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In a packed lecture room at the Anacortes Public Library, joy was palpable as the crowd cheered for Vice President Kamala Harris during Tuesday’s presidential debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Throughout the evening, laughs, groans and cheers were heard from the roughly 40 debate watchers as candidates detailed positions on the economy, abortion and immigration throughout a 90-minute debate watch party hosted by the Fidalgo Democrats. The crowd included more women than men.
Mount Vernon resident Marcia Waterman, 62, was highly impressed with Harris’s performance, saying at the commercial break she was “on point.”
Waterman said what stood out to her was that Harris was actually answering the policy questions posed by the debate moderators, while Trump at times failed to answer questions with concrete plans and spread misinformation.
“She’s not letting Trump get away with his lies, and she just keeps going back and nailing him,” she said. “In the first debate with [President Joe] Biden, when it was his turn to speak, you wanted him to say those things, and when he couldn’t get it out, your heart just sunk … But having her say the things that we’re thinking — I mean, she’s speaking from our hearts.”
She especially liked Harris’s positions on abortion access for women and growing small businesses with tax credits.
The room filled with laughter and cheers as ABC debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked Trump when he spread misinformation about women getting late-term abortions and “executions after birth” — and a debunked claim about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
While there may have not been an audience at the debate in Pennsylvania, the crowd in Anacortes presented a united front for Harris, verbally calling for the moderators to cut Trump’s microphone when he interrupted Harris or spoke over his allotted time limit.
Harris’s debate performance impressed Stanny Stewart and Bunny Heiner, both from Anacortes. They felt Harris spoke well about her plans for the presidency.
“I just feel like she’s straightforward, she’s believable. I feel like I trust her,” said Stewart, 65. “She made so much sense, and she came around to all of her points and some of her points, and [Trump] didn’t.”
Heiner, 83, added, “Harris expressed herself very clearly so I couldn’t possibly misunderstand her.”
Following the presidential debate, fewer than a dozen stuck around to watch the Washington gubernatorial debate between Attorney General Bob Ferguson and former Representative and King County Sheriff Dave Reichert.
Annie Todd is CDN’s criminal justice/enterprise reporter; reach her at annietodd@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 130.
