I think a good bit of the purpose of rallies is crowd bonding. Same as protest marches and demonstrations, and many non-political events like rock concerts and football games. Most people love to be in a crowd with a few thousand other people shouting and chanting. It creates an emotional energy that watching television or reading editorials doesn’t. Floods them with whatever that thing is, endorphins? It makes those who might, thinking objectively, decide to vote for you, into adoring crusaders. At least that’s the hope.
I feel like this exact question came up last cycle, but I could be misremembering. Anyhow, as someone who has traveled up to NH for dozens of rallies over the last eight-ish years, I’d say this is a big one:
A big part of the actual event is getting your info and trying to get you to not only do some volunteer work, but rope others into doing it with you. (even if you didn’t come in convinced)
That aside, the other things mentioned (media coverage, meeting with big donors) are also true.
Not in my experience. We always try to strike up a conversation in line, and there’s definitely a subset who can be convinced in person, and they attend to see if that happens.
I’ll also note that there’s a political tourism subset, like us. We ran into the same people at three rallies one day. (Cruz, Rubio, Kasich)
It’s an event, which gets people talking about the candidate.
On regular days, “Who are you voting for?” is just kind of an awkward topic of conversation, but if there’s a big rally coming up, that gives you a natural entry point to such conversations. “Hey, Bob, what are you doing this weekend?” “Oh, I’m going to the massive Candidate Controversial rally!” “Really? I didn’t think you’d support them!” “Well, let me tell you, their position on squid tariffs is just so compelling, I really have to give them my support!”
Do candidates collect donations at rallies?
Is it allowed (YMMV according to state) for the rally to collect your early ballot and get it delivered to the correct county seat?
That might be of value in of itself.
I think there are many reasons that have been stated.
One other reason might be if you didn’t rally. How would that be covered and what would voters think? I imagine it would be defeatist and look like quitting, etc. Rally’s might be so ingrained and expected that you would attract negative value and attribution to your campaign if you did not do them.
Additionally, what’s the higher value use of the candidate’s time? Rallies have all of the benefits listed above, and only require a couple hours from the candidate him/herself. A couple more hours spent taping commercials or soliciting major donors (of which he or she is already doing plenty) is of marginal benefit when you’re already blanketing the airwaves in ads and are swimming in campaign cash.
Generally no (see laws). It looks like there a few states where no laws are specified but most places have restrictions on who can deliver ballots (usually a member of the household) or how many can be delivered in one election. Having s campaign operative show up at the office with thousands of ballots, just screams of 2000 mules.
Good question. Political rallies made sense in the pre-industrial days, and even well into the 20th century. There were “rally moments” as late as the 60s, and maybe beyond. Most of them were caught on film (or videotape), and the excitement could be palpable even when watching an event in your living room. Yet a lot of that thrill of being there was a transference from the live action event to the hungry eyes of the TV cameras, then straight to the viewer’s much smaller world.
We’ve lost a good deal of that kind of immediacy in the new digital age of computers, androids and the like; and there’s no going back, just as there’s no way of going back to the so-called golden age of television, with its live drama and variety shows. As with so much technology-driven change there’s nearly as much loss as gain. It’s surely easier to chat with people, whether friends, families or acquaintances.
I don’t know how, right now, to carry on with this topic much further (too late maybe, didn’t get enough sleep last night), but I love to see issues like this brought up; somewhere, anywhere, and discussed by mature people, and I don’t mean elderly, just grown up enough to listen to other people’s opinons with interruptions, flaming and name calling.
I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember but this presidential cycle I feel it even more strongly.
I’m sure prior to the days of instant video communication they served a purpose in that they rounded up rural voters to build hype and sell them on voting for them.
I can’t think of a single reason to hold a political rally like the ones Trump and Harris do on a daily basis now. The people who actually attend them are always fully locked into the candidate. There are no voters who can still be swayed that already take time out of their lives to go wave signs with other people waving signs at people running for office. The guy next to you is already sold on the candidate so who is it the attendees are trying to influence? It’s like wearing a Pearl Jam T-Shirt to a Pearl Jam concert. I guess they are fundraisers but to what end? Harris has raised well over $1B for her short 3-month campaign. My $10/100/1000 donation isn’t going to move the needle for her and she’ll never know my name or that I paid my political tithing. No one is watching them on TV if they are on at all. These are not for persuadable voters, they are for people who already know who they are voting for.
I don’t buy the whole “undecided voter” schtick anymore either. The people who claim to still be undecided are simply people who are either going to vote for Trump or not vote at all but they enjoy the ego boost of media pursuit. Seriously, 90% of the people you see getting interviewed on TV or sitting on cable news panels are so full of crap that it’s cringey. Rallys don’t do anything for them either.
Is there any legitimate reason to hold political rally’s today? I don’t think so.
Yeah, I think that, at this point, people who (a) fully intend to vote, and (b) truly aren’t sure which candidate they are going to vote for, are vanishingly few. “Undecided” seems to be more “do I vote for the less-objectionable of the two candidates, or do I stay home?”
Higher voter turnout does seem to have some correlation to battleground states.
Two major objections to such a simple matchup. One is that those states also have higher turnout in non-presidential elections. Two, those states almost certainly saw many more ads and more door knocking than safe states.
Something that I don’t see mentioned earlier is that large rallies get more media coverage than smaller events. They will be discussed for days before the event, get saturated news coverage during the event, and lead off the television news and the next day’s newspaper headlines after the event. Almost all of that coverage will be favorable: outlets can’t insult large crowds of locals even if they hate the candidates. Free publicity or, at least, extra publicity for a sunk cost.
I read that since Trump is avoiding Snapchat after it banned him, the Harris campaign is moving in, spending about $5 million for 5000 ads. Rally coverage in the media has to be much lower than that per impression.