to high housing costs in the U.S.

An economic study said a mass deportation of eight million immigrants would increase consumer prices.

Vance suggested that school shootings are due at least in part from “illegally obtained firearms” and guns from across the southern border, but most guns used in mass shootings were obtained legally, and guns are largely being trafficked in the other direction because they are easier to buy here.

Tender moment between Vance and Walz after the Democratic vice presidential nominee shared an emotional story about his son witnessing a mass shooting.

Vance turned to Walz to sympathize with him before addressing the cameras.

After a brief commercial break, we are back on the debate stage with moderators bringing up the topic of gun violence.

Both Vance and Walz agree that gun violence is a problem that needs to be solved but they have different ways of approaching the solution.

Vance cites mental health issues, crime rates and illegal gun ownership as the main contributors to these problems. Walz says it’s access to guns.

“We have to increase security in our schools,” Vance said. “We have to make the doors lock better, make the doors stronger, make the windows stronger.”

House Republicans voted to block the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding “any firearm injury and mortality prevention research” in 2023. Only four Republicans joined every Democrat in voting against it.

A botched late-term abortion isn’t a thing, but Vance also falsely said he has “not supported a national ban.” During the Senate race, he said he supported Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposal to ban abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy.

While Walz gets emotional discussing complicated and life-threatening pregnancies and abortion care, Vance invokes a woman who needed an abortion while skirting his support for preventing her from getting one.

When confronted with the issue of abortion, Vance repeated the same policies that Trump has: leave abortion up to the states.

Vance promoted “pro-family” ideas to support Americans raise children.

But when further pushed on his past statements about supporting a “national minimum standard”, Vance falsely claimed he never supported a national abortion “ban”.

On the issue of reproductive rights and abortion, Vance is a slightly disadvantage. Democrats have been campaigning hard on the issue.

Moderators asked Vance about his previous criticisms of Donald Trump – something multiple outlets have reported on.

Like Walz, Vance said he “was wrong about Donald Trump.”

James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, wants the FBI to investigate what he is calling Walz’s “longstanding connections” to the Chinese Communist Party “that make him susceptible to the Party’s strategy of elite capture, which seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural, and academic circles to influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans.”

Trump’s campaign tonight is calling him “Tiananmen Tim” and promoting a “federal congressional investigation” that his own ally is launching.

Walz taught English and American history in China through Harvard University’s WorldTeach program in the late 1980s. He later started a program called Educational Travel Adventures with his wife Gwen Walz, who is also a teacher, to organize summer trips to China for American high school students.

Walz was one of the “first government sanctioned groups of American educators” in China after the country opened its doors to the world in the 1980s, and he was in China during pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.