Opposing views from Washington supporters of the Clinton v. Trump debate

Monday’s long-awaited first presidential debate of 2016 was built up as being big as the Super Bowl, but unlike in sports, supporters from both sides can claim victory at the end.

KIRO Radio’s Jason and Burns spoke with Washington supporters from both sides to get their takes on the debate, including asking both about their thoughts on the lack of discussion on Clinton’s email scandal.

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Congressman Rick Larsen, a Clinton superdelegate, said the Democrat showed that she is not only strong on policy but is also passionate about the job. He said that Clinton needs a longer, better answer to questions about the emails and expects Trump to hammer that point in the second round of the debates. Listen to the full audio here.

He may bring them up. Regardless of what the moderators bring up, your first impression is your best impression and I’ve run for election and re-election for 19 years. Every election, no matter how much people know you, it’s always about re-introducing yourself to people. … Clinton, people believe they know her. Elections are all about re-introducing yourself and she re-introduced herself tonight. When you look back at whether its emails, or whatever other issues you have with Clinton, so long as she’s continually re-introducing herself, no matter what you think of her, that’s always a positive.

Trump did not re-introduce himself tonight. He confirmed the concerns people have had about him. He is temperamental, he did the facial expression equivalent of Al Gore’s sighs in 2000, where he sort of had that mocking face of what Clinton was saying. That’s not good for Trump and he’s going to have to, I believe, kind of recover from that.

Luis Valdez, with the Donald J. Trump for Washington state campaign, said he thought Trump did well and expects him to bring up the email controversy more often. Listen to the full audio here.

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize them as scandals, I would characterize them as points of misjudgment by Ms. Hillary Clinton, where she has put the … whole United States security at risk because she allowed her emails to be unsecured. That’s my issue. … Yes, I expect it to come up in the next one. The other thing I was highly disappointed by, not with Mr. Trump, but with the moderator, was that there were no issues about immigration. There was no (discussion about) issues that are important to the community and important to the voters at this time.

I think Mr. Trump proved in tonight’s debate that he’s not going to get riled up, because she took a couple of shots at him and he didn’t bite. So this whole concept of, ‘Oh, he can be baited with Twitter,’ I think that showed that that’s not real because he was pretty cool, calm and collected, I thought.

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