CAMPAIGN DIARY
Kamala Harris wanted a crowd and she got one.
At her final appearance of the 2024 US presidential campaign on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania late on Monday night (local time), Harris stepped out to a crowd some 30,000 people, according to local media
A line had begun to form by 2pm and by 6pm it stretched several blocks and had doubled over and trailed up a nearby hill, back down again and around a fountain. A guess, based on Google Maps, is that it might have touched 5km long at one point. Harris herself didn’t appear until about 11.30pm but, credit to her, the crowd stayed until the end.
They packed into a fenced-off area around the large neoclassical museum, which sits on a small hill overlooking the city, and many more crowded outside. If Harris was looking to prod a certain someone with a known weakness for crowd sizes, she likely succeeded. The Trump rally I attended over the weekend was hardly comparable; Greensboro, North Carolina, is 10 times smaller than Philadelphia and while it wasn’t the last night of the campaign, the crowd was noticeably smaller, and a good chunk of it left early (Trump spoke for over an hour).
Pennsylvania is a swing state – in fact, it’s the pre-eminent swing state. Harris almost certainly needs to take it to win, and her rival, former President Donald Trump, probably needs it (although slightly less than Harris, according to observers). The result is on a knife edge, according to polls, with both sides effectively tied.
Although surrounded by some evenly split (and therefore crucial) suburbs, Philadelphia itself is blue as blue, Joe Biden won 81.2% of the vote here in 2020 – not far off the 85.2% Biden won in radical San Francisco, California. The Harris campaign knew it would get this kind of reception and was not disappointed. No one in Philadelphia needed convincing, but it wasn’t about that, it was about making a statement to the rest of the state and the country.
Harris spent the entire day in the state, visiting Allentown, Scranton (Biden’s birthplace), Reading, and Pittsburgh before her Philadelphia rally.
These last two rallies, along with six rallies across six battleground states, were combined into a single livestream – think Live Aid for Democrats. At 9pm, people at the Philadelphia rally watched Harris’s appearance in Pittsburgh, some five hours drive away, on the big screen. Harris wouldn’t appear on stage in Philadelphia for another three hours (we were also briefly treated to a Katy Perry stream).
It made for a pretty disjointed night. People who had lined up for hours spent most of the evening watching a giant TV, but perhaps waiting around watching an enormous TV is fun for Americans. The stream was also broadcast online, but the most popular version I could find on Facebook was managing a mere 1500 concurrent views – roughly what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern managed to get on some Covid streams.
There was plenty of star power. Jon Bon Jovi played at a rally in Michigan, while Perry entertained Pittsburgh. Philadelphia got Ricky Martin (whose Puerto Rican birthplace was a clear dig at Trump, and a plea to Latino voters to vote Harris), Lady Gaga, and Oprah Winfrey, who delivered a powerful speech drawing a line from the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s to now. Though hitherto a sceptic of perennial fringe pleas for Winfrey to make a run for the White House herself, I found myself ever so slightly convinced.
The artists only sang two songs each before disappearing, an odd choice, as it meant most of the night was spent watching an empty stage.
There was a long lull before the final musical act and Harris herself appearing. The crowd was restless, joining long lines at the assembled food trucks for a snack.
Finally, Winfrey led Harris on to the stage. Harris opted for lofty for her final speech. Nodding to the location (the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps featured in the Rocky movies), Harris dubbed her campaign “a tribute to those who start as the underdog and climb to victory”.
She preached unity, saying the campaign “brought together people from all corners of this nation and from all walks of life”, and that these people were united by “love for our country and our faith in a brighter, stronger and more hopeful future that we will build together”.
She said the campaign finished as it had started, “with optimism, with energy, with joy”.
Pretty heady stuff. Standing in the crowd, it was impossible not to draw comparisons with the equally lofty speeches of former President Barack Obama – in fact, the campaign left little room for you to think otherwise, with onstage speakers leading chants of “yes she can”, an unsubtle throwback to Obama’s slogan.
Might it have been too lofty? This is a fairly negative election, focused on retail issues such as inflation and immigration. It played well to the Philadelphia crowd, but it’s not hard to see how wrapping your campaign in wealthy celebrities and preaching togetherness might not fare so well across the swing states, where Trump’s message of stable prices, tariffs to protect local jobs, and fixing the border are perhaps more compelling. Then again, Americans love the lofty historical stuff that would make New Zealanders gag, and Obama made lofty work during the ultimate bread-and-butter election, the Global Financial Crisis year of 2008.
Trump himself continued with the fire and brimstone routine. In the final moments of the campaign, he implicitly dubbed Harris a “b****”, which wouldn’t appear to be the smartest move in a campaign where women voters appear to be sceptical of the abortion-ban curious Trump team.
Trump spread his appearances out across three states, beginning in North Carolina, before making two stops in Pennsylvania (in Reading and Pittsburgh) and then flying to his last rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he also concluded his two previous campaigns.
The different itineraries reflected the relative importance of Pennsylvania to each campaign. Most observers reckon Trump has more pathways to victory than Harris, making Pennsylvania slightly less important to him. It could reflect a strategic error on both parts – Harris might have been wise to spread herself out; Trump might have been wise to fight harder for the greatest prize, Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes.
Apart from the exceedingly confident Harris and Trump campaigns, no one in the country has a clue who will win, so close are the polls. The national discussion has moved to why the polls and the betting markets are completely wrong (which is far more fun). To be fair, there’s some compelling evidence they might be. Polling supremo Nate Silver makes a strong case that the polls are a little too uniform, suggesting some of them are “herding”, as in some instances pollsters are taking a file drawer approach (not publishing) to those that divert too much from the consensus, or altering parts of their weighting until they conform more closely to the consensus.
In recent elections people have turned to the betting markets where the polls have failed, figuring a large number of people who have put actual money behind a particular result might be an even better indicator than polling.
Until recently, some platforms showed Trump with a massive edge on Harris, suggesting someone knows something the polls don’t. But that might all be a ruse. We know now the “someone” is just that, a “someone” with Polymarket, one of the main betting platforms, confirming US$28 million (NZ$47m) of these bets were placed by a single person (a Frenchman) using four different accounts. The Wall Street Journal tracked him down, and, disappointingly, he doesn’t seem to have a more sophisticated idea of what’s going on than anyone else — just more money. These trades are not a representation of the wisdom of crowds, but the representation of one Frenchman’s risk appetite.
So maybe all the tied polls are wrong and the outliers, like one in Iowa this week, are right. This would suggest a very strong showing for Harris. Or maybe all the polls are underestimating Trump as they did in 2020 and 2016
Every theory in one direction seems to be netted out by an equal theory in the opposite direction.
At least that question will be answered fairly shortly.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018. His travel to the United States was assisted by the US Embassy in Wellington.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.