Viewers tune into presidential debate at watch parties across Boston

Bars, restaurants and college classrooms filled up across Boston to put on watch parties during the presidential debate on Tuesday night.

As Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican nominee former President Donald Trump took the debate stage, several institutions across Boston also took to hosting fellow members of their communities to watch the debate.

Zach Zinman, president of Tufts University Democrats, hosted a debate watch party at the Joyce Cummings Center on Tufts’s campus to provide a place for students to watch the event as a community and encourage more political participation. 

“It’s the only election year of our college years,” Zinman said. “This election will shape the rest of our lives.”

Barney Howard, 27, who was on vacation to the United States from Manchester, United Kingdom, said he and his friends “stumbled across” a presidential debate watch party at Ducali’s Pizzeria & Bar in the North End on Tuesday night. 

“It’s very different to the U.K.,” Howard said. “We would never have watch parties in bars. People would watch at home.”

Howard said the restaurant was quiet, but had a “lighthearted atmosphere.”

Justine Murphy, a Rhode Island resident, said the event was her first time attending a watch party for a debate. 

Murphy said she has been looking forward to the debate since Harris took President Joe Biden’s place as the Democratic presidential nominee.

“Now you have two candidates who can talk for an hour and a half, which is a little bit of a bare minimum you would hope for the president,” Murphy said.

Melvin Poindexter, a Democratic National Committee member, also watched the debate at Ducali’s. The DNC organized watch parties across the country in each “geographical congressional district and Massachusetts senatorial district” to engage residents politically, he said. 

“Boston, because of the colleges here, is a shining beacon of young activism and democratic engagement,” he said.

Somerville’s La Posada Restaurant & Tequila Bar also hosted a watch party for the Somerville Democrats organization. 

Matt Firmani, a tech support specialist and Somerville resident, decided to attend the watch party at La Posada because it was close to his home and made for “a good opportunity to get Taco Tuesday in” while also watching the debate. He said he was surprised by the event’s turnout and noticed the palpable energy of the attendees.

“It was a line out the door,” Firmani said. “There’s clearly an undercurrent of desperate enthusiasm [for this debate].”

Firmani said La Posada attendees felt “tense” at the beginning of the debate, but “melted into this jubilation of, ‘Oh my gosh, [Harris’s] actually killing it.’” 

Isabella Curavalati, a student at New England Law Boston, also attended the La Posada watch party. She said she has been “so excited” about the Harris campaign because her mother, Maria Curatone — who is running for her third term of reelection for the Register of Deeds for Middlesex County — champions similar ideas like women’s rights.

“[My mom] was like, ‘You should come out with me tonight, and we should watch the debate together and make it something special,’” Curavalati said. “She always raised me to be an independent woman, and now we have a strong woman who could possibly be our president.”

Curavalati said everyone in La Posada “was really excited for Kamala to take the stage,” adding that she and other young people refer to her by her nickname, “Big Sister General.”

Curavalati said the “vibe” of the debate watch party emulated “hope and excitement,” which she said she hadn’t experienced since Barack Obama’s presidency.

Firmani had attended the Massachusetts Democrats’ victory party in 2016 for then-candidate Hillary Clinton in Cambridge, where he said he watched the room “collapse emotionally” when Clinton lost. He said he and the attendees at La Posada felt “a lot more reassured” watching Harris debate Trump.

Harris “straddled the line professionally” between addressing both her supporters and the “people in the middle” who “really needed to hear from her,” Firmani said.

Curavalati said while “everyone is entitled to their own opinions,” voters can see the same “polarizing” politics at the national and local levels.

“In such a Democratic state, we still have very split opinions,” Curavalati said. “When you see campaigns like the one that my mom is in right now, you realize that on the national stage, those very split ideologies can be boiled down to these local campaigns.”

Murphy said she hopes voters also pay attention to local politics, as those elections impact their lives more directly. 

“The roads you are driving on, the train that you’re using,” Murphy said. “That’s not really going to be the president’s concern day-to-day, so [local] elections are going to really matter for your day-to-day quality of life.”