At Choppers Sports Grill in Cherry Creek, the watch party crowd for the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate liked former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina best, voting her top dog in a poll that ranked Florida Sen. Marco Rubio second and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson third.

There were roughly 80 people watching the Republican debate at Choppers, drinking local beer and eating flatbread appetizers. TV screens hung every few feet along the walls of the bar’s packed backroom, although, much to the crowd’s dismay, the debate audio cut out time and again.

There was Rubio making some well articulated point and then suddenly came silence and a collective groan from the crowd, as music swelled in place of the candidate’s well articulated defense of his tax plans. On every screen, Rubio smacked his lips silently, his tongue’s desperate search to wet his infamously dry mouth exaggerated for the lack of audible words. (“Give me a break,” an exasperated employee told the mutinous Republicans as he took a few seconds to restore the sound.)

“Democrat bartender!” came the shouts. The crowd may have been onto something. Choppers used to be Rick’s, one of Denver’s original fern bars. (President Jimmy Carter visited the joint in the swinging 1970s just to see the bar’s solar-operated dishwasher.)

The crowd liked Fiorina and Rubio and Carson – and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul had their fans – but they clapped loudest and most often at lines delivered by billionaire businessman Donald Trump. They groaned at lines delivered by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. And, as the night progressed, they began to shout down Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Kasich is struggling in the polls and has been lately positioning himself with increased vehemence as a teller of hard truths and as the only real “adult” among the candidates – the one with the most of what he argues is much-needed executive experience in government.

At first, the crowd reacted to Kasich with non-response. They watched him without comment. But as he grew more aggressive, insisting on time to speak and calling out frontrunner Trump’s plans as “silly,” they turned acid.

“Boo,” they started to grumble. Soon they were haranguing him whenever he spoke. “Never mind” and “Enough already” and “C’mon, buddy, give it up.”

“Kasich is confrontational,” said Doug Gragg, a longtime Denver Republican and precinct committeeman who calls himself a political diehard. “I originally was for Kasich for purely mathematical reasons – Ohio means the presidency. But he’s just not doing a good campaign.”

Ken Wilkison, who said his friends have long called him “Republi-Ken,” was one of the most vocal watchers. He cheered loud and clapped hard when candidates exchanged sharp barbs. He was loudest when they articulated tough stands on immigration. At one point, when he was booing one candidate and cheering another, he fell into a name-calling tussle with another Republican at the watch party.

He later shook off the spat.

“Immigration is a main issue for me, and it’s a tough issue for the party, OK? It’s complicated, which is why you see us having arguments here. It’s tough because it’s not a clear left-right issue. It’s more of a top-bottom issue. It’s that the establishment on both sides agree on immigration.

“The GOP elite are happy to have illegal immigrants come here to work for less money,” Wilkison said. “Democrats want them to come here and claim benefits. So the immigrants are beholden to both sides – the establishment on both sides has leverage over the immigrants. But that’s all at the expense of average Americans.

“It’s disingenuous to say that people who are for border control and enforcing the rule of law – that we’re nativists or bigots,” he said. “We’re just against the shortcut to cheap wages.”

Evania Ku said she liked Fiorina.

“Fiorina is a serious person,” Ku said. “She speaks based on experience about the economy.”

Ku said it also would probably help in the general election if the Republican candidate is a woman.

“Fiorina is Hillary Clinton’s opposite. She has been in the real world and has a good grasp of how the economy works. She’s sharp.”

Kim Middaugh liked Rubio best. “He’s a strong conservative. He’s articulate and knowledgeable on the issues.”

“Trump,” she said, “he just repeats generalities, and I don’t think he is going to be able to ship out 11 million people. We need a pathway – not amnesty – but we need a pathway for immigrants.”

Middaugh shook her head when, unprompted, she brought up Bush, as if she wanted or at least expected him to be a more adept candidate than he appears to be.

Bush is stumbling along in fifth place in the race, according to aggregate pollster RealClear politics and, as Middaugh was considering the candidates over her drink, he had just finished jokingly thanking Trump for asking the moderators to “let Jeb speak.”

“Bush is still not presenting a strong enough case for being president,” Middaugh said.

Ian Pollard is an independent voter recently relocated from Texas. He said he would probably join the more than one-third of Colorado’s registered voters who choose not to affiliate with either of the two main political parties. Among the candidates on stage, Pollard said he probably liked Paul best.

“He has strong opinions, and he uses facts to make his points. I think the others lean too much on emotional arguments. He has a frankness that I like. I like his fiscal arguments.”

Listening to the crowd and the candidates, Pollard thought that, even if the immigration policies being proposed on stage weren’t racist, they were – he searched for the word – “insensitive.”

“Deporting 11 million people? I mean, that’s the only answer you can come up with to solve this problem?”

Pollard said the fact that a large share of Republican primary voters are buying what Trump is selling means the GOP faces broad challenges.

“I hear the cheering in the room for the tough-on-immigration proposals, and I look around and it’s a lot of older white people in here. I think it’s maybe what a lot of them want to hear, but it’s closed-minded. I think there’s a lot of life experience that would tell you a plan like that is just not a legitimate policy proposal.”

Pollard said he was feeling for Rubio.

“He’s a Cuban guy. His parents were immigrants. He knows the reality, but you can see that he seems boxed into a position. You hear him get into debates about foreign affairs and the economy, but he doesn’t say anything on stage about these immigration proposals. That’s pretty revealing.”

Gragg thought the CNBC debate in Boulder two weeks ago was a better show.

“Maybe it’s because of the confrontational nature of the moderators,” he said. “I’m a political junkie, so I kept watching, but I bet most people turned [this debate] off half-way through.”

Erick Valencia, a 21-year-old Denver Republican, liked what he saw.

“I thought Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz did well tonight. If Marco Rubio were to get the nomination, I could see Fiorina picked as VP. I think that would be a strong ticket – those are the two best candidates we have.”

– john.tomasic@gmail.com

– with additional reporting by Ernest Luning