The first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris drew a big crowd on Brown’s campus this Tuesday.
Over 200 students gathered in Salomon Center to watch the debate, which took place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The debate marked the first since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21 and endorsed Harris’s presidential candidacy.
The watch party, which was primarily sponsored by Brown Votes, was the result of a collaboration among multiple organizations at Brown, including the Brown Political Union, Brown Political Review, Every Vote Counts, as well as the Political Science and International and Public Affairs Departmental Undergraduate Groups.
“I think there was a lot of excitement,” Chair of Advocacy for Brown Votes and BPU President Logan Tullai ’25 said about the event. “That was part of the aim of having a bunch of non-partisan groups together to host a watch party, so there wouldn’t be some kind of underlying assumption about your ideology when attending.”
“Especially with both of these debates not having (live) audiences, I think watching it in a large setting like this can add some of that sense of community,” Tullai added.
Asher Labovich ’26 said he was surprised by the event’s turnout.
“I was expecting like 40 to 50 people,” he said. “I don’t know how many got in that room, but it must’ve been at least 100,” he added. Some people lay on blankets they brought to the event.
For Tullai, the consequences of the previous presidential debate between Biden and Trump raised the stakes of Tuesday’s showdown. “Seeing how much of a turning point that was, it was kind of exciting to see this as a potentially other turning point in this election,” he said.
While the groups that organized the watch party were all nonpartisan, the crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Harris, Labovich said. That observation aligns with years of polling data about Brown students’ political opinions, including an August poll of first-year students in which 83% of respondents who planned to cast a ballot said they would likely vote for Harris, The Herald previously reported.
“I didn’t see anyone clapping or anything when they heard something that they seemed to like from Trump,” he recalled. “There was a lot of screaming and hollering when Harris said something throughout the night, and a lot of cringing when Trump said stuff.”
Labovich added that there appeared to be constant discourse about political issues throughout the debate.
“There were a lot of debates happening in the room,” he said. “It’s a lot of people who care about similar issues (and) feel really passionately about topics like abortion and immigration.”
In hopes of boosting voter turnout, the event’s organizers displayed a QR code that gave people instructions on how to register to vote during the debate’s second intermission and after the event concluded.
Reflecting on the debate, Labovich believed that turning to Harris after Biden’s rocky performance was the right decision for the Democratic Party.
For Labovich, it feels like a “different lifetime.”
Aniyah Nelson is a University News editor overseeing the undergraduate student life beat. She is a junior from Cleveland, Ohio concentrating in political science and sociology. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music and watching bloopers from The Office.
