Harris, Trump clash at Atlanta rallies shows divisions in country

ATLANTA (AP) — Two rallies. Two Americas.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stood in the identical arena 4 days apart, each looking at the packed audience as in the event that they were concert stars or skilled boxers.

The competing events took place three months before Election Day in the state that generated the narrowest margin in the 2020 White House race. In terms of policies, tone, kinds of voters in attendance and even music playlists, the rallies offered not only contrasting visions of the country but in addition completely different versions of it.

This dynamic raises questions on how a divided society might reply to a Trump return or a Harris rise to power.

At least two individuals who got here to the Georgia State Convocation Center on different days could agree with that.

“It’s OK to have different ideologies,” said Angela Engram, a 59-year-old Democrat who got here from Stockbridge, Georgia, to listen to Harris speak Tuesday. “But now it’s all about party and personality and power, and people don’t even try to understand each other.”

Tracy Maddux, a 67-year-old retired food market owner from Sparta, Georgia, who attended the Trump rally on Saturday, shared Engram’s regret about politics in 2024.

But Maddux blamed Engram’s party, saying Democrats now not care about atypical people. Engram blamed Trump and his supporters, especially those that accept his lies that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged.

Both crowds formed a coalition on the battlefield

Biden dropped out of the race in July and Democrats have promoted Harris, so each major-party candidates now have the potential to pack arenas.

Harris — the primary woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to function vice chairman — drew a racially and generationally mixed crowd, though mostly black and mostly female. Democrats danced to R&B, hip-hop and pop, rocked out with special guest Megan Thee Stallion and exploded to Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which became Harris’ entrance song and campaign anthem.

Trump drew an overwhelmingly white audience with a notable presence of black voters. The playlist leaned toward his eclectic musical tastes—Village People and ABBA amongst them—but included loads of country. The crowd erupted at the primary notes of his signature walk-up song, “God Bless the USA,” by Trump supporter Lee Greenwood.

Those were two different crowds in one among the nation’s key, divided states that may determine the presidency. In 2020, Biden campaigned heavily with black voters, younger voters, other voters of color and educated white voters in metropolitan areas like Atlanta. Trump dominated rural areas, small towns and smaller cities. In Georgia, the result was Biden winning by 11,779 votes out of 5 million forged.

Both campaigns expect the Harris-Trump showdown to play out in an identical fashion, with each parties’ electorate playing a key role in the election results in Georgia and across the country.

A recent rally for Harris so angered Republicans that they downplayed her participation.

“They had a big crowd. They had some entertainment. They did some twerking,” said Georgia Gov. Burt Jones, who was one among Trump’s “fake electors” after the 2020 election.

Jones claimed that Harris’ crowd thinned out after Megan Thee Stallion’s performance. That wasn’t the case in the course of the 25 minutes Harris spoke. In fact, Trump lost a significant slice of his supporters during his 91-minute speech.

Two rallies provided two very different visions of America

Democrats celebrated Harris as a historical figure who could use her background to profit all Americans.

“She ties all of these threads 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 spoke more about politics than about her biography, also mentioning her biggest flaws: inflation and immigration.

On inflation, she implicitly blamed corporate greed, promising to combat “exorbitant prices” and “hidden fees.” Democrats have promoted Biden’s biggest spending measures of the term as groundbreaking investments in clean energy, domestic manufacturing like Georgia’s expanding electric battery plants, and infrastructure improvements that previous presidents, including Trump, have didn’t deliver.

Republicans on Saturday blamed the measures for higher prices and portrayed Harris as a radical who threatens national values.

Trump offered dystopian predictions for the Harris administration. “A 1929 crisis…you’ll end up in World War III…the suburbs will be overrun by violent crime and savage foreign gangs,” Trump warned. “If Kamala wins, there will be crime, chaos and death all over the country.”

He specifically blamed Harris for the killing of Georgia resident Laken Riley, whose death authorities blame on a Venezuelan who allegedly entered the United States illegally. Harris didn’t mention Riley but criticized Trump for scaring Republican senators into abandoning a bipartisan agreement on immigration and border security.

From a coveted seat in the audience, Terry Wilson, a 46-year-old truck driver from Chattanooga, Tennessee, stood in acclamation to Trump’s attacks on Harris. In the interview, Wilson added his own Trumpian exaggeration: “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, because the mostly white audience laughed and cheered.

For vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, Trump was a living martyr who “took a bullet for the country.” Speakers recalled a bloodied Trump standing up as a possible assassin’s bullet grazed his ear at a Pennsylvania rally three weeks earlier, a picture emblazoned on the T-shirts of the complete Atlanta crowd.

At Harris’ rally, Trump was portrayed as a former president with a criminal record who ran an illegal online college, was found civilly answerable for sexual harassment, refused to just accept the outcomes of the 2020 election and watched as his supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol to stop Biden from certifying as his successor.

“I’ve dealt 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 tone down his political rhetoric. But there have been chants of “Lock him up! Lock him up!” — chants that began when Biden was still in the race but reached deafening levels in Atlanta.

The cry is a response to Republicans who shouted “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent, eight years ago. She has never been charged with a criminal offense.

Consensus is an increasingly difficult idea to know

Presidential campaigns are at all times about differences and divisions. Only once in the past half-century—Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984—has the winner exceeded 55 percent of the votes forged. More often, the winner didn’t even win the favored vote, as happened with Trump in 2016 and Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

Engram, a Harris supporter from Stockbridge, still found reason for optimism.

“We really have so much in common if people would just calm down and think about it,” she said, at the same time as she expressed doubts that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement would ever help construct a national consensus. A healthier conversation under Harris, she said, would depend “on good Republicans who aren’t all MAGA.”

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Trump allies haven’t suggested they may be reaching a consensus. Pastor Jentezen Franklin of Gainesville, Georgia, used his call Saturday to call the election a “spiritual battle.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., warned of the leftist “regime” behind Harris: “They hate you. But Donald Trump loves you.”

Trump has long spoken of his lies that he lost 2020 due to voter fraud, attacking not only Democrats but in addition Gov. Brian Kemp, Georgia’s strongest Republican, and others who Trump said had let the party down by not helping him overturn Biden’s victory.

Democrats on Tuesday peppered their remarks on the vote with references to the late civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, who long represented the Atlanta area in Congress. Warnock ridiculed Trump, calling him “the guy from Florida” who made the infamous call pressuring the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes” to win the 2020 contest.

Both candidates emphasized unity in their speeches.

“We are one movement, one people, one family and one great nation under God,” said the previous president.

The vice chairman’s version: “We love our country, and I believe that the highest form of patriotism is fighting for the ideals of our country. … And when we fight, we win.”

But only one among them will do it.