So the polls say that right now, Kamala Harris is about where Donald Trump was when Joe Biden elected to not stand for re-election and Donald Trump is about where Biden was then. And it feels like everyone who wants Trump to win is urging him to drop the personal attacks and obsession with crowd size and focus on the issues…to which Trump responds by increasing the personal attacks and the obsession on crowd size.
Many, many years ago I heard a speech by Dan Rather about all those years when he covered presidential elections. He went back to Nixon in 1960 and he said that you should never believe any politician of any party when they boast about how many people they had at their campaign stops. He had all these stories about candidates claiming they had 5,000 people in a building that could hold, at most, two thousand.
And he said that often, this was the function of "Advance Men" — guys who volunteered to do the dirty work in the campaign in the hopes of landing great jobs in the administration if their guy won. 1,800 people showed up but the Advance Guy, trying to impress the candidate, told him 4,000 and then the candidate figured he could bump it up to five. The press, of course, is then lying and biased for saying it was 1,800. Trump probably needs no middle man.