Get to the Point:
The Deeply Weird Experience of the Modern Political Rally
If I may occupy the soapbox and carry the talking stick for just a paragraph, my own political sympathies these days are thus. First, I find myself pining for a time before politics was a person’s defining characteristic. Political polarization is a complex issue that ought not be dismissed with facile linear explanations—it’s partly a function of economic polarization, partly also a function of an era’s predominant political issues—in other words, on some issues sometimes there simply isn’t common ground. One needn’t be a trained historian to think immediately of times in American history when this was the case. My glasses are perhaps a little rose-colored, but as a child I don’t remember anyone decorating their vehicle with Bob Dole flags while simultaneously wearing Bob Dole-branded clothing from the waist up. Conversely, I don’t remember anyone ever comparing Bob Dole to Hitler.
Secondly, as a people we haven’t yet properly reckoned with the effect of social media on electoral politics. I am fully aware that I sound like an old person whining about ‘the kids these days,’ a time-honored tradition at least as old as Plato, but your older relative forwarding emails and Facebook memes is just as guilty. I am also fully aware that lying about one’s political opponent is another time-honored tradition, stretching back in our country to colonial times. But in an era now when media is predominantly consumed in the format of sixty-second Tik Tok videos and image memes are taken as fact, attention spans are demonstrably getting worse and it’s only getting easier to lie convincingly. Of course, every new media technology alters the electoral process—as television famously did in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate—and as you grow older anything new and different naturally produces anxiety. But the social media era does feel functionally, dangerously different to me, even beyond the usual old person anxiety. If the end goal is an informed electorate, I’m not sure how that can happen one minute, one meme at a time.
Now that your humble correspondent has cleared his throat for a full page of text, I suppose we can talk about the Kamala Harris campaign event. It was at the Thomas and Mack Center on the UNLV campus in Las Vegas, this past August 10. I attended this event because a relative of mine wanted company; otherwise, I’d never have gone. Regardless of my own November voting intentions, I approached this event like a social experiment. After the fact, it was a fascinating experience. I felt like Dian Fossey or David Attenborough, narrating a nature documentary about the workings of a social system that was alien to my own. After the fact, I’d gladly also attend a Trump event just to see how the other half does it. I bet the music choices are different.
As we entered the vast arena parking lot, I quietly predicted an army of protestors in support of former President Trump. I was wrong—there was exactly one guy, pacing up and down the sidewalk where the cars turned off the main road, his red Trump hat ($50 plus shipping) standing out garishly amid the muted urban landscape, his Trump flag ($88 plus shipping, visit the Trumpstore website today!) waving gloriously in the hot desert wind. I find people like this to be fascinating, in the same class of individual as the true believer who wears a sandwich board on a well-trafficked street corner and screams through a bullhorn that the time of repentance is nigh. Has any street corner preacher ever influenced the worldview and behavior of one single heretic? Ever? Once? In history? I confess myself skeptical. If I may presume to speak for the heretics, I think we just say “I should cross the street so I don’t have to deal with that goofball,” and move on with our day. Yes, even when we agree with the message being presented. But if they feel like it gets them right with their God, fair play to the street preachers, I guess.
The experience of getting into these events is similar to that of getting into any large stadium event, with the exception of one glaring important detail—security. Modern stadiums are constructed with multiple points of ingress, often most if not all of the way around the perimeter, for the simple reason that moving tens of thousands of pedestrians into and out of any structure is an enormous logistical headache. At a large concert or a football game, all of these available avenues of people movement will be open for business. In 2016 I attended WrestleMania 32 at AT&T Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys call home, and whatever you think of the Cowboys, fair play to them, entering and exiting that stadium was impressively convenient. At a political event, I have to assume, the level of security demands that everyone in attendance make use of a single set of doors.
What I’m really getting at is this: getting into the event was a test of endurance. August in Vegas, not sure what we expected. I cannot speak to the VIP paid experience, as that was not ours. For general admission, one single line snaked and zig-zagged all across the parking lot and entryway of the stadium. The first several zigs and zags were simply open to the Vegas afternoon sun. Perhaps the final two-thirds of the trek, as one drew closer to the venue, was shaded by portable tents and supported by misters and industrial fans. Volunteers and campaign staff were everywhere with water bottles, snacks, ice cream cups and cold towels. Dark blue Harris/Walz 2024 signs were attached to popsicle sticks to serve as handheld fans. We were met at the corner of one zig-zag by a formidable stack of Domino’s Pizza boxes, manned by three volunteers handing out slices. Chairs were placed all along the covered part of the walk, and those chairs saw plenty of use. As far as mitigating the physical misery of standing outside in the Las Vegas summer, the campaign pretty much did all they could.
Where the concrete entryway met the asphalt parking lot, the shaded part of the line was also home to the pop-up shops of various merchandise entrepreneurs, hocking mostly t-shirts arrayed on foldable poker tables, bearing the face of Kamala Harris alongside a variety of clever slogans. I don’t know if these people were affiliated with the campaign. I do not believe that they were.
