Voters and progressive groups gathered at Atomic Tom’s in downtown Binghamton Tuesday night to watch the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The event was organized by the progressive activist group Citizen Action and the New York Working Families Party. Democratic state Sen. Lea Webb was also in attendance.
Sarah Hardin, 21, studies political science at Binghamton University. She is a registered Democrat and voting in a presidential election for the first time.
Hardin said access to reproductive health is a very important issue this election, for her and a lot of her peers. She said she liked what she heard from Harris during the debate.
“What's really important during this election cycle right now is the choice for women to have their own body autonomy at the end of the day,” Hardin said. “And I think that's literally on the ticket right now. That is the ticket. So I think that's why I have to vote for Kamala Harris.”
Ryan Gaire, 18, is president of Binghamton University’s College Democrats chapter. He said he felt that Harris seemed ready to lead the country during the debate, and he’s glad the issues of health care and housing came up. But he added he would have liked some clear details on Harris’ plans to end the war in Gaza.
“I appreciate that she said that there was too much suffering going on amongst the Palestinian people,” Gaire said. “But when she was asked what her plan is, she was just saying we need to have a cease fire and bring the hostages home, which is great, but how are you going to achieve that when the administration she's in has not done so for the past year?”
Leora Eisenberger is also a registered Democrat and Binghamton University student, originally from the Buffalo area. Like Hardin and Gaire, she is voting in a presidential election for the first time in November.
Eisenberger said she was nervous about the debate at first.
“I mean, Kamala and Trump hadn't even met before this debate, so I was unsure of how that would go,” Eisenberger said. “Trump acted about how I expected him to. He was interrupting everybody all the time, didn't answer questions. But I felt like Kamala did a fairly good job of staying on topic, getting her points across clearly.”
Like many young people voting for the first time this year, Eisenberger, who is studying history at Binghamton University, was 13 during the 2016 election. She said the division she saw that year changed the way she saw politics.
“I want to be a history teacher, and this is the stuff that I cannot wait to teach my students about 20, 30 years from now,” Eisenberger said. “I cannot wait to tell them that I was part of this... that we were all part of this.”
Recent polling from NPR and PBS shows a very close race between Harris and Trump, and a third of respondents said the debate will have an effect on who they decide to vote for.