The Harris town hall was billed as an event in which the two women would “warn about the risk of a second Trump term for America and lay out the vice president’s agenda for a New Way Forward for the American people.” What that meant in practice was that it was tightly focused on suburban women in Chester County, a suburb of Philadelphia that President Joe Biden won by 17 points but that might be closer this time around. Even though Cheney is best known for pursuing Trump through the House Jan. 6 committee and has based her anti-Trump activism largely on what she says is the threat Trump poses to American democracy, the event wasn’t really about that. Instead, it was centered on two “predetermined” questions from the audience that addressed concerns about family, healthcare, children, and abortion. 

The Trump event, on the other hand, was more inclusive, in its target audience, its selection of questioners — there were six — and its broader focus on moving past the economic difficulties facing Pennsylvania voters in the Biden-Harris years.

First the Harris event. It was held in Malvern, about 20 miles west of Philadelphia, at a performance space called People’s Light and Theatre Company. The room was pretty small. It wasn’t intended to draw a large audience. The Harris campaign set up a stage and a seating arrangement that looked like a studio audience for a talk show. It looked like the set of an Oprah program, minus Oprah Winfrey’s talent for entertaining.

The event was moderated by Sarah Longwell, a political operative who is executive director of a group called Defending Democracy Together, which in the last presidential election raised and spent more than $38 million to elect Biden. A significant part of that money came from a Democratic dark money group called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which the New York Times described as a “cryptically named entity that has served as a clearinghouse of undisclosed cash for the left.” In turn, Longwell’s communications firm, Longwell Partners, does a significant amount of business with Defending Democracy Together. The group has a number of “projects,” including Republicans for Ukraine, Republicans for Voting Rights, Republicans for the Rule of Law, and more, but its most public face is the Bulwark, which doubles as a Harris fan site and a virulently anti-Trump webzine.

Who came to the Harris event, which featured huge signs proclaiming “COUNTRY OVER PARTY”? The Harris campaign had lined up about 30 disaffected Republicans to sit behind Harris and Cheney on the stage. Otherwise, the audience appeared to be mostly Democrats, with a few Republicans mixed in. I approached a group of three women, all of whom turned out to be lifelong Democrats, and then another couple of women, who were also lifelong Democrats, and then three people, two women and a man, of whom the women were lifelong Democrats and the man was a former Republican. The man said he left the Republican Party over Trump but also because of pre-Trump changes in his life, including a growing religious consciousness, that made him view politics differently. When I approached a few other people, a campaign worker asked me to sit down.

As it turned out, while seated I had a conversation with two men, both Republicans, who had originally been asked to sit behind Harris onstage. They had all been in a holding room upstairs, but when the moment came to be seated with Harris and Cheney, there weren’t enough chairs onstage for everyone, so the campaign put them in the press area, as it happened, next to me.

One man was a professor at Temple University School of Medicine, and the other was an engineer. Just as an aside, the event seemed to represent the educational divide that has developed between the Democratic and Republican parties, with Trump attracting more and more voters without a four-year degree. It’s a guess, but the great majority of the small crowd at the Harris event had college degrees, certainly including the two men next to me.

Both had voted for Republican candidates through Mitt Romney in 2012. Both were classic GOP fiscal conservatives, concerned about unsustainable levels of deficit spending. The doctor said his grandparents had come to the United States from Ukraine, and he was particularly unhappy with current Republican positions on U.S. war assistance to Ukraine. Both were pro-choice and believed that was consistent with traditional GOP views of individual freedom.

The engineer was the less politically active of the two. His wife, a teacher, was also at the event and was sitting onstage. The doctor was quite politically conscious. (He was a reader of the Bulwark.) I asked them both whether, if former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley were the Republican candidate running against Harris, they would be at the Harris event. The engineer said he wasn’t sure. But the doctor, who voted for Haley in the Pennsylvania Republican primary, said he would not be at a Harris event if Haley were on the ballot. He would be supporting the Republican.

The bottom line on the two men was that they want their old Republican Party back — the party of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. They quite reasonably fear that that might never happen after the ascendance of Trump. 

The two audience questions, which were carefully managed by the Harris campaign, did not reflect the men’s concerns. Some light on how the questions were formulated was shed at the next Harris-Cheney event on the same day, this one in Michigan, where an audience member asked the moderator there, Maria Shriver, “Are we going to be able to ask a question?” Shriver said no. “You’re not, unfortunately,” she said. “We have some predetermined questions.”

The first of the two questions at the Pennsylvania event came from a young woman who described raising her 7-year-old son while taking care of her 72-year-old mother, who has dementia, and also holding a job. “My son is in second grade, my mother is in a nursing home, and I work full time,” the woman said, asking how Harris planned to make both child care and elder care more affordable while ensuring the healthcare workers involved were well paid. The woman was obviously going through a very difficult time, and Harris expressed a lot of sympathy. That was, in fact, nearly all that Harris did. Finally, she said her solution is to “restructure it so that Medicare covers the cost of in-home healthcare for your parent,” a proposal she rolled out earlier this month on The View. If actually enacted, it would be expensive almost beyond imagination. (After the event, the doctor told me that was the first thing he thought when he heard Harris say that.)

The other question was from a young woman, a student, who identified herself as a Zoomer — Harris was fulsome in her praise of the young generation — and who wanted to know about maternal mortality. “Specifically in the United States, maternal mortality is devastating,” the young woman said, “and I was wondering if you have a plan to combat the crisis.” Harris did not have a plan, but she spoke sympathetically for several minutes. Her discussion included a reminder that she strongly supports abortion.

