Coveted Bucks County hosts dueling partisan watch parties for VP debate

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As the candidates for vice president faced off in their first and likely only debate during the campaign, supporters of both gathered at competing watch parties in Bucks County, a county evenly divided between party voters.

Not surprisingly, party adherents thought their own preferred candidate won the debate.

“I thought [Republican JD] Vance did a great job,” said Jim Maxwell, a retired FBI agent who lives in Newtown. “He’s competent, intelligent, and he’s new blood. I think he sets the stage for the future.”

Over with the Democrats, Leslie Spina said Democrat Tim Walz “did great.”

He “really stayed on topic of the things that are important to people who vote the way that I want to vote,” said Spina, who runs a childcare agency.

More than 200 people showed up at the Newtown Athletic Center for the Republican watch party, which featured speeches by Pennsylvania Republican Party chair Lawrence Tabas and mixed martial arts title winner Eddie Alvarez.

“I’ve never been more inspired in my life watching Donald Trump’s first assassination attempt,” Alvarez said. “With a face full of blood, he picked himself back up off the ground. He looked at the people he served, and he yelled the most iconic line ever in the history of America. ‘Fight, fight, fight.’”

About 25 people attended the Harris campaign’s watch party, where New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy appeared before the debate kicked off. He heaped praise on Walz as he spoke to the crowd.

“Tim Walz is one of our closest friends,” Murphy said. “There are a lot of people in life who appear to be one thing, and yet they’re another. Tim is exactly as he appears to be. He is the big teddy bear. He’s the guy who lights the room up.”

Murphy also told attendees he believed that recent stories about Walz’s insecurity on the debate stage were an intentional strategy by Democrats to catch Vance off guard.

The exchange began with the news of the day: Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon and Iran’s launch of a series of ballistic missiles at Iran in response. At the Republican watch party, the situation weighed heavily on local resident Danielle Teta’s mind.

“We’re almost at World War III, and that’s a really scary thing,” Teta said, adding she believes Trump and Vance would handle the situation better. “You have to think about which side you’re voting for because, if one side would be better than the other, it changes everything.”

Local Democrat Lorrie Copolin said she was concerned about ongoing fighting in Israel and Palestine but added, “It’s not in my backyard.”

She said that Vance was wrong to blame Harris. “She’s not the president. She doesn’t make the policy.”

Maxwell, the retired FBI agent, said the issue is related to the border where he worries “terrorists” can get in or others “here for nefarious reasons.”

Democrat Sandy Lee Kahn, however, thinks Republicans are missing the economic value of immigration.

“I think that people have to understand that the majority of jobs that are local, Americans don’t want, or are filled by immigrants right now,” said Bucks resident Sandy Lee Kahn. “I don’t think that a lot of people realize how important they are to our community.”

The crowd at the Republican event loudly booed in unison when Walz pressed Vance to say that Trump lost the election in 2020 and referred to the 140 police officers who were assaulted that day. Teta argued Trump wasn’t to blame.

“Trump did not say, go down there and have a riot,” she said. “He said, go down and peacefully protest. I do think there were a lot of bad actors at the Capitol [and] I think there should be some consequences. But there are people in jail still, and we’re almost four years later.

She added that she believed FBI provocateurs were also among the crowd.

It makes sense that both campaigns would organize watch parties in Bucks County. Democrats won a majority of voters in the county during the last two elections. Still, Republicans see an opening there in their effort to win the county and Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes.

Nearly 166,000 Bucks County residents — just over 48% — voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, less than 1% more than Donald Trump, but she lost Pennsylvania and the election. Joe Biden took the county much more decisively, with nearly 205,000 votes and nearly 52% of the total vote.

However, Republicans have recently secured a slight registration advantage. In just four years, they closed a 10,000 voter registration gap and now boast 198,045 registrations compared to 197,781 for the Democrats.

“If we win here, we win the election,” said Jim Worthington, a Newtown resident and owner of the host of the Republican watch party, told WHYY News.

At the Democratic watch party, Bucks County Commissioner Robert Harvie expressed the same sentiment.

“We are the biggest swing county in Pennsylvania — people joke about us being the key to the Keystone State,” he said. “So as Bucks goes, typically Pennsylvania goes, and as Pennsylvania goes, the nation has gone in several elections.”

Copolin said she was concerned by the shift in registration.

“I’m a little worried because I heard there’s more Republicans than Democrats [in Bucks County] for the first time or at least recently,” she said. “And I don’t know why that is.”