Harris and Trump say America tanks if they lose. So why the exuberance at their rallies?

Shortly after taking the stage 91 minutes late for his Atlanta rally this week, Donald Trump did what he can't help doing — go off on a tangent. This was clearly going to be a night at the improv.

He marveled at length about how Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket booster was snatched from the skies by mechanical arms on its return. All that fire and smoke. “Coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time,” he told his crowd. “Was that crazy?” Talk about a rocket's red glare.

A day earlier in Erie, Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris was buzzing with energy and blinding smiles on stage, and so were the thousands there to see her. No tangents.

She delivered a lacerating putdown of her opponent, polishing the art of looking incredulous about the man half the country might be voting for. If she’d held up a sign, “WTF” would have nailed the expression on her face. Her crowd was on a sugar high.

If next month’s election is the ultimate battle of good vs. evil, which we are told by both sides that it is, why are all these Georgia and Pennsylvania people dancing in the hall and having all this fun?

Harris' rhetoric is existential, the country's very foundation susceptible to crumbling away Nov. 5, in her reckoning. Trump's always provocative words have gone darker still, even with violent undertones at times.

Yet in a country sick of what American politics has become, here were thousands marinating in it. Enjoying it. Making a date night out of it. Cocooned in it.

The Harris rally Monday and the Trump one Tuesday were on different planets, to borrow Trump’s phrase for the world each candidate is offering Nov. 5. Trump looked ahead by looking back, promising a return to the country “you were born in.” Harris was fiercely future-focused.

Chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A” rang out at both events and love of America was in the air. But what America?

For U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who warmed up the crowd for the tardy Trump, it's the country where boys grow to be men — “manhood is needed” — and girls become strong women who get husbands. Added Trump when he spoke, “Transgender insanity will be out of our schools immediately” if he wins.

For Harris, it's the country where people have “the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride."

At the Trump rally, Jonathan Cordero, 31, a former Bernie Sanders supporter now backing the Republican, was asked whether he recognizes that Democrats are patriots, too. He said yes, and compared patriotism to religion — different faiths all devoted to a deity.

“Somebody who believes in, let’s say, Islam or Hinduism, they fully are committed to that belief system,” he said. “Same concept here — if somebody is for Harris and they’re chanting ‘U.S.A.,’ that’s because that’s their vision for where the country should go.”

More than four hours before Harris took the stage, the line to get inside the Erie Insurance Arena wrapped around a city block. Once inside, people had more than two hours to kill before the first speaker addressed them.

Many were on their feet much of that time, dancing as a high-energy DJ spun a club mix heavy on female artists like Katy Perry, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Madonna and Taylor Swift.

People danced the Cha Cha Slide at their seats when prompted by the DJ. “Woah, we’re halfway there!” the crowd shouted when Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” came on, with those lyrics.

Before the speakers started, Robert Cabaniss, a 28-year-old music artist from Pittsburgh, two hours away, and his companion on a fishing trip showed up to support a strongly Democratic friend at the rally.

If not a pure party loyalist himself, Cabaniss nevertheless supports Harris because “she fights for all of us” and, in his mind, she’s the only grownup running.

“It’s like, man, did he grow out of his shoe size yet?” he said about Trump and his “spoiled brat talk.” He went on: “I’m still waiting. It’s like Peter Pan hasn’t grown up yet.”

As for Trump’s supporters, he said, “I think they love their country, but not the right way.”

A few sections over sat Angela Cox and her adult daughter, Taylor Norton, who had driven from Buffalo, New York, about 90 minutes away, after learning about the rally online. They were in line two hours before settling in their seats, and Cox had no complaints about that.

“I’ve been having conversations with people all day long, and I love it,” she said. “The camaraderie.”

The hall was electrified when Harris walked out and launched into a half hour speech hitting on the touchstones of her campaign — her plans, biography, patriotism and the “brutally serious consequences” should Trump, whom she’s come to call an “unserious man,” win.

In a twist for her, she had the crowd watch a video on the jumbo screen of Trump musing about using the military to suppress “the enemy within” — the political opponents, investigators and resistant bureaucrats he branded as more dangerous than Russia or China.

