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President Donald Trump is speaking during a campaign rally at the Pikwa Agriculture and Event Center in Circleville, Ohio, on October 24.
Cleveland – Kamala Harris walks happily between East 30th Street. Holding the cordless microphone to Maskai, he addressed a line of early voters who had endorsed the last blocks of the Quahoga County Board of Elections and flooded the freeway off the ramp.
“It’s Kamala, and I came to Cleveland to say thank you!” Democratic nominee for vice president begins. “Thank you for voting early and voting. Your vote is your voice, your voice is your vote. There is a lot at stake. Don’t let anyone take your power. ”
There were probably several hundred people in Earshot. It will be the largest audience he will address during his five-hour visit here on Saturday – and an indication of how carefully Biden’s campaign is proceeding through the coronavirus protocol. The large number of voters queuing to vote in this large Democratic county had encouraged Harris’ presence. And the sight of this on social media at least made President Donald Trump’s allies work in a competitive manner.
“When you can’t lead a crowd …” A senior Trump adviser from Ohio snacked on Twitter.
A campaign follows the best epidemic efforts. Not others. It’s not that Biden and Harris can’t pull off a big crowd. That’s what they’re choosing not to do. And scenes on Saturday of both campaigns clarified the different and different positions of the presidency 10 days after election day.
Trump was coming to Circleville near Columbus for his visit when Harris was leaving Ohio. The city of about 14,000 is known for its annual pumpkin show, a five-day festival that draws hundreds of thousands of people. Saturday would have been a closed night, but the epidemic forced organizers to cancel this year’s event. Circleville got Trump rally instead.
Michael Hartley, a Republican strategist living in Circleville, asked BuzzFeed News if locals were disappointed with the pumpkin trade for Trump, saying “energy is off the charts.” “It simply came to our notice then. Vendors and carnival food. The small town is showing America. “
The outdoor rally drew thousands, many masked.
If you wear a mask and do your best to stay six feet away, the Trump event will look as horrible as gaslighting. When Vice President Mike Pence campaigned in Columbus last week, people were sitting, standing, shaking hands, and listening, mostly outdoors, but closely-together. The exceptions were sitting directly behind Pence in those TV shots. Before Pence took the stage and they didn’t put on their masks. In the Trump and Pence events, more than 224,000 Americans are being treated for a deadly epidemic, and it is understood by his supporters that Trump has already fought and won.
Trump said to Circleville, “News, CNN, all they talk about, Covid! Covid, Covid, Covid,” Trump said to Circleville.
“You have to live life. And you have to get out. You have to be awake, you have to be careful, you have to be socially distant. Get very close, put on a mask, keep going, you know, a lot of things,” he said. Crowds of supporters soon said that most were not doing those things.
Biden and Harris have created a coronavirus – and their criticism of the president’s response – to the impressive focus of their campaign. After taking a vacation at Burke Lakefront Airport on Saturday, Harris raised a question about Ohio’s electoral significance in the opportunity to hit that message. “First of all,” she replied, “Ohio will help determine the outcome of this election, no question. But you also look at the challenges the people of Ohio are facing … then we have the highest number of hospital admissions in Ohio.” The onset of the epidemic. “
Henry J. Gomez / BuzzFeed News
Kamala Harris will speak on October 24 in the Kuahoga County Board of Elections election.
Trump spent a lot of this final stretch to create issues of business dealings and personal problems for Biden’s adult son Hunter, with little success. And he spent a lot of time on Saturday bragging about his favorite metric: crowd size. “Is there a better place than a Trump rally?” He asked Circleville. “I mean, seriously, right? It’s serious, but we have fun.”
Biden events are small when they are small. Trump gives the former vice president endless hell for running the early months of coronavirus in his Delaware basement, even if it’s the thing responsible for the 77-year-old. Trump is 74 years old, and although no definitive source for his Covid-11 diagnosis has been found, the president, unlike Biden, has been holding large gatherings and rarely wearing a mask in public. (USA Today reported this week that coronavirus cases have risen in five counties since Trump rallied there.) Biden has remained coronavirus-free, and he and Harris continue to limit the size of crowds in their programs. Many on the election board or Trump’s senior adviser joked Saturday that if Biden or Harris had gone against health recommendations and ensured such an event, he might have come inside the high school gym.
Democrats recently began experimenting with drive-in rallies, where attendees live in their cars. Former President Barack Obama held a rally in Miami on Saturday that saw about 400 people in 228 cars in the Biden campaign. (Trump, however, mocked Obama as a weak draw in a comment he made to reporters after landing in Ohio.) Meanwhile, a drive-in rally with Biden and rock star John Bon Jovi in Dades on Saturday afternoon pulled more than 200 cars.
Harris stuck to a more traditional schedule in Cleveland. Or at least it was conventional in the sense that the places the national candidate usually went to while campaigning in a state of war. She just couldn’t go inside or invite a lot of people to go with her. And so when she was picked up from the Soul Food restaurant, the owner greeted her from the outside with six bags already containing catfish, greens and other specialties. In the otherwise deserted part of downtown, about a dozen people watched from the sidewalk.
It was the same, if a little busy scene in suburban Lakewood, where the owners of a clothing boutique met Harris outside, a daughter showing off some of their goods. At one point, Harris walked to the center of Detroit Avenue to wave to the crowd. Those who came close to Harris at both stops wore masks. Harris also kept it with him the whole time.
Henry J. Gomez / BuzzFeed News
Kamala Harris in her distance speech at the Culahoga Community College College Ledge, Oct. 24.
Harris left the board of election for a speech at the nearby Cuhhoga Community College College Ledge, locally known as Tri-C. Held outside the courtyard, the event was the centerpiece of Harris’ Day in Cleveland. He drew about 50 people, all wearing masks and lying on the ground in social distant circles. It was so scattered, so pervasive, that his words occasionally turned on her again. When she finally spoke about the civil rights icon John Lewis, someone in the audience quietly insisted on Lewis’s “good trouble” mantra, but the rumble went much further than that at the big rally.
“The moment will pass,” Harris said in his remarks there, trying to instill a sense of unity in his small, socially isolated crowd. And for years to come, our children, our grandchildren, others – they will see in our eyes, each of us. And they will ask us: Where were you at that moment? And I know who I am right now, hanging on to Tri-C, I know that what we tell them is a lot more than how we felt. “
Harris was working up to a broader argument: that Democrats’ efforts to mobilize and mobilize voters amid the epidemic – and other national crises, as Harris calculated Saturday – would help free the country from the tumultuous Trump era. .
An hour later, as she boarded a plane from Cleveland, she was asked another Ohio-centric question: What did she learn from some of the voters she met on Saturday? And once again, the coronavirus hospitalization led to the Harris epidemic. She spoke of good behavior modeling and adhering to safety protocols. She mentioned how Trump kept saying we were rolling in the corner and the vaccine was coming soon.
“You see everything you’re publishing and reporting,” Harris said. “Everyone knows we shouldn’t round the corner. Here is a fight we are facing right now. “
