I don’t even know what to make of this

For as long as I’ve been doing this, I’ve been pointing out that rally crowd size has never been a leading indictor of voter turnout. It wasn’t the case a hundred years ago when Eugene Debs drew massive crowds but lost in a blowout. It wasn’t the case eighty years ago when Wendell Willkie drew massive crowds but lost in a blowout. It wasn’t the case in 2016, when Bernie Sanders drew massive crowds but lost the primary race by four million votes. And it wasn’t the case when Trump drew massive crowds in 2016 and 2020 but lost the popular vote by millions of votes both times.

So now that Kamala Harris is winning the rally crowd size contest, I’m not going to turn around and suddenly claim that it means more than it does. If you want to know who’s winning an election you have to look at three leading indicators: the polling averages, the fundraising momentum, and popular momentum. Rally crowd size plays a part in the latter, but it’s only one part of one of the three indicators.

All that said, the rally crowd size issue has now taken a stunning turn. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both held rallies on Thursday night. They were both in swing states. And they were both in cities with similar metro area populations. In theory they should have seen similar crowd sizes. But Harris filled a 20,000 seat venue with far more people than that outside trying to get in, while Trump appeared to only manage to fill about 3,500 seats in a 5,000 seat venue.

This means Kamala Harris drew a crowd about six times as large as the one Donald Trump drew under similar circumstances. That shouldn’t be possible in an election where Harris only has a fairly small lead. Yet we’re seeing it play out. Harris has been outdrawing Trump for awhile, and the gap keeps getting larger down the stretch.

Some people will argue that Harris only outdrew Trump because Harris had so many cool special guests at her rally. But that just underscores the point. If Trump were able to attract any cool special guests to his rallies, he’d be doing it. Instead he’s out there limping along almost on his own. He’s the only star of his own show, and it’s not a show that anyone wants to watch anymore.

I’ve been pointing out for nearly a decade that Trump’s base has never been relevant to elections. Trump’s base wasn’t the reason he won in 2016. Trump’s base couldn’t keep him from losing in 2020. And Trump’s base will not decide the outcome in 2024. They’re a comparatively small group, not enough to carry an election on their own, and their votes are already baked in. Trump couldn’t win the popular vote even when he was drawing superior rally crowd sizes.

Yet now Trump is drawing inferior rally crowd sizes. Massively inferior crowd sizes. It’s a wholesale shift from 2016 and even from 2020. And it’s not difficult to figure out why. Trump is out of gas, in every sense of the phrase. His base may still be with him, but even they’re tired of his act. They don’t want to have to show up and watch their senile leader babbling about sharks and cannibals and getting confused about what’s going on and where he’s at. They don’t want to have to keep pretending that Trump isn’t senile. And so even they’re only turning out for his rallies at a fraction of the numbers they once did.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. Some candidates just naturally draw huge rally crowds, and it doesn’t mean they’re competitive. Some candidates just naturally don’t draw large crowds, and it doesn’t mean they’re not competitive. But what to make of a candidate who used to draw huge rally crowds and now can’t draw crowds at all? Usually, if you’ve fallen that far, your party isn’t stupid enough to nominate you again.

But none of this is happening in a vacuum. It’s not just that Trump’s ability to draw a crowd is vanishing. And it’s not just that Kamala Harris is outdrawing him. It’s that Harris is drawing massive crowds in her own right. Trump could have drawn five times the number of people he drew on Thursday night, and Kamala still would have outdrawn him. The story here is about Kamala.

On some level, only one presidential candidate or the other can have momentum at any given time. If you’re losing, then the popular narrative is that you’re losing, and it’s hard to get any momentum from there. And so perhaps part of why Trump is struggling so badly to draw a crowd is that even his base knows deep down that he’s losing and that Kamala has all the momentum. Most people don’t want to turn out for what they see as a lost cause. It’s as if Kamala’s winning momentum has broken Trump’s base’s spirit as much as Trump’s cognitive collapse has broken his base’s spirit.

We’ll see what it all means soon enough. I stand by my position that rally crowd size is not a key indicator of voter turnout. But you’d sure rather be Kamala Harris heading into this final stretch than Trump, right? In any case, it all comes down to turnout, and that’s our job. Let’s each try to get three like-minded people around us to show up and vote down the stretch. That crowd of three people is more important than any rally crowd, no matter the size.