PHILADELPHIA—Kamala Harris’s final argument to the American people — an exhausting and often baffling rally in Philadelphia — played out Monday night like a conservative fantasy of the worst that can happen when liberals are left in charge: It was expensive. It was overcomplicated. It left many of the people it purported to serve unsatisfied, annoyed and increasingly alienated as the night went on.
From a logistics point of view it was easily the worst large political event I have ever attended, and I covered Donald Trump in 2016. If it was a sign of how the broader Harris campaign was operating heading into election day, I fear it was a catastrophic one, at least for anyone desperate to move on from the last, endless decade of Donald Trump.
I should pause here to say that none of this is about content, really. If you have seen any major Harris surrogate speak in the past month, nothing anyone said Monday would have come as a surprise. Harris herself gave essentially the same speech twice, once broadcast from Pittsburgh early in the evening and a second time, live, near midnight.
It certainly had nothing, in terms of shock value, on Donald Trump’s rally two Sundays ago at Madison Square Garden, in New York. There were no racist jokes, no ceaseless bigotry, no super-villain-y oligarchs or worm-brained bear killers. It was just endlessly, painfully, almost creatively boring. It began to feel, as the hours kept ticking by, like a joke being played by the campaign against tens of thousands of its most loyal supporters in the most crucial swing state in the nation.
“I hope Kamala Harris shows up at some point,” someone standing in the crowd near me said near 9 p.m. “I didn’t know they were going to do video tapes. Jesus Christ.”
It started off well enough. The event, in front of the famous Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was supposed to begin at 5 p.m., according to details sent out to attendees. By mid-afternoon, the lineup to get in stretched at least half a kilometre down Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Inside, it had all the trappings of a victory celebration. There were food trucks, free buttons, even a friendship bracelet stand. Before the main event began, local legends The Roots performed a set. By 8 p.m. there were still thousands of people pouring through past security and through the gates into the venue.
It was about then that things started to get squirrely. After speeches by Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor, Cherelle Parker, and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, who is up for reelection, a DJ in a shiny red suit and a giant white hat took over. Instead of introducing another performer or speech, he queued up what was supposed to be a live feed from a different, simultaneous rally in Wisconsin.
The problem, the first of many, was that the audio didn’t really synch up. It also kept cutting out. At one point, it cut back in again just as one speaker was wrapping up. ”—and with that being said …” Half the audience laughed; the other half sighed.
The organizers took a single bad idea (piping in simultaneous rallies) did it badly and then doubled down hour after hour after hour. We were in Milwaukee, then Pittsburg, then Detroit. By 11 p.m., the crowd, visibly thinned by that point, was openly booing the action on screen, at least when they weren’t sighing audibly and begging the DJ to move on. When he asked the audience to “give it up, for the mayor of Mesa, Arizona” the loudest, angriest collective groan I have ever heard swept through the crowd.
It felt like being inside a giant balloon letting out enthusiasm for eight hours straight. “Come on Kamala! We’ve got to knock on doors tomorrow,” an exasperated audience member yelled at one point. When a piped-in Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer urged people to get out and vote “tomorrow” someone in Philadelphia replied: “Tomorrow! The sun’s coming up now!”
In the grand scheme of a high stakes campaign, none of this matters very much. Donald Trump is still Donald Trump. In his own closing rally Monday night, he claimed, among other things, that 100 per cent of the jobs created under Joe Biden “went to migrants, not people.” He called Nancy Pelosi “an evil, sick, crazy” then mouthed the word “b****.” He said he “stopped the wars with my being volatile. Nobody had a war. We didn’t have any wars except that we finished a war that we had.” He was still talking well past 2 a.m.
Harris is manifestly, obviously better than that. The problem is, I’m still not 100 per cent sure what else she is. She is better than Donald Trump, sure, and younger than Joe Biden. But despite having covered this campaign, despite following the news professionally, I still don’t much of a sense of what kind of president she would be.
Most of the Democrats I’ve spoken to in Pennsylvania this week have been cautiously and increasingly optimistic. They believe that momentum is on their side, that the race is now Harris’s to win. It says something that as she was still speaking Monday, thousands of them were already going home, far more, it looked to me, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of the whole, than left early during Trump’s rally at MSG.
Some of them did stop, however. They turned around. They headed back toward the giant screens set up through the venue. It wasn’t for Harris, though. It was because the DJ had announced that Lady Gaga was doing another song.
