Kamala Harris rounds off campaign with surreal star-studded mega-rally
Most presidential campaigns are tied off either with a single blockbuster rally — think Barack Obama's 100,000-strong crowd in Virginia in 2008 — or a one-night mini-marathon across the swing states (Trump's preferred style).
Last night, Kamala Harris decided to merge the two into what was undoubtedly one of the most surreal public events one could expect.
The basic concept was this: with seven swing states identified as key to the election, the Democrats would round off the campaign with at least one banner event in each of them. But instead of being held in sequence, the rallies were to be conducted simultaneously, all as mini-festivals featuring multiple speakers and musical acts, names big and small.
Harris and Tim Walz would appear at two rallies each, but not together, and the different events would have highlights from the others beamed into them live, so everybody got Jon Bon Jovi's wrenchingly bleak acoustic rendition of Living on a Prayer.
The keystone rally was in Philadelphia, where a gargantuan crowd — myself among them — lined up for hours upon hours to gather at the foot of the Rocky Steps for an event meant to showcase the Harris campaign's strength, optimism and energy.
What transpired instead was the hybrid of a corporate all-hands Zoom call and the chaotic vote-tallying portion of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Mix 'n' match
Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were all on the line (Phoenix may have been too), but none of them was obviously at the centre of the narrative. Philadelphia had by far the largest crowd, but much of its time was spent watching halting live-streamed footage from the others.
The whole thing was MC'd by DJ Cassidy, who also helmed the euphoric roll call vote at the Democratic National Convention this summer. While he was physically on stage in Philadelphia, he was also charged with introducing in-person speakers at the other events, sometimes in the middle of live acts on the stage next to him.
A case in point: a full three hours after the crowd was let into the Philadelphia ground, Ricky Martin appeared with a phalanx of dancers to give a truly fiery performance, stopping after one song to implore the crowd to vote and leaving the stage as if his act was over.
DJ Cassidy immediately whirred into life, introducing someone he teed up as a major guest: Vince Saavedra, the executive secretary-treasurer of the Southern Nevada Building Trades Unions.
The Philadelphia audience was baffled, but even more so when Martin immediately stormed back onto the stage to sing Livin' La Vida Loca, which the crowd listening to Saavedra in Las Vegas were presumably the only ones to miss.
The constant back-and-forth between down-the-line and in-person performance steadily blurred the line between the real and the mediated, over such a duration that by the time Harris herself appeared in corporeal form at nearly 11 pm EST, reality and the passage of time had begun to warp into unfamiliar forms.
The crowd were flipped back and forth between being live audience members, remote viewers, and participant performers. Speakers beamed in from location A would ask everyone in location B to make some noise for the benefit of their own crowd, but the noise from A seemingly wasn't relayed back to B. There was therefore no reaction to the noise contributed by B, raising the questions of whether it had been heard, by whom, and to what end.
The multi-location digi-rally was a setup curiously without a centre, seven peripheral events all existing only to behold and perform for other.
The slickness of the production and tightness of the cues also left something to be desired: Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive and Journey's Don't Stop Believing played over each other for more than a minute, someone switched off Katy Perry halfway through her set somewhere else in Pennsylvania, and at one point, the recorded music filling a gap between speakers dropped out to make way for the Detroit Youth Choir's soundcheck.
The unreality only heightened as night fell. The giant screens flanking the stage in Philadelphia were excellently crisp, and their portrait orientation meant they looked so dramatically out of scale with the human body.
The upshot was that anyone featured on them appeared not like a section of themselves blown up to an image, but instead uncannily alive, as if they belonged to a human super-species three times the height of the rest of us.
Harris made her first appearance from Allentown, Pennsylvania, after which Walz spoke in both Wisconsin and Michigan an hour or so apart, delivering almost exactly the same short speech both times — a bizarre idea given it was being simulcast to the exact same seven or so audiences.
Final flourish
It was only at the very end of the night that Philadelphia finally moved to the centre of the thing, with a flurry of big names all appearing in the flesh. Lady Gaga arrived to perform a heartfelt God Bless America before introducing Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff.
Emhoff in turn introduced Oprah Winfrey, who brought ten first-time voters on stage with her but only asked questions of five of them before giving a genuinely riveting speech and then introducing Harris — whose arrival by this point felt less like a scheduled campaign stop and more like the realisation of a prophecy, justifying at last the audience's faith that both she and they did in fact exist in real space and time.
Her speech was almost identical to the one she had given earlier in Pittsburgh — that is, to the one we had witnessed live on video several hours before. But it was effective nonetheless.
Harris' lines are by now so well-rehearsed and well-known that the audience practically reads half her speech out loud along with her, a mark of how consistent her message and her campaign's vocabulary has been since it launched practically overnight in the summer.
The expression on the faces of my fellow rallygoers was familiar from the Harris supporters I talked to in Atlanta: an overjoyed grin crushed shut with a steely clenched jaw. Not a single person I talked to or overheard in the space of nearly eight hours came close to sounding confident the election is won, and speaker after speaker hammered home that in 2016, Pennsylvania was only lost by 40,000-odd votes.
One thing largely missing from the rally, however, was Donald Trump. He was almost never mentioned by name, if ever. Harris referred to "those who are seeking to divide us", and almost every speaker acknowledged the existence of an administration prior to Joe Biden's, but little else was said of him.
Instead, the message of the rally was that the speakers, like the audience – their feet, hips, backs and necks turned halfway to concrete after hours of standing on the spot – are champing at the bit to vote, get a result, and move on.
Perhaps that indicates a degree of confidence that the outcome of the election really will offer a chance to move on from Trump. But whatever her expectations for Tuesday night really are, Harris used her last speech to rouse the crowd with three words that candidates do not throw out lightly: "We will win."
