PITTSBURGH — Steel City Republicans started debate night with confident laughs and ended with laments and even silence after watching former President Donald Trump’s performance against Vice President Kamala Harris in their first face-off.
“I don’t think either side did stellar,” Erin Koper told The Post, adding Harris “did better than my expectation” and “found her comfort zone.”
“I heard people calling it more of a wash,” said Sam DeMarco, Allegheny County GOP chair and county councilman.
“I felt it was more of a loss.”
The Allegheny County GOP squeezed 120 swing-state Republicans and Trump supporters Tuesday night into the second floor of Steel Mill Saloon overlooking the Ohio River.
It expected a resounding victory for Trump.
It didn’t get it.
DeMarco cited numerous “lost opportunities” Trump had to hold Harris to account.
On the border and immigration, “he could have put her away,” he told The Post.
“He could have ended her campaign tonight. And he didn’t,” DeMarco declared.
He said Trump was “overconfident.”
Ken Roberts, 40, in sales and a blue blazer, noticed another “missed opportunity.”
He wished ABC or Trump had asked Harris, “How long did you know the president was incapacitated?”
He didn’t think the debate would move the election much in Harris’ favor and stuck to his initial prediction that it’s “Trump’s race to lose.”
Others were less sure.
Harris “appeared to be more knowledgeable and better prepared,” Todd Bray, a retired airline pilot, told The Post.
“Kamala may have changed a few people’s opinions.”
But his wife Victoria interjected, “She never said how she’s going to change things.”
“I’ll say Trump lost, but Kamala didn’t win,” Mike Hallowran, 32 and an analyst at regional grocery chain Giant Eagle, told The Post.
Sitting down with a smile and a baseball cap before the debate, he predicted Harris would “cackle in 10 seconds” when given the chance to speak.
“That’s why they’re hiding her,” he said.
Leaving the bar, he echoed Kamala Harris’s slogans to move forward and not go back.
“Trump needs to stop living in the past,” Hallowran said, wishing the former president would stop questioning the 2020 election.
“Trump shoots himself in the foot every chance he gets,” he added.
Texting with his mom during the debate, he said Trump’s comments about migrants eating pets “went over her head.”
“Come on, Donald. Don’t talk about that,” Ron Gregrich, a retired teacher sitting at the bar, said.
Cats and dogs, that’s a “waste of time.”
Trump “speaks well to his base” but not to independents, Hallowran concluded.
When ABC’s David Muir asked about Trump questioning Harris’ heritage, one woman staring up at a TV yelled out, “She’s not black!”
Asked if Trump is divisive, James Hayes, the Republican running to unseat Pittsburgh Squad member Rep. Summer Lee, said, “I’m the only black person in the room. I don’t care. I’m American.”
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“A lot of the identity politics comes out of the Democratic Party,” he emphasized.
People started looking down at their phones when the debate turned to Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The bar went quiet.
Then “Woo-hoo!” Ken Maleski hollered when Trump noted police killed Ashli Babbitt, but no one “on the other side” was killed. Babbitt was shot trying to break into the Capitol.
Maleski, 70 and a retired forester, said Democrats and media use Jan. 6 as “fodder,” but the rioters were 1% to 2% of those who stormed the Capitol. Most were “people my age,” he said, adding he wasn’t there himself.
Ron Gregrich, a retired teacher, thought Trump won on policy.
“If people just read the transcripts, Trump would be winning,” he said, alluding to the tale Richard Nixon beat John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential debate with radio audiences but not on television.
He said Harris won visually, which might matter more to viewers.
“Kamala looks glamorous” with “animated facial expressions,” he said, while “Trump looks dour.”
Some of the watch-party attendees did too by the end of the night.
