Ethan Wolin, Contributing Photographer

While a trivia game held the attention of most patrons at the New West Cafe, 71-year-old Denise Rodgers watched Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump spar on the debate stage. She had to read subtitles as music blared.

“We experienced the best without the sound. Their body language and split-screen images told the story. Harris is superior to Trump,” Rodgers wrote in a text the next day.

New Haveners’ impressions split along partisan lines as the prime-time ABC News presidential debate in Philadelphia captivated the nation on Tuesday night. Local voters and politicos who spoke to the News emerged with unchanged attitudes about the election, now under two months away.

Devoted Democrats in the deep blue city took from the faceoff a boost of confidence in Harris’ still-young candidacy and validation of President Joe Biden’s choice to withdraw from the race amid the fallout from his June debate performance against Trump.

“She had so much confidence,” said Audrey Tyson, a vice chair of New Haven’s Democratic Town Committee, adding that Harris maintained her poise under Trump’s attacks. “No matter what he said, she just was strong in articulating what she wants to do in her plans.”

Tyson, a strong Biden supporter who said she was not very familiar with Harris before the summertime upheaval, voted for Harris as a delegate at the Democratic Convention last month. Tuesday’s debate reinforced her enthusiasm for the new nominee.

Some Democrats said they saw the debate as a chance for Harris to match her campaign’s energy and broadsides against Trump with more details about her policy agenda.

“Kamala gave more substance around some of the things that she wants to do, like affordability for homes for first-time homebuyers,” Ward 29 Alder Brian Wingate, who watched the debate at home in Westville, told the News.

Wingate said that Harris still needs to specify her economic policy, especially for quelling the high cost of living. 

“People want to know how you’re going to make people get more money,” he said. “I wish she had drilled down more on that.”

As Yale students gathered around campus to watch the debate among friends or at watch parties, New Haveners tuned in from their homes, on their phones and in bars.

The New West Cafe in Westville played the debate on two televisions while two others showed a baseball game between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees.

Early in the debate, Rodgers, an artist and framer, said she wanted Harris to articulate how she would support the middle class. 

“I’m for Kamala, only because another four years of Trump unbridled would be very dangerous,” she said.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, can almost certainly count on receiving Connecticut’s seven Electoral College votes. But not everyone in the Elm City seeing Trump and Harris clash on Tuesday favored the Democratic ticket.

Kelvin Olivo, a 33-year-old car detailer from Bridgeport, could hardly focus on the ongoing debate while drinking with friends at 80 Proof American Kitchen & Bar downtown. He said he has never voted in an election before and, despite once having had high hopes for Biden, has made up his mind to vote for Trump this time.

“The Democrats feed you a bunch of BS, feed you on dreams, but they never follow through,” Olivo said. “Kamala is their puppet. Trump stands on business.”

Republican congressional candidate Michael Massey, who is running a long-shot campaign to unseat longtime U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro in Connecticut’s New Haven-centered Third Congressional District, said he fell asleep during the debate, which he called “pretty boring” in a phone interview with the News.

“He didn’t do well, he didn’t do bad,” Massey said of Trump, whose politics he began to embrace while serving time in federal prison. “Either you like Trump, or you don’t.”

Massey added that he believed the ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, had favored Harris and unfairly pushed back on Trump.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Paul Garlinghouse, an active local Green Party member who has run for alder, said “it’s hard to evaluate” the debate given Trump’s outlandish statements, such as a baseless claim about immigrants consuming pet animals in Ohio.

Garlinghouse said he planned to vote for neither of the candidates who exchanged jabs at the National Constitution Center — but rather for Green nominee Jill Stein.

Early voting in Connecticut begins on Oct. 21.