Trump and Harris fans offer their election hopes and fears at rallies

The fans outside Donald Trump’s rally in Milwaukee were in a good mood, smiling and laughing — in some cases, beer in hand — as they descended on the 18,000-seater Fiserv Arena with hours to go before the former president’s arrival.

Many of the Wisconsinites present were hardly optimistic about the future of their country, but about the election itself, they were remarkably upbeat.

“He’s got the votes, and although (the Democrats) are gonna try and stop him with some fake votes,” said Holly, a retail worker in her early 30s. “Trump is gonna Trump them.”

Milwaukee is a solidly Democratic city in a hotly contested state. Wisconsin provided among the narrowest margins of victory for Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and all the recent polling indicates that it is likely to be extremely close this year whichever way it votes.

However, the Trump fans Euronews spoke to at the rally were unanimously confident, and in some cases certain, that he would win both their state and the national vote.

One person predicted Trump would get 55-60% nationwide, a number that does not match any mainstream poll and which would make him the highest-scoring presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

The same voter, who declined to give his name, was selling unofficial T-shirts reading “Kamala isn’t black, Joe has dementia” (he was black himself). Asked what would happen if Harris did in fact win the election, he immediately became tense and began to walk away.

“Prices’ll go up,” he said over his shoulder. “I see maybe some females being happier, but otherwise, f*** that s***.”

‘I call her laughing Kamala’

Indeed, Trump is lagging behind Harris when it comes to female voters, largely because of his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade and with it, the federal right to access abortion care.

The gender gap was underscored by a shocking poll that put Harris three points ahead of Trump in Iowa, which had not previously been considered a swing state this cycle.

According to the poll’s crosstabs, Harris is surging among female voters, and those over 65 support her by a two-to-one margin. If those patterns were repeated across the Midwest or the country at large, Trump would almost certainly lose by a massive electoral college margin.

Nonetheless, the crowd at the rally seemed perfectly gender-balanced despite the proliferation of fully misogynistic Trump-themed clothing for sale. References to career advancement via sexual favours and prostitution were stamped on clothing everywhere. A man in a ketchup-red suit and orange wig stormed around the crowd with a stack of shirts reading “Trump versus tramp” and screaming at the top of his lungs, “It’s MAGA time, b***h”.

Outside the arena car park, a woman was selling rather more demure merchandise. She offered a different rationale for her support for the former president, grounding it in policy rather than animus toward the other side.

“I think he’s gonna win,” she said, reflecting happily on what she felt Trump had done to bring down the cost of living via fracking. “And if Harris does, I’ll be worried about these unvetted immigrants coming in. Not that immigration’s bad, but you need to know who’s actually coming into the country.”

Linda, a suburban grandmother in her late 50s decked out in a vermilion Trump hat and metallic purple lipstick, also had a policy-centric theory for why Harris would lose.

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“People are tired up of paying the prices that they pay for everything — groceries, gasoline, food, medical, services, it’s all crazy,” she said. “It happened with this last administration.”

Concern and anger at inflation have been at the centre of the campaign, even as the rate of inflation comes down and the US economy remains strong on various measures. But Linda’s opinions of Harris herself were rather less simple.

“She’s a Marxist, that’s what I think. She’s being fed everything from the Obama administration. So anything they want her to say, she’s just repeating it, and it’s not even genuine,” Linda said.

“If you notice, when she’s interviewed — if it’s on the spot and not at a planned event and she doesn’t have anything to read from, she doesn’t know how to answer a question because she doesn’t know what’s going on,” she explained.

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“Actually, there’s an article about this: she sustained a head injury many, many, many years ago, and they say that this laugh that she has constantly is from a head injury and that she still has it. Look it up. It’s information that people need to know about her.”

Euronews could not find any article making this claim, but there has been plenty of talk on the right about Harris’ speaking style and the volume of her laugh. Trump himself has attacked her for it many times since she replaced Biden, saying at a rally in July, “I call her laughing Kamala. Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy.”

‘They’re going to try it again’

The mood at Harris’ rally in Atlanta, meanwhile, was very different. The crowd roared under a blazing sun and the candidate herself was in fine spirits, but talking to the people trickling out afterwards, it was hard to find anyone who considered the election a done deal.

Not that there weren’t optimists. Evangeline, who has manned a ballot drop location during early voting, said the sheer number of Georgians casting ballots in advance of Tuesday is itself cause for courage.

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“Four million of us have already voted, and we’re only 10 million altogether,” she said of the state’s voters, who have been returning their ballots at a record rate. (The Republican Party launched a lawsuit attempting to stop counties from allowing voters to return their ballots the weekend before the election, but a judge threw it out.)

But for all her optimism about voter turnout, Evangeline had a grim expression on her face as she talked about Trump.

“Don’t forget they tried to steal the vote in this state last time,” Evangeline said. “They’re going to try it again if she wins.”

John, a longtime Democratic activist, said he was most worried about what might happen in the gap between the vote on 5 November and the certification of the result in Congress on 6 January next year.

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“It’s a perilous time. It’ll be fraught with all kinds of potential skulduggery on their side. I think we’re going to have to be vigilant,” he warned.

“It’s going to go to the courts, and my big fear is that the Supreme Court somehow gives the green light to state legislatures to overturn the will of the people.”

“Our only hope is if Kamala Harris can win by a sufficiently large margin in enough states that it becomes difficult to do that,” John said.

Like the other Harris voters filtering out of the rally, John was highly optimistic about Harris herself and her agenda, but with an unmistakable steel in his eyes. While Harris and her running mate Tim Walz trade on exuberance at their in-person rallies, the campaign’s messaging to grassroots activists is shot through with anxiety and pressure to hold the line lest the election slip away.

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It was that projection of discipline that set the Harris rally in Atlanta apart from Trump’s. Most of the visible merchandise was official and slick rather than physically and textually crude and the perimeter around the outdoor much more tightly controlled.

The only real voices of disruption were two loud groups of pro-Palestine protesters, both chanting, “Harris, Harris, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”.

The day after tomorrow

As for what the result would mean, both candidates’ supporters were loath to be drawn on the consequences of the other side winning — partly because neither was keen to think about it.

When Euronews asked two elderly Harris supporters in Atlanta what they would do in the event of a Trump victory, their faces turned to stone. “Well, what can we do?” one said, her hands visibly tensing. John, with his laser focus on the legal wrangling after the votes are counted, said that another Trump term “could be the end of democracy”.

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“It was said in 2016, when he was elected, among those who knew him best, that if he got into the White House he would never leave, that he would try at least to become president for life.”

Back in Milwaukee, Euronews asked Holly what would happen if Trump lost. She was anything but circumspect, and her exuberance gave way to something more ominous.

“I think there will be a civil war,” she said without a moment’s pause. “Our nation is already divided, but it’s only going to become more divided. And what happens if there’s a war with a foreign country? The United States is going to depend on her to be the commander in chief?”

Asked what she would do in that situation, she had a simple response: leave.

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“Somewhere where it’s English-speaking, not as expensive to live. Italy. Iceland. I’ve heard great things about Finland.”