The tiny conservative crowd was clearly hoping for fireworks on Tuesday night as they gathered at a Boston-themed bar on H Street in the heart of the nation’s capital.
Instead, the few dozen attendees at the Washington DC Young Republicans vice presidential debate watch party were treated to a nearly two-hour policy-packed wonkfest, a back-and-forth slog where few lasting political points were scored and both men likely walked away from the stage with the majority of both their dignity and standing with their respective running mates intact.
DC’s chapter of the Young Republicans organization is a wacky bunch, even by the standards of today’s hyper-online Gen Z and millennial conservatives.
The group has regularly hosted disgraced ex-congressman George Santos as a guest of honor at their events, as well as his sneering number two, Vish Burra. They’ve also gone nuclear on X against Santos’s critics, including against moderate Republicans in Congress who called for Santos’s ouster. Those same Republican members of Congress would likely never grace the doorstep of DC’s YR chapter. Meanwhile, sources involved in the broader Young Republicans organizational field around the DC/Maryland/Virginia region tell The Independent that the takeover of the DC chapter by Groyper-adjacent, hyper MAGA partisans has led to a cratering effect on their ability to field canvassers and other volunteers for local races, especially in the battleground state of Virginia.
The crowd gathered on Tuesday to watch JD Vance and Tim Walz face off on the debate stage seemed ready for some excitement to break out at any point.
But, it never did.
There were scattered “woos” and rounds of cheers during the first half of the night whenever Vance, who came polished and ready to deliver sharp talking points, was able to land a blow on his opponent.
There were boos when Walz brought up his own upbringing in response to an unrelated question — and even a few stifled groans when Vance did the exact same.
And there were loud jeers for the moderators – CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan – when the issue of climate change and its role in the devastating Hurricane Helene that has ravaged the American southeast in recent days came up.
The group turned to energetic hoots when Vance, minutes later, turned the issue of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) back on moderator Brennan and claimed that refugees seeking Temporary Protected Status (TPS) could acquire such approval to enter the US simply by activating it with an app on their phones. Brennan, thanking him dryly for explaining the process, did not correct him.
But the energy shifted, momentarily, during the segment on abortion and reproductive freedom.
Guests were visibly on pins and needles as Vance navigated questions about his past support for a national ban — something he denied supporting in one sentence, then acknowledged in the next — as well as barbs about IVF and pro-family policies like the child tax credit. But the Ohio senator escaped without any gaping wounds, and the debate pressed on.
“He handled that about as well as he could have,” one young Republican in a MAGA hat mused to The Independent at the bar.
But by the end of the first commercial break, it seemed like the energy had largely left the room.
