Generally speaking, I don’t put a lot of stock into “rally enthusiasm” or “crowd size” as an important indicator within presidential campaigns. I’ve seen behind-the-scenes of political rallies, and sometimes the most in-person enthusiasm does not translate into GOTV work on the ground, nor does it translate into actual votes on Election Day. Crowd size and rally enthusiasm help craft the narrative of a campaign though – when Kamala Harris’s rallies are jam-packed and star-studded, the narrative is that the Harris campaign is a freight train AND a big tent, and that Harris is a generational candidate. On the other side, it’s been underreported for years that Trump’s rallies have gotten smaller and smaller. Fewer nutjobs are showing up, and Trump’s broke ass can’t afford to rent out the arenas he desperately wants to fill (but can’t). So, as you can imagine, Trump is sh-tting his diaper about Kamala Harris’s crowd sizes and supporter enthusiasm.
When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival. If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors.
“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago — lots of empty seats — but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.”
Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University Convocation Center. It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign, and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up her crowd. Mr. Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size.
“I don’t need entertainers,” he said on Saturday. “I fill the stadium because I’m making America great again.”
The numbers game has long been of paramount importance for Mr. Trump. As a reality television star, he was obsessed with ratings (“What is it about me that gets Larry King his highest ratings?” he wrote in one of his books). This only intensified once he entered politics. He spent his first full day in office as president trying to convince the news media that his inauguration crowd was larger than the Women’s March the day before. (It was not.)
It’s funny that Trump has these obsessions, honestly. During the “bad weeks” when Democrats were publicly knifing President Biden in the back, a competent Republican presidential campaign would have been able to dominate weeks (if not months) of newscycles about Dems-in-disarray and the dysfunctional chaos within the sitting president’s party. The Trump campaign couldn’t do sh-t because it’s always been a cult of personality, based around the most thin-skinned and superficial man in history. They couldn’t do sh-t about the Dem dysfunction because Trump was actually really mad that Democrats were getting so much attention. Now he’s mad that Kamala Harris is beating him at his own dumb “crowd size” obsession.
Photos courtesy of Getty, Cover Images.