ATLANTA – Two rallies. Two Americas.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stood in the same arena four days apart, each looking over capacity crowds like concert stars or prizefighters.
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The competing events were staged three months before Election Day in the state that produced the closest margin of the 2020 race for the White House. On policy, tone, the types of voters in attendance and even the music playlists, the rallies offered not just opposing visions of the country but starkly different versions of it.
Those dynamics raise questions about how a factionalized citizenry might embrace a Trump comeback or a Harris ascension.
On that, at least two people who came to the Georgia State Convocation Center on different days could agree.
“It’s OK to have different ideologies,” said Angela Engram, a 59-year-old Democrat who drove from Stockbridge, Georgia, to hear Harris on Tuesday. “But now it’s just so much about parties and personalities and power, with people not even trying to understand each other.”
Tracy Maddux, a 67-year-old retired grocer from Sparta, Georgia, who was at Trump’s rally on Saturday, shared Engram’s lament about politics in 2024.
But Maddux blamed Engram's party, saying Democrats were no longer concerned about ordinary people. Engram blamed Trump and his supporters, especially those who accept his falsehoods that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged.
Both crowds added up to a battleground coalition
With Biden leaving the race in July and Democrats elevating Harris, both major party candidates have the juice to pack arenas now.
Harris — the first woman, the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president — drew a racially and generationally mixed, though majority Black, majority female crowd. Democrats danced to R&B, hip hop and pop music. They rocked with guest star Megan Thee Stallion and they exploded for Beyoncé's “Freedom,” which has become Harris’ entrance song and campaign anthem.
Trump drew an overwhelmingly white audience with a noticeable presence of Black voters. The playlist leaned to his eclectic musical tastes — the Village People and ABBA among them — but featured plenty of country music. The crowd erupted at the first notes of his signature walk-up song: “God Bless the USA,” by Trump supporter Lee Greenwood.
It was two disparate crowds in just one of a divided nation's battleground states that will decide the presidency. In 2020, Biden campaigned hard with Black voters, younger voters, other nonwhite voters and college-educated white voters in metro areas such as Atlanta. Trump dominated rural areas, small towns and smaller cities. In Georgia, the result was a Biden victory by 11,779 votes out of 5 million cast.
Both campaigns expect the Harris-Trump matchup to track along the same lines, with the parties' bases playing pivotal roles in the Georgia and national outcome.
Last week's gathering for Harris frustrated Republicans enough that they played down her part in it.
“They had a big crowd. They had some entertainment here. They were doing some twerking,” said Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who served as one of Trump’s “fake electors” after the 2020 election.
Jones alleged that Harris’ crowd thinned after Megan Thee Stallion’s performance. That was not the case in the 25 minutes Harris spoke. In fact, Trump lost sizable chunks of supporters across his 91-minute speech.
Two rallies gave two very different American visions
Democrats celebrated Harris as a historic figure who could leverage her background for all Americans.
“She brings all of those strands together,” Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, said Tuesday. “She sees us because in a real sense she is all of us.”
Harris herself talked more policy than biography, including on her biggest liabilities: inflation and immigration.
On inflation, she implicitly blamed corporate greed, promising to attack “price gouging” and “hidden fees.” Democrats promoted the biggest spending measures of Biden’s tenure as seminal investments in clean energy, domestic manufacturing such as the burgeoning electric battery plants in Georgia and infrastructure improvements that eluded previous presidents, Trump included.
On Saturday, Republicans blamed those measures as the cause of higher prices, and they cast Harris as a radical who threatens national values.
Trump offered dystopian forecasts of a Harris administration. “A crash like 1929 ... you’ll end up in World War III ... the suburbs will be overrun with violent crime and savage foreign gangs,” Trump warned. “If Kamala wins, it will be crime, chaos and death all across our country.”
He blamed Harris specifically for the killing of Georgia resident Laken Riley, whose death authorities have blamed on a Venezuelan man who allegedly entered the United States illegally. Harris did not mention Riley, but criticized Trump for spooking Senate Republicans into abandoning a bipartisan immigration and border security deal.
From coveted floor seats, Terry Wilson, a 46-year-old trucker from Chattanooga, Tennessee, stood in acclamation for Trump's broadsides on Harris. In an interview, Wilson added his own Trumpian hyperbole: “I mean, she’s a Marxist.”
Michaelah Montgomery, a Black conservative activist, joined Trump’s recent mockery of Harris’ racial and ethnic identity. “She’s only Black when it’s time to get elected,” Montgomery argued. The predominantly white audience laughed and cheered.
To running mate JD Vance, Trump was the living martyr who “took a bullet for the country.” Speakers recalled a bloodied Trump standing up after a would-be assassin’s bullet nicked his ear at a Pennsylvania rally three weeks before. The image was emblazoned on T-shirts throughout the Atlanta audience.
At the Harris rally, Trump was presented as the ex-president with the felony record who ran a profiteering online college, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse, denied the 2020 election results and watched his supporters ransack the U.S. Capitol to prevent Biden’s certification as his successor.
“I have been dealing with people like him my entire career,” said Harris, a former prosecutor in California.
There was no mention Tuesday of Trump’s brush with death or Biden’s subsequent call to tamp down political rhetoric. There were, however, chants of “Lock him up! Lock him up!” — cries that began with Biden still in the race but rose to a deafening pitch in Atlanta.
The chant is a retort to Republicans, who eight years ago bellowed “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent. She has never been charged with any crime.
Consensus is an increasingly elusive idea
Presidential campaigns always involve differences and division. Only once in the last half century – Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984 – has the winner surpassed 55% of all votes cast. It's been more common for the winner not even to prevail in the popular vote, as happened for Trump in 2016 and Republican George W. Bush in 2000.
Engram, the Harris backer from Stockbridge, still found reason for optimism.
“There really is so much that we all share in common if people would just calm down and consider it,” she said, even as she expressed doubts about Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement ever aiding national consensus. Healthier discourse under a Harris administration, she said, would depend “on the good Republicans who are not all MAGA.”
Trump's allies did not suggest they could aim for consensus. Pastor Jentezen Franklin of Gainesville, Georgia, used his invocation Saturday to declare the election “a spiritual battle.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., warned of a leftist “regime” behind Harris: “They hate you. But Donald Trump loves you.”
Trump went on at length about his lies that he lost in 2020 due to voter fraud. He attacked not just Democrats but Gov. Brian Kemp, the most powerful Georgia Republican, and others who, Trump said, failed the party by not helping him overturn Biden's victory.
Democrats on Tuesday peppered their remarks about voting with references to the late civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, who long represented the Atlanta area in Congress. Warnock mocked Trump as “a Florida man” who made an infamous phone call pressuring the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes” to make him the winner of the 2020 contest.
Through all other rhetoric, the two candidates each made nods at unity.
“We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God,” the former president said.
The vice president’s version: “We love our country, and I believe it is the highest form of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country. ... And when we fight, we win.”
But only one of them will.