NASHUA, N.H. — On a night when former Vice President Joe Biden faced the toughest test of his campaign for the Democratic nomination, a small handful of Biden supporters gathered at the Peddler's Daughter, an Irish restaurant and pub on Main Street in downtown Nashua, for a debate watch party hosted by the Biden campaign.
The watch party did not go off without a hitch, as the single television showing the debate in the back of the pub had no volume. While music played over the speaker system and a larger group of mostly young people cheered on a Copa America soccer game at the bar, the Biden supporters relied upon closed captioning to follow the debate.
Despite the lack of sound from the television, the watch party attendees remained in good spirits for the high-stakes first debate of the primary season. When Biden delivered his first line of the night, Lynne Daleb, a resident of Nashua and a New Hampshire native, exclaimed "I love Joe."
Daleb explained before the start of the debate that she was a moderate Democrat and she liked that Biden was "a true Democrat" and "for the worker." She described Biden affectionately as "the kind of guy to shoot the breeze with" and disputed that he was a racist because of his remarks on segregationist senators earlier in the week. "That's Obama's buddy," she said.
Although most of the Biden supporters left the restaurant or stopped following along with the subtitles by the time of the exchange between their candidate and California Senator Kamala Harris more than an hour into the debate, Gail Hernandez, 59, of Wilton, New Hampshire said at the end of the night that she wished Biden had apologized. "His mistake was not saying 'I'm sorry.'"
Hernandez, who still supports Biden as the best candidate to stand up to Trump, said that the most exciting part of the night was scouting out potential running mates. She emphasized that he could "bring in other people" — not older white men like himself — to advance the progressive agenda. Currently out of work and looking for a new job, Hernandez supports a living wage. "I'm all for $15 an hour. $10 isn't enough."
Diane Dupre, a resident of Amherst, New Hampshire who voted for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, also still holds several progressive policy preferences. She wants Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and she praised the single-payer health care systems in Canada and Ecuador, where she recently traveled.
Dupre said however that circumstances have changed for the 2020 primary and defeating Donald Trump was her number one priority. She believed that Biden could persuade voters in the Midwest and the Bible Belt because he makes people feel "comfortable" and "safe."
Whereas Dupre highlighted a possible map to the White House for Biden, Daleb stressed his popularity among older Americans. "Joe brings something to the table that the others can't" because "we still got a lot of the older generation" and he can "speak the language" of Baby Boomers, as well as Republican members of Congress like South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham.
Daleb, a vocal advocate for the Kurdish people on Twitter, also argued for a candidate with foreign policy experience. Daleb befriended a group of Kurdish refugees in the 1990s and has since taken up their cause as her own. She pointed out that protecting the Kurds from Middle Eastern dictators like Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan has historically been a bipartisan issue.
As the candidates proceeded into their closing statements, Hernandez said that she liked that there were so many candidates and that she watched both nights. She said she saw "a lot of diversity and a lot of energy" and she did not understand why pundits were "whining" about the size of the field.
Dupre, who was most concerned about "who do we think can win a general election," wanted to narrow the field and bring down the number of candidates in the debates, but only through polling. She did not want the party to intervene because "we don't have a Trump."
In search of a Democratic nominee that can win in New Hampshire and across the country, Dupre expressed confidence in her candidate. "I think it's Biden. I hope it's Biden," she said.
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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