Why does this election feel so different? (2024)

Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as (L-R) U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), Republican Vice Presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) and his wife KellyJohnson watch during the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

");}

If 2020 was the face mask election, this one is turning out to be the Bounty election — you know…the “quicker picker upper” paper towels we need to clean up Trump’s unhinged meltdowns.

Never-Trumper George Conway went on MSNBC “Morning Joe” on Monday to call Trump “a deeply unwell man…a deeply psychologically disturbed individual,” because Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris not just of lying about her crowd size at a recent Detroit rally, but of faking the crowd altogether, somehow using AI to show the 15,000 or so who were in attendance inside an airplane hanger when Harris’ Air Force Two plane pulled up outside. Trump posted this on his social media platform:

Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.

The crowd that showed up to fill the airport hangar to hear Harris and running mate Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, wasn’t fake, nor have been any of her crowds.

What is different about this election is how we’re seeing it through two sets of eyes – our own, and those of the man who after thinking he was cruising to an easy win in November against a frail and fading Joe Biden, now sees himself losing, and he really, really can’t stand it.

The meme that Trump is “melting down” doesn’t quite get how profound his discomfort and disbelief are at this moment. The switchover from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris happened so abruptly and went so smoothly, it’s almost as if there never was a Biden campaign. Just three weeks in, Kamala Harris looks like she has been the presumptive nominee ever since the primaries began early this year with Biden at the top of the ticket. If you blinked over the past week, you’d open your eyes to find her someplace else with a crowd at a rally even bigger than the last one. She went from Wisconsin to Georgia to Pennsylvania to Michigan to Arizona to Nevada and back to Michigan again – and that schedule omitted appearances in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia that had to be canceled due to the Biblical-style rains of Hurricane Debby.

The other thing that has changed is that Trump has lost his natural-born ability to shock.

This is what Trump was doing during the same week in August in 2016: He held two rallies on August 3 in Jacksonville and Daytona Beach, Florida. On the 4th, he was in Portland, Maine; on the 5th, he held rallies in Des Moines, Iowa and Green Bay, Wisconsin; on the 6th, he was in Windham, New Hampshire; on the 9th, he held rallies in both Wilmington and Fayetteville, North Carolina; on the 10th, he held rallies in Sunrise and Kissimmee, Florida. On and on he went at a pace of a rally every day or every other day with two rally days sprinkled in there once or twice a week.

This past week, aside from an impromptu whine-in to the media at his club/resort/motel in Palm Beach, Trump held a single rally in the state of Montana, which he carried by 16 points in 2016 and 20 points in 2020. And his rallies haven’t been as well attended this time around. The New York Times noted that his recent rally in Atlanta had plenty of empty seats, the second-tier balcony was nearly empty, and people started leaving the venue halfway through his 90-minute speech.

The 2020 election campaign was an exception to the rule because of the COVID epidemic, with neither Trump nor Biden holding many rallies. Trump still complains in his rants about the “stolen” 2020 election that Biden couldn’t have won because he “never left his basem*nt.” But this election, it’s back to normal. The word “barnstorming” was resurrected from ancient times to describe the series of rallies held by Harris and Walz last week. What is the word that best describes Trump’s week?

Golf.

A video of Trump disparaging Vice President Harris, referring to her as a “bitch” from the driver’s seat of his golf cart, went viral last week. He without a doubt found a few voters out there on the links of his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. That they had to be members paying thousands in dues to belong to Trump’s own club should let you know how many of them needed persuading to vote for him.

The biggest difference in this election isn’t how many rallies the two candidates are holding, or even that, for a change, the Democrat has been up in the polls instead of the Republican. FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average has Harris up 2.7 points over Trump, as of Monday, a six-point jump over Biden’s showing just before he suspended his campaign.

The difference this time around is that the Democrats have been on offense since the afternoon Joe Biden suspended his campaign three weeks ago. That Biden dropped out was not a surprise to many, but it was to Trump, who quickly called foul and even briefly claimed that the switch of candidates before the Democratic Convention was somehow “unconstitutional,” as if the Constitution of the United States has anything to say about the rules of American political campaigning. The Harris campaign used the element of surprise to maximum effect by being prepared to hit the campaign trail running without any apparent preparation prior to the Biden announcement.

The Trump campaign was caught flatfooted, or flat golf carted, take your pick. Pundits who only days previously had been consulting medical texts on early-onset dementia in covering Biden were suddenly parsing Trump’s language at his Mar a Lago press conference and finding abrupt jumps by Trump from one subject to another in the middle of sentences and going over his continual references to the fictional Hannibal Lecter for clues to his mental acuity.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The kitten heel, as it were, was on the other foot, and Trump’s discomfort was there for all to see.

The other thing that has changed is that Trump has lost his natural-born ability to shock. The flat-out racism of his remarks to the Association of Black Journalists wasn’t shocking to the journalists themselves or to us. Everyone has had to listen to his racism for so long, it was a one-day story, and then the media moved on. But it’s where the media moved to that matters. Trump’s rants weren’t as interesting as Kamala Harris’ evident delight at the ebullient cheers at her rallies, her “joy,” as the press began calling it.

It turns out that the dour, downcast approach of Republicans has a shelf-life, and it has reached its sell-by date. The Trump campaign isn’t showing energy. It’s operating on a tank full of depression and dismay.

The Harris-Walz campaign appears to have taken the opposite approach, recognizing that people want to feel proud of their country and not only that, better about themselves as citizens. They’re playing Beyoncé to herald Kamala as she and Walz walk out to greet the rallies. Just wait until they start playing Taylor Swift. The Harris campaign is right on the issues, but what her campaign is really about is energy and enthusiasm, and it’s working.