Debate watch parties were held across Springfield last night as the first of four presidential debates took place at Hofstra University in New York.
One was billed as a non-partisan watch party at Missouri State University.
MSU socio-political communications major Emily Doll is a Hillary Clinton supporter. After watching the debate, Doll said she felt like Trump came across as “very arrogant.”
"Most of his comments relating to race, which is a very important issue to me, it seemed like he only cared about places that he had property in. It was very impersonal, and it just wasn't very intelligent. Hillary's comments--I think she's been very poised throughout the whole thing," she said.
Ryan Wissmann is an MSU geology major and a Donald Trump supporter. He felt like the debate was biased against Trump.
"I noticed a number of times that Hillary was given longer than Trump to speak. I feel that Trump did do a good job. There were a couple of moments that he did falter, but he did do a good job. He--for the most part he answered the questions. He made his views very clear," he said.
But he felt like Trump was able to show why he should be the next president.
One person in attendance was Dr. Eric Morris, communication professor and debate coach at MSU. According to Morris, from time to time in presidential debates, there have been occasional patterns of “talk-overs.” But that was a frequent occurrence last night. While he said that can make for an entertaining event…
"The drawback to that is that it really keeps you off topic, and this is also a debate that meandered off topic quite a bit. I saw several instances where questions were asked and the answers that were given to them had little if anything to do with the question. They were kind of like stream of consciousness jump to this issue, this issue this issue instead of clearly answering it," he said.
Morris didn’t think moderator Lester Holt did a bad job in the debate Monday night, but he’d like to see something different in the next debate.
"I would like to see a form of moderation that would insist upon an actual direct answer to questions," he said.
While he admits it’s not likely to happen this year, he’d like to see a format where the initial answer time is short—30 seconds—and the moderator can extend it to as long as two minutes as long as the candidate directly answers the question.
Morris said he was hoping to get a better feel for Donald Trump’s position during the debate. But he said the Republican candidate said nothing new.
There were partisan watch parties, too. Greene County Republicans hosted their own watch party at Classic Rock Coffee, while, across town, Greene County Democrats watched at Patton Alley Pub.