“He’s so weird! He’s so weird!” the crowd chanted in a sing-song, taunting voice that echoed across Temple University’s packed basketball stadium Tuesday evening. Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Penn., was the first person to mention Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, to the crowd that had packed the overflowing Philadelphia rally for Vice President Kamala Harris, as she introduced her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn. The spontaneous chant cracked Shapiro up, causing him to pause momentarily before laying back into the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump’s “weird” and beardy running mate.
The chanters didn’t know the half of it. Hours earlier, I had been at a South Philly venue where Vance spoke briefly to about 200 supporters and a group of bored journalists. Vance’s event was small, mean, and yes, weird, featuring the unjustified sarcasm of the candidate and a desperate feeling reminiscent of the mood at a strip mall shot bar at 2 AM on “ladies’ night.”
Meanwhile, the Harris/Walz rally felt like a rousing speech by Coach Eric Taylor of “Friday Night Lights” combined with the front row at Coachella. The cheers were so loud that I regretted not bringing my earplugs. The mood was jubilant, even though folks had to wait hours in the heat and humidity to even get into the place. The campaign claimed over 12,000 people showed up, which is not an exaggeration. Even as Harris and Walz gave the final speeches of the evening, the line to get into the overflow room — just to watch the event on TV — went on for multiple city blocks.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Walz said, to a thunderous reception. A simple line, but it brought the house down because of the plain-spoken truth Walz has swiftly become famous for. “Joy” was the word of the night. People in the stands practically vibrated with it. In the air was a visceral hope that this campaign would be the end of the long national nightmare that is Trump and the MAGA movement.
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The crowd was so exuberant that Harris and Walz could have done shadow puppets and the place would have erupted. Even before they spoke, DJ Diamond Kuts had the crowd repurposing classic hip-hop lyrics into political chants, with the funniest being “move, Trump, get out the way” rather than the expletive used in the original Ludacris tune. But both brought their A-game. Harris drew ecstatic applause with her promises to end Trump’s criminal career. Walz has honed “Minnesota nice” into a deadly rhetorical weapon, both making his desire to help people sincerely felt while also making “weird” burn like Dorothy Parker’s ghost had insulted you.
Vance’s speech, on the other hand, wasn’t just underwhelming but a little uncanny. Despite using room dividers to shrink the space, the campaign could not hide that the crowd felt like a medium-sized wedding, albeit a pathetic one where no one cares for the couple. Vance, perhaps recognizing charisma isn’t his strong suit, spoke briefly before bringing up a series of local citizens ready to blame Mexicans for their familial tragedies of drug addiction. He spoke for a couple more minutes, before taking the reporters’ questions about cat ladies.
Even in his short speech, it seemed Vance — like the Trump campaign overall — is still struggling to accept that they are running against Harris and not President Joe Biden. It felt like the speechwriter had typed Ctrl-F “Biden” and replaced every instance with “Harris,” whether it made sense or not. Vance accused Harris of hiding from the press with a “basement campaign.” Never mind that Harris is now the young and spry candidate who can keep up with an aggressive schedule, while Trump is the tired old man who can barely campaign between naps.
One upside to the Vance event: There was no line to use the ladies’ room. Sure, there were women in attendance, but the gender ratio felt like the guest list on Joe Rogan’s podcast. There was one kind of diversity in this small but weirdly intense crowd. Every type of white man that gets a hasty “swipe left” on his dating profile was in attendance: ‘Roided out dudes with bad tribal tattoos. Older men radiating “bitter divorce” energy. Men with enormous beards that have never known the touch of a trimmer. Skinny fascists wearing expensive suits, despite the oppressive heat. Glowering loners staring at the two women under 40 like cats watching birds out a window.
It’s not just about Vance, either. The Trump campaign often has the dwindling energy of a concert for a D-list band well past its prime. As my colleague Andrew O’Hehir wrote of the Republican National Convention, it was “a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event,” without the “chaotic, unhinged, angry energy” of the 2016 convention. As far as the Salon team could figure out, this was borne out in the numbers. The Cleveland convention of 2016 brought in an estimated 44,000 people. Despite GOP predictions that this year’s would be even bigger, the Secret Service told Salon only 27,000 people had credentials to enter this year.
Trump has already started floating conspiracy theories, such as insisting officials are keeping invisible fans away from his events, to explain away the perceived difference in crowd enthusiasm at his rallies vs. the excited reception Harris has for her fledgling campaign. There’s a lot of chatter in MAGA circles about how the enthusiasm for Harris is “manufactured,” as if all the people bringing down the house on an early Tuesday evening in Philadelphia are phantoms instead of real people.
But boy, I was there, and they are very real. More than that, the contrast with the Vance event underscored the Democratic messaging about “normal vs. weird.” The people who flooded the Temple stadium looked like any cross-section of America on any given night. There was old, young and all in-between. There were tattooed hipsters and soccer moms. There were people of every race, dressed in every which way. It could have been a crowd of people chosen at random from the streets of Philadelphia, or any city in America, really. They were brought together by the chant quickly becoming the Harris campaign slogan: “No going back.” They were also brought together in laughter when Walz offered a corny dad joke about Vance: “I can’t wait to debate JD Vance. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Like all good dad jokes, the sexual innuendo is implied in the faintest of ways. But really, the sexual innuendo is almost beside the point. It’s just another way to say, as the crowd had chanted merely half an hour earlier: “He’s so weird.” But in a nice way, like your high school football coach ought to.
Necessary caveat: Trump can still win. Indeed, as Harris reminded the screaming crowd, she’s still the “underdog” in polling. There are still millions of Americans so poisoned by political polarization and Fox News propaganda that they can see the swelling crowd at a Harris campaign and feel resentment and fear instead of joy. But it’s still a hopeful sign that the MAGA hate just isn’t moving the masses like Harris’s “no going back” message seems to be doing. It may even be enough to finally tilt the polls towards the outcome most Americans want, which is not and never has been Trumpism.