“You heard his words coming from him,” she said. “He’s talking about the enemy within, Pennsylvania. ... He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country.” Lusty boos washed over the hall.

Her rally-goers were jazzed throughout. Afterward, she snaked through the crowd on the floor, shaking hands and chatting for 20 minutes.

“I think she’s superb,” said Luther Manus, a 97-year-old World War II and Vietnam veteran as the arena started emptying out. “And it’s something, because what we had we don’t need again.”

The upper-crust suburban setting outside the 2,800-seat Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre put something of a damper on the carnival-hawker midway vibe that traditionally accompanies an outdoor Trump rally in a fairground setting.

But the usual merch was on display, like the T-shirts saying “I’m voting for the felon and the hillbilly,” a reference to Trump’s criminal conviction and running mate JD Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“I just want to be around people that feel the same way I feel,” said Lydia Ward, a 33-year-old makeup artist, mother of two and longtime Trump supporter. "I’ve never been to something like this. The weather’s great, and we were able to get a babysitter and kind of made a date out of it.”

The typical attendee invested as many as eight hours in Trump's event, from joining the lineup into the home of Atlanta’s ballet and opera companies to seeing him leave the stage with Village People’s 1978 song “Y.M.C.A.” blasting.

A screen over the stage flashed slides that few seemed to heed. Some slides made dystopian threats about the consequences of a Harris victory that focus on an America overrun by violent migrants. “Kamala’s border plan: Make America Haiti,” proclaimed one, with a dog picking its way down a junk-strewn street. “Kamala is responsible for a broken economy, broken border and broken world,” said another.

Whether because he was tired in his third event of the day or just feeling chill, Trump was a bit lower key and shorter in his remarks than in some recent speeches, clocking in at 70 minutes. But he covered his bases.

He cracked up his crowd with one-liners. He made common cause with MAGA supporters by telling them his rich friends are “boring as hell," though one of the world's richest, Trump supporter Musk, plainly fascinates him.

He mocked Harris for being wed to a teleprompter and not knowing what inflation is ( she does ). He tapped the thrill of group transgression, as when he said that under Democrats, “Everything turns to ...” The crowd completed the sentence.

A hearty ovation greeted one of his newer lines about immigration: "The United States is now an occupied country, but Nov. 5 is liberation day.”

“I love the excitement,” said Kay Bomar, a retiree from Ringgold in northwest Georgia. “You can talk to these people about what you feel and they tell you what they feel. You can say what you think here and not have to be afraid of offending somebody because they feel something different.”

Cordero, the former Bernie Sanders supporter, plans to vote for Trump for the first time. “There’s similarity," he said. "Not in the literal sense, but in the sense of the energy that they provoke out of people. They are very about change.”

Cordero, who lives in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta and works in technology and advertising, showed up to be part of history.

“I’m Hispanic," he said. "I’m Puerto Rican, and there’s some people who would say that Latin people shouldn’t like Trump, or that Hispanics shouldn’t support somebody like Trump. But I disagree with that statement.

“I think that Trump, this time around, has really reached all kinds of people simply by saying that we’re going to get the economy to a good place. We’re going to get our country safe again.”

Harris got under Trump's skin in their debate by noting how his crowds can thin out while he's still speaking. A few did bail Tuesday night, starting about 25 minutes into his much-delayed speech. Most hung in.

Among them were Julius Adams, a student collecting disability who is Black, and his wife, Tanya Young-Adams, who delivers pizzas for Papa Johns and is white.

He has faith that Trump will follow through on deporting those immigrants who are “causing trouble,” even if he doesn't pull off the mass deportations he's promised. She is sold on Trump's plan to exempt tips and car loans from taxes.

“We’re on disability," she said. “We can barely get by with trying to buy groceries. And I’ve got a car payment and gas is outrageous.”

Trump and Harris gave their supporters a night away from that sort of grind. In Erie and Atlanta both, it was a welcome-to-the-tribe party, a performance and a chance to cut loose.

The election results will tell which rally's exuberance proved more rational.

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Thompson reported from Erie, Pennsylvania, Amy from Atlanta and Woodward from Washington.