For a moment, it seemed odd that one of only two questions would be about maternal mortality. Given all the other things in the United States that affect millions and millions more people, why that? In a subscription-only video debrief just after the event, Longwell, the moderator, explained that there were originally going to be three questions but that was cut to two because of time concerns. But however many questions there were, Harris had to be sure to discuss abortion. Harris “eventually got to reproductive rights, which if she hadn’t, I was going to have to do a little follow-up because it’s like we can’t get out of here without her talking about reproductive rights,” Longwell said. The idea of the gathering was to convince pro-life Republican women that it would be OK to vote for Harris, who is strongly pro-abortion. Cheney did her part by telling the audience, in the words of the New York Times, “that they could back Ms. Harris with a clean conscience” on the grounds that some state post-Dobbs laws have gone too far. Maternal mortality was a way to back into the abortion issue with a crowd that might be appalled by the no-limits abortion policies of, say, a Minnesota law signed by Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). In any event, abortion got covered, as it had to be.

And that was it for questions. “Questions from the town hall with Harris/Cheney in Malvern, PA this afternoon sound like they’re coming from typical partisan Democrats, not from cross-pressured Nikki Haley acolytes,” political analyst Josh Kraushaar posted. Indeed, they did. After that, Harris and Cheney said goodbye and headed to Michigan and Wisconsin.

The Trump event, 18 hours earlier in Lancaster, was moderated by Sage Steele, the former ESPN host who left the network amid a dispute over free speech concerns in 2022. Held at the Lancaster County Convention Center, it was much bigger than Harris’s event. The Trump campaign had set up chairs in half of the big room. Those were filled, and the other half was nearly filled with people who stood the entire time. So it’s safe to say that thousands were there, although it’s hard to say exactly how many.

Just as the Harris event featured big signs saying “COUNTRY OVER PARTY,” the Trump event had a big sign saying “BETTER OFF WITH TRUMP.” That pretty much conveyed the entire message of the campaign, in the sense that Trump’s voters believe they were better off when Trump was president from 2017 to 2021 and believe they will be better off if Trump is elected president again. 

The first person I talked to was a woman whose daughter has served 12 years in the U.S. Navy and is in a world “hot spot” that she would not identify. She said national security is her most important issue. She felt that Biden has mismanaged the military and, in particular, eliminated the incentives for officers like her daughter to stay in the Navy. She would like to see Trump as commander in chief again. She also said abortion is extremely important to her, from the pro-life side. She said she wanted abortion to be “rare” in the U.S., which was an echo of what President Bill Clinton used to say about it. Finally, she went to an Elon Musk town hall earlier and came away feeling that Musk is a brilliant man who should have some role in a Trump administration.

I then talked to a Lancaster man who said he had been a fan of Trump’s since The Art of the Deal. His most important issues are the size of the government, its corruption, and its inefficiency. He, too, brought up Musk, saying he was very happy to hear word that Musk might take some sort of role working on government efficiency should Trump be elected. 

Next was a woman whose top issue was national security. Then a woman whose top issue was the border. Then two sisters whose top issues were illegal immigration. They came from a group of eight siblings, only one of whom is a liberal, and they thought that might be because he moved to Boston. They were particular fans of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the vice presidential nominee, and said they believe Vance is the best choice Trump has made in the campaign. 

Then came a man whose top issue was inflation. And another man whose top issue was also inflation. He said he did not trust Trump in 2016 and voted instead for breakaway Republican Evan McMullin. (He forgot McMullin’s name, so I had to prompt him.) And then a group of friends, one of whom said she voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 because she hated Hillary Clinton and didn’t think Trump was serious. She said the unfounded Russian collusion charges aimed at Trump during his first years turned her into a Trump supporter.

I talked to more people at the Trump event because it was bigger and the organizers didn’t try to stop me. It was far looser than the Harris event. When Trump appeared with Steele, they went to a list of questioners who had been selected by the Trump campaign. Like the Harris event, the questioners were supporters of the candidate. This was not some old-fashioned town hall in which a crusty New Englander rises to give the candidate a hard time. With that in mind, here are the six questions from the Trump town hall:

1. A man named Bob identified himself as a retired union worker on a fixed income and wanted to know if Trump “will commit to helping protect Social Security and Medicare benefits.” Trump said he would and went on to discuss the ravages of inflation on fixed incomes, pledging to end taxes on Social Security benefits and taxes on overtime and tips for those still working, among other things.
   
2. A woman named Suki said she worked as a bartender/server and has four sons — one is headed to medical school, one is a professional boxer, and two are MMA fighters. “Wow,” Trump said. “That means she’s got those good fighting genes.” Suki, who said she has a tattoo of Trump on her leg, asked what Trump will do to “lower taxes for working Americans like myself.” Trump said the first thing to do is to make the economy stronger for everyone. He then moved on to discussing immigration before returning to his no-tax-on-tips proposal.
   
3. A man named Chris, who was Lancaster County Sheriff Christopher Leppler, asked Trump about his “plan for law and order” in a second term. Trump discussed protecting police officers as they do their jobs and freeing them to fight crime with fewer restrictions. He also went all over the map for a while, discussing cognitive abilities and immigration.
   
4. A woman named Olivia, who said she was a student and first-time voter, asked Trump for his plans to curb inflation and make housing more affordable. Trump talked about cutting through burdensome regulations that limit homebuilding. 
   
5. A man named Ty, who said he was a small-business owner, asked Trump about lowering the cost of energy. Trump discussed his drill-baby-drill-frack-baby-frack goal and spoke of a future in which electric cars coexist with