This is part of a series, This American Carnage, from Charlie Lewis, who is reporting from America on the 2024 US presidential election.
“I can’t hear y’all!” the DJ tells the early arrivals nestled at the barriers at Kamala Harris’ final campaign stop in Pittsburgh before election day in Washington. He hits the kill switch for the chorus of “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” for people to sing along, and then flips to “Brick House”. The crowd cheers and sings. “Yessir!” the DJ shouts back.
Harris is set to appear here anytime between now and four hours away, and wild rumours persist about a potential Taylor Swift appearance (although she does have a football match to attend…).
There are two giant stars and stripes and a row of food trucks gleaming in the late afternoon sun, all set against the backdrop of the Carrie Blast Furnaces (only two remain from the late-1800s peak, when the shore along the Monongahela River was lined with them), burnt black, pipe coiling around the conical peak perched on a battered building more than a hundred years old. It’s Burton-era Batman, a steampunk dream, and today it’s an odd fit for the cheery “all-ages music festival” vibe as attendees and media personnel start to pool around the stage.
“You know we’re in the middle of history, right?” hollers the DJ. “We’re gonna change the whole world tomorrow, with just one act.”
Harris is joined in Pittsburgh by Republican Donald Trump, who will be addressing his crowd at a clashing (in every sense of the word) event across town at the PGP Paints Arena. Crikey had applied for credentials from both campaigns: Harris’ team eventually granted it, but Trump’s people — despite the fact they could do with the crowd numbers — denied us a door spot. (We’re in decent company, with reporters from The Washington Post, Axios and Vanity Fair also having been knocked back).
Given Trump’s rhetoric on matters of unfriendly media, I was both amused and terrified at the thought of a campaigner googling an Australian news outlet called Crikey and “Donald Trump” and finding, say, Bernard Keane’s assessment of the events of January 6.
Harris’ final campaign event was initially slated for Point State Park, before a late change shifted it here. In the fenced-off media scrum, I ask a local reporter whether that was down to potential clashes between supporters. “Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s traffic? But also, Mount Washington is right there, there are buildings all around,” he says, before then miming speaking into a radio. “I think if I’m a Secret Service guy, I’m looking at that set-up and saying, ‘No fucking way’.”
“I know!” a local AFP reporter chimes in. “When I heard where it was, I thought, ‘Haven’t they ever seen Jack Reacher?‘”
A local had told me the day before that for the first few days of hunting season — an event so momentous that when it comes around they give kids two days off school — Pittsburgh has the most heavily armed population anywhere in the world.
I ask him when hunting season starts.
“Oh, like … nowish?”
Stay tuned for updates to this story, as Lewis writes from the rally as it unfolds and Trump and Harris make their final pitches in Pittsburgh.