The people in line were a fascinating hodgepodge of diverse characters, all the strange bedfellows that make up the modern big-tent Democratic party. McGovern baby boomers intermingled with Obama millennials intermingled with alt-lifestyle Gen Zers whose political awakening was almost certainly the modern focus on LGBTQ issues and also, simply, opposition to Trumpism. It was a bit surreal, seeing people who probably wouldn’t interact much in other avenues of life, breaking bread (even if it’s Domino’s Pizza crust) together under an industrial strength misting device—the older strait-laced gentleman in a golf polo, the green-haired trans teen, the retired Army officer in a ‘Veterans for Kamala’ shirt. If Thomas Freidman or David Brooks had witnessed this, they’d wax poetic about the unifying Kumbayya power of hating Trump. I just thought it sounded like the beginning of a ‘walked into a bar’ joke.
Once upon the interior concourse I was approached by a young man who identified himself as the political correspondent for a Nevada news website, which, for reasons that will become clear, shall remain nameless. This is mostly a function of me being an old lump of coal, but I thought he looked twelve. As a bald man, I’m allowed to say this—his hair was ready for school picture day. He gave me a few starter prompts and I sensed that he’d thus far gotten a lot of comments of the quality of “Trump sucks” and “Go Kamala,” so I made an effort to be a little more thoughtful. This was a failure, as I am not currently in an era of life where I have time to read the Economist and the New York Times and stay intelligently abreast of the relevant issues, nor in full transparency would I spend my free time that way if I were. Moreover, I am not what you would call an electrifying public speaker. My attempt at thoughtfulness probably came off as babbling as I attempted to rustle up a coherent thought about Ukraine and the Supreme Court. I can only hope his footage was corrupted.
And then we were in the venue proper. My attention was immediately drawn upwards, to the 1990 National Championship banner earned by the Runnin’ Rebels’ men’s basketball squad that year, led by absolute force of nature power forward Larry “Grandmama” Johnson, and coached by Tark the Shark, the late great Jerry Tarkanian. LJ was already playing for the Charlotte Hornets by the time my young mind began to care about basketball, but I recently watched that 1990 UNLV tournament run on YouTube, months before I’d ever set foot in that building. The banners and the retired players’ jerseys captivated me for longer than they probably should have. I wished I still had my neck towel so I could have chewed on it in Tark’s honor (for the layman, Tarkanian was famous for this, typically in moments of great stress).
Those banners and jerseys in the rafters, I had ample time to study them. If these events are defined by a single word, that word is waiting. You wait in line, you wait in lengthy refreshment lines, you wait in line at the bathroom, you wait inside the venue. For hours. This is probably unavoidable; presidential candidate schedules simply are what they are. The Harris Campaign was in the midst of a tour of the so-called ‘battleground’ states, which on the presidential election map are neither comfortably red nor blue, but a coin flip depending on the year. Nevada is one of those; Arizona is another. The campaign’s schedule in these states was surely event-heavy, morning and night.
The doors opened at 1 p.m., while Vice President Harris took the stage at about 7 p.m. What do you beforehand? Well, once you’re done waiting, I’ve been to enough wrestling shows (and that was chiefly what this felt like to me) in my life to know that before you get to the main event, you’re going to get an undercard. A fantastically-dressed local DJ (for the cut of his suit, think Huggy Bear off Starsky and Hutch, for the color, think Jake Gittes in Chinatown) juiced up the crowd with everything from modern hip-hop to old favorites like the Bee Gees and Queen. I didn’t think I’d ever live to hear Naughty by Nature played at a presidential campaign event, but I suppose pop culture has cycled enough that such things are now Palatable Enough for the Olds.© In my distant memory there was a time when some of those tracks, you had to find one kid in the neighborhood whose irresponsible parents had allowed that PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS label to enter the home, and then you could make a taped recording. Heck, Snoop Dogg was once dangerous and subversive; now marijuana is legal and he’s clowning around with Martha Stewart on Olympics broadcasts. For everything a season, so it goes.
The lower part of the stadium’s 100 level was legitimately a dance party for this part of the night, but not everyone appreciated the DJ’s musical stylings. An older gentleman in front of me in a Stanford cap, who may have been dragged to the event by his wife, covered his ears for most of the music and otherwise read his Kindle right up until Minnesota Governor Tim Walz took the stage. I felt like I could hear his thoughts: Michael Dukakis would never play this junk! Briefly I amused myself by imagining becoming him in thirty years, cringing as President Brayleigh Khaleesi takes the stage to a remixed jazzed-up version of Skibidi Toilet. For everything a season, so it goes.
