Dueling rallies between Harris and Trump in the same Atlanta arena show America’s deep divisions

ATLANTA – Two rallies. Two Americas.

vice president Kamala Harris and former president donald trump they stood in the same arena four days apart, each looking out at the packed crowd like concert stars or boxers.

The competing events were held three months before Election Day in the state that produced the closest margin in the 2020 race for the White House. When it came to politics, tone, types of voters in attendance, and even music playlists, the rallies offered not just opposing views of the country, but wildly different versions of it.

These dynamics raise questions about how a factionalized citizenry could embrace a Trump return or a Harris rise.

On that score, at least two people who showed up at the Georgia State Convocation Center on different days could agree.

“It’s okay to have different ideologies,” said Angela Engram, a 59-year-old Democrat who drove from Stockbridge, Georgia, to hear Harris on Tuesday. “But now everything is about parties, personalities and power, with people not even trying to understand each other.”

Tracy Maddux, a 67-year-old retired grocer from Sparta, Georgia, who was in Trump’s rally on Saturday shared Engram’s lament about politics in 2024.

But Maddux blamed Engram’s party, saying Democrats were no longer concerned about ordinary people. Engram blamed Trump and his supporters, especially those who buy into his falsehoods that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged.

With Biden leaving the race in July and the Democrats elevating harristhe two main party candidates have the strength to fill arenas now.

Harris — the first woman, the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president — drew a racially and generationally mixed, though mostly Black and mostly female, audience. Democrats danced R&B, hip hop and pop music. They rocked out with guest star Megan Thee Stallion and exploded with Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which became Harris’s entrance song and campaign anthem.

Trump drew an overwhelmingly white audience with a notable presence of black voters. The playlist was based on their eclectic musical tastes – Village People and ABBA among them – but featured a lot of country music. The crowd erupted with the first notes of his signature song: “God Bless the USA” by Trump supporter Lee Greenwood.

It was two disparate crowds in just one of the battleground states of a divided nation that will decide the presidency. In 2020, Biden campaigned heavily with Black voters, younger voters, other voters of color, and college-educated white voters in metro areas like Atlanta. Trump dominated rural areas, small towns and smaller cities. In Georgia, the result was a Biden victory by 11,779 votes out of 5 million cast.

Both campaigns expect the Harris-Trump showdown to follow the same lines, with the parties’ bases playing key roles in Georgia and the national outcome.

Last week’s rally for Harris frustrated Republicans so much that they downplayed her role in it.

“They had a big crowd. They had some entertainment here. They were making some adjustments,” said Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, who served as one of Trump’s “fake electors” after the 2020 election.

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

Democrats celebrated Harris as a historic figure who could leverage her education for all Americans.

“It brings together all these threads”, Raphael Warnock, The first black U.S. senator from Georgia, said Tuesday. “She sees us because, in truth, she is all of us.”

Harris herself spoke more about politics than biography, including about her biggest responsibilities: inflation and immigration.

On inflation, she implicitly blamed corporate greed, promising to attack “price gouging” and “hidden fees.” Democrats promoted the biggest spending measures of Biden’s term as seminal investments in clean energynational manufacturing, such as the flourishing electrical industry battery factories in Georgia and infrastructure improvements that has eluded previous presidents, including Trump.

On Saturday, Republicans blamed those measures as the cause of higher prices and cast Harris as a radical who threatens national values.

Trump offered dystopian predictions of a Harris administration. “An accident like 1929…you will end up in World War III…the suburbs will be overrun with violent crime and savage foreign gangs,” Trump warned. “If Kamala wins, it will be crime, chaos and death across our country.”

He specifically blamed Harris for murder of Georgia resident Laken Riley, whose death authorities attributed to a Venezuelan who allegedly entered the United States illegally. Harris did not mention Riley, but criticized Trump for scaring Senate Republicans into abandoning a bipartisan agreement on immigration and border security.

From the coveted seats, Terry Wilson, a 46-year-old truck driver from Chattanooga, Tennessee, cheered Trump’s attacks on Harris. In an interview, Wilson added his own Trumpian hyperbole: “I mean, she’s a Marxist.”

Michaelah Montgomery, a Black conservative activistjoined Trump’s group recent mockery of Harris’ racial and ethnic identity. “She is only black when she is elected,” argued Montgomery. The predominantly white audience laughed and applauded.

For running mate JD Vance, Trump was the living martyr who “took a bullet for the country.” Speakers recalled a bloodied Trump rising to his feet after the bullet of a would-be assassin cut off his ear at a rally in Pennsylvania three weeks earlier. The image was printed on T-shirts for everyone in Atlanta.

At the Harris rally, Trump was introduced as the former president with the criminal record who directed a enjoying college onlineit was considered responsible in civil court for sexual abuse, denied the results of the 2020 elections and saw his supporters ransack the US Capitol to stop the certification of Biden as his successor.

“I’ve been dealing 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 for crack down on political rhetoric. There were, however, shouts of “Arrest him! Lock him up!” – shouts that began with Biden still in the race, but reached a deafening tone in Atlanta.

The chant is a reply to the Republicans, who eight years ago shouted “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent. She was never accused of any crime.

Presidential campaigns always involve differences and divisions. Only once in the last half century – Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984 – has the winner exceeded 55% of all votes cast. It has been more common for the winner not to even prevail in the popular vote, as happened Trump in 2016 and Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

Engram, Harris’ Stockbridge supporter, still found reason for optimism.

“There really is so much we all share in common if people would just calm down and consider it,” she said, although she expressed doubts about Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement ever helping the national consensus. Healthier discourse under a Harris administration, she said, would depend on “good Republicans who aren’t all MAGA.”

Trump’s allies did not suggest that they could aim for consensus. Pastor Jentezen Franklin of Gainesville, Georgia, used his invocation on Saturday to declare the election “a spiritual battle.”

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

Trump spoke at length about the lies he lost in 2020 due to voter fraud. He attacked not only Democrats but Governor Brian Kempthe most powerful Georgia Republican, and others who, Trump said, failed the party by not helping it overturn Biden’s victory.

Democrats on Tuesday peppered their comments on the vote with references to late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. John Lewis, who long represented the Atlanta area in Congress. Warnock mocked Trump as “a Florida man” who made a infamous phone call pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State “to find 11,780 votes” to make him the winner of the 2020 race.

Through all the other rhetoric, each of the two candidates nodded toward unity.

“We are a movement, a people, a family and a glorious nation under God,” said the former president.

Vice President’s version: “We love our country and I believe it is the highest form of patriotism to fight for our country’s ideals. … And when we fight, we win.”

But only one of them will.