The energetic, enthused, and huge crowds that Americans are seeing on prime time television coverage of the Democratic National Convention are no anomaly. The Harris-Walz campaign’s momentum is not confined to the convention or to rallies—and it’s putting the Trump-Vance campaign to shame.
Just look at the fundraising: Vice President Harris raised an unprecedented $500 million—half a billion dollars!—in donations in the one month since President Joe Biden stepped aside and handed her the reins to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. That included $204.5 million in the last two weeks of July alone. But what’s remarkable is that $119 million of that haul came from small-dollar donors. That’s a lot of regular people who are excited about her campaign.
By contrast, Donald Trump raised just $47.5 million in July and a measly $8.35 million came from direct donations to the campaign, rather than committees.
Just look at these numbers:
Speaking of numbers, there’s the bane of Trump’s existence—crowd size. Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, packed not one but two arenas on Tuesday night: the United Center in Chicago, where the Democratic convention is being held, and the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, where Donald Trump and the Republican Party held their own convention last month.
That’s a helluva lot of very happy, excited people.
Meanwhile, Trump is obsessing over crowd sizes on his Trump Social site, posting more than 25 times on Sunday about Harris.
“We had to turn away lots of people yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but Comrade Kamala Harris’ Social Media Operation showed empty seats, long before the Rally started, early in the afternoon when, in actuality, we had to turn away 11,500 people!” he wrote. “She’s a Crooked Radical Left Politician, and always will be!”
But the numbers and photos don’t lie. Trump’s crowds this week have been … smaller.
Most of the nation can’t attend the political parties’ conventions, so let’s take a look at the television ratings.
Variety reports that, according to Nielsen’s primetime tracking across 12 news channels, Day 1 of the DNC brought in an average of 20 million viewers, and Day 2 soared higher, to an average 20.8 million. During Barack Obama’s speech? It surged even higher, to 21.6 million.
For context, Variety points out that the first three nights of July’s Republican National Convention peaked at 18.1 million on Day 3, after premiering to 18 million on Day 1 and cratering to 14.8 million on Day 2.
Ouch, Trump. That’s Harris and Walz’s smiling, happy faces beamed into millions more homes than you and your wildly unpopular running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
All of that energy is translating into actual work on the ground. The Harris-Walz campaign just announced that this is their team’s largest mobilization week. This past "weekend of action" included over 10,000 volunteers across battleground states. Those volunteers made around 900,000 calls and knocked on more than 100,000 doors.
That’s about 1 million voter contacts in a matter of days. They also recruited more than 24,000 new volunteers during their weekend blitz. This week, 4,000 people are phone banking on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night the campaign is holding 500 convention watch parties, at least one in every state.
Trump’s campaign has apparently decided to put all of its volunteers’ energy into “election integrity” efforts on Election Day.
No wonder he’s so mad all the time. No crowds, no money, no energy. Trump looks like he knows he’s lost.
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