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Mr. Warnock declined to say whether he thought Mr. Biden should run for re-election, saying: “You’re asking me who’s going to run in ’24? The people of Georgia get to decide who’s going to be their senator in three days.” He also embraced many of the policies the president has pushed, like student loan forgiveness.

At times, Mr. Walker tripped up on his language and policy details, including when he said he wanted Georgians to move away from government health care to the kind of insurance Mr. Warnock has — which is government-subsidized health care.

At one point, Mr. Walker also seemed to blame people with diabetes for their condition, saying during a discussion on insulin costs that while he believed in reducing the price of the drug, “at the same time, you got to eat right,” adding that “unless you’re eating right, insulin is doing you no good.”

But overall, Mr. Walker held his own after he and his campaign had assiduously tried to lower expectations ahead of the debate. A month beforehand, the candidate half-jokingly told reporters that he was “a country boy” and “not that smart.” Mr. Warnock, he said, was “going to show up and embarrass me.”

That did not happen, but Mr. Walker’s biggest task was to quell doubts about his qualifications for the office.

It is unclear if he succeeded. He continued his outright denial of the abortion claims by his former girlfriend. “I said that was a lie, and I’m not backing down,” he said.

In perhaps Mr. Warnock’s most combative move, he pivoted from a question about “defunding police” to Mr. Walker’s history of violent altercations and exaggerations of his résumé, including a claim that he had been in law enforcement.