There was a host of local guest speakers. They were fine. Trump was booed; Kamala was cheered. JD Vance was mocked. Slogans were uttered. There was special ire reserved for “Project 2025,” the extremist think tank policy wish list, the end goal of which is to turn America into an ultra-right-wing theocratic wonderland. Because it was Las Vegas, there was some shine for the hospitality union, a lot of shine for them in fact. Their members were given a place of honor seated directly behind the speakers. Of course, these rallies are as much about bolstering the down ticket for the party as they are about rallying support for the top of the ticket. I remember reading years ago that the coin-flip states have almost nothing to do with policy, that the lone variable relevant to who wins is just who does better in the ‘get out the vote’ battle. Accordingly, there was a great deal of effort and energy given to this goal.
It’s probably difficult to cut down on the list of local speakers when you have to fit in Senators and Congresspeople, but if I have a critique of this point in the program, the crowd was extremely restless. They were allowed to become tired. They remained polite to the speakers, cheering at the right times and booing at the right times, but there was a noticeable change in the energy as speaker after speaker trotted out the same boo and cheer cues. Between speakers a guy a few rows in front of me started chanting Ka-ma-la, Ka-ma-la. This was not an expression of enthusiasm, but impatience. There was one moment where the stage went dark and the moment felt pregnant with meaning and importance, while whispers filled the air that it was at last time for Tim Walz… and out came another local speaker. The room deflated like a balloon.
Tim Walz brought them back, when he did come out. Again, say whatever you want about the politics, but the popular Minnesota Governor has some political skills. He’s got the gift of gab, as they say. From an electoral standpoint I can see why the Harris Campaign chose him, as he fills in a lot of what she might have been perceived as missing. Harris is from a city in a left coast stronghold; Walz was born in the heartland and spent his working career in a different Midwest state. He has a natural ability to simply talk to people and sound like a genuine normal person, which so few politicians seem to manage, no matter how hard they practice. He’s not a smooth talker like a Bill Clinton; if Bill Clinton sculpts a beautiful vase with his words, Tim Walz builds you a table with a hammer and handsaw. This may well be a practiced trait, but he maintains that straightforward folksy manner that seems to befit a longtime teacher and sports coach. If you consciously designed a running mate for Vice President Harris in a lab, he’d look and sound like Governor Tim Walz.
So much of modern televised elections is about trying to land a ‘slam dunk’ moment—so many try, and so few succeed. A few famous examples stick out. There was Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again,” landed on Jimmy Carter. Ironically enough because it didn’t really affect the race, but probably the best in history was Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen hitting Dan Quayle with the absolute rhetorical killshot of “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Often imitated, never duplicated. Probably the funniest failed attempt at one of these is a recent one, when former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called Donald Trump “Donald Duck” at a debate that the former president did not attend. You really can’t adequately describe in words the self-satisfied smug look on Christie’s face when he delivered this limpest jibe of all time; it must be seen to be understood.
The point is, I think Walz has a solid chance to land one of these all-time zingers on JD Vance. Vance looks like an eighth grader at his first mock trial next to Walz. The very definition of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
And then it was Kamala time. My first impression was that she is tiny in person. It is going to be a strange image when she shakes Trump’s hand at the debate, if that happens. If she wins, she will assuredly be our shortest president since James Madison, who happened to have been the same height as Vice President Harris. She is a very good public speaker, though it is not natural in the way that Tim Walz is. I find Trump to also be a very good public speaker, in his own idiosyncratic way. This is not an insult to the vice president; as I mentioned earlier, I am also not a natural public speaker. But she can hit the boo lines and the cheer lines and pause for good comedic timing with the best of them.
I found myself focusing on the mechanics of the public speaking rather than the content, because there wasn’t much content to speak of. And content is beside the point of these things anyway—the point is the booing and the cheering, exciting the base by seeing the candidate live and probably most importantly, the signing up new volunteers for the local ground game. As Democrats have done since he arrived on the national political stage, Vice President Harris consciously positioned herself as a bulwark against Trumpism. There were vague statements about making the economy work for everyone, not just millionaires and billionaires. Harris said she would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, which, in retrospect, seems a pretty big promise to actually put on the record. She made the Obamaesque statement that she would govern for ‘all’ Americans, not just blue states, which, given that Project 2025 calls for replacing the civil service with Trump’s partisans, is perhaps more relevant than it used to be.
Leaving the event, we were allowed to use any available door, so it was not as terrible as getting in. A handful of people left in the middle of her speech to beat the traffic, because of course they did. I have no desire to ever attend one of those things ever again, but I’m glad I went once. I was certainly relieved when the day was over.
If there’s interest for it, I may write a few more of these regarding this, our current silly season. Of course the point of campaign rallies is the noise, but in future iterations we’ll try to put on our thinking caps a little more firmly, ignore the noise and dial down past the words into some policy positions.
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This has been the first installment of Eastern Sierra NOW’s “Get to the Point.”
If you would like to contact Kevin McCormick, email [email protected].
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Eastern Sierra NOW. Eastern Sierra NOW does not endorse any political candidates or positions. Readers are encouraged to conduct further research and consult with relevant experts or professionals before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information provided in this article.
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