About a week after the first presidential debate, students and Gainesville residents came together Tuesday night to watch U.S. vice presidential candidates Sen. Tim Kaine and Gov. Mike Pence debate.
The Graham Center Student Fellows and Gators 4 Hillary hosted free debate watch parties to give the public a chance see how Democratic candidate Kaine and Republican candidate Pence would defend their platforms and their running mates.
At the Bob Graham Center for Public Service’s nonpartisan watch party at Pugh Hall, UF political science junior Natalie Jiron said debate-night bingo and slices of pizza served as a way to balance out this year’s highly polarizing presidential election that often leads to heated arguments.
Because both of the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, tend to overshadow their vice presidential candidates, the 20-year-old said she didn’t anticipate Tuesday’s debate to be as abrasive as the presidential debate Sept. 26.
“We never hear them speak,” she said. “We have two very strong-personality candidates, so we kind of only see (Kaine and Pence) as puppets.”
Throughout the debate, however, Kaine and Pence took jabs at each other’s running mates, with Kaine alleging Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump didn’t pay his income taxes and Pence pinning Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as the main culprit of the Middle East’s instability.
At the office of the Florida Democratic Party located on Northwest Sixth Street, Santiago Marquez, a 19-year-old UF sustainability and women’s studies sophomore, said both candidates did fairly well.
Despite how they’ve been portrayed in the media, he said, they refused to back down when pressed on each other’s policy points.
“They’re not as reserved,” Marquez said. “And they usually are.”
