Kamala’s crowds? They’re actually big and happy

WILKES-BARRE, Pennsylvania – In the days before Vice President Kamala Harris came here, on Friday the 13th, some Trump supporters in this northeastern Pennsylvania town speculated that she would have trouble attracting a big crowd to her rally. Even when attendees began to show up, the detractors said the number was small and perhaps they had been paid to attend.

Former President Donald Trump himself promoted the idea a few days earlier at his debate with Harris. “People don’t go to her rallies,” Trump said. “There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”

The idea of the Wilkes-Barre rally was for the Harris campaign to go into a Trump stronghold. The former president won surrounding Luzerne County by 14 points over Joe Biden in 2020 and by 19 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The point was not to win Luzerne County in November but to make progress there as part of winning Pennsylvania overall.

Trump has paid a lot of attention to the area. He has held rallies there several times, most recently on Aug. 17 at the Mohegan Arena, which can accommodate somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 people, depending on how it is set up. Some accounts called Trump’s August crowd “near capacity” – the exact crowd size has gotten caught up in a lot of trolling from the Harris campaign and some media outlets. But Trump undoubtedly drew a lot of people.

Entering Republican territory, Harris set a lower bar for herself, holding the rally at the McHale Athletic Center at Wilkes University. It’s a good deal smaller than Mohegan, and not designed to accommodate arena-size crowds. Harris filled it up; local news reports said officials let just over 4,100 people into the event.

The day before, Harris held two rallies in North Carolina. In Greensboro, located in heavily Democratic Guilford County, which Biden won by 23 points over Trump in 2020 and Clinton won by 20 points over Trump in 2016, Harris drew a crowd estimated at 17,000. In Charlotte, where in Mecklenburg County Biden won by 35 points over Trump in 2020 and Clinton won by 30 points over Trump in 2016, the Harris campaign said it drew 7,500 people at the Bojangles Coliseum.

Quibble with the numbers if you want; crowd size has long been a point of contention in political battles. But Harris has been drawing big crowds, and they aren’t bused in and they aren’t paid. Some of the Republican grumbling going on now is reminiscent of 2012, in the Barack Obama-Mitt Romney race, when a number of Republicans convinced themselves that the polls were “skewed” and Democrats were demoralized. A visit to an Obama rally or two would have proved otherwise, but those Republicans chose to ignore the Democratic enthusiasm in front of their faces. Now, Republicans should be seeing a lot of Democratic enthusiasm in front of their faces.

More than anything, the Wilkes-Barre crowd seemed happy. Really happy. Harris didn’t have to do much to please them; at one point, she literally said, “We’re all in this together,” and they cheered wildly. They often broke into chants of KA-MA-LA! KA-MA-LA! KA-MA-LA! evoking memories of the Obama cult of personality in the 2008 campaign.

Many members of the audience fit the Harris/Democratic profile – they were social workers, teachers, students, school administrators, nurses, psychologists. In the course of several conversations, all described themselves as lifelong Democrats. Just one said he had feared the party had been heading toward defeat under Biden – “He’s old, man” – while the rest said they fully supported Biden. Now, they’re just as fully on board for Harris. All were ecstatic about Harris’ performance against Trump in the debate a few days before.

As far as issues are concerned, when asked their most important issue, every woman said abortion or “women’s issues,” by which they meant abortion. Some of the men said so, too, but several others said that preserving democracy was the most important issue to them. That was it. Certainly, they have other concerns, but when asked the simple question of what is most important to them, they listed Harris’ strongest issue, and the issue Biden sought to make the centerpiece of his campaign.

Harris’ rallies are real-life illustrations of the standard poll question about voter enthusiasm. For months, when Biden was their candidate, Democrats lagged in the question of which party was more enthusiastic about the race. Now Democrats are ahead. That’s not the only measure of what is important in an election, and it doesn’t mean things can’t change in the next several weeks. But it’s something Republicans need to realize about the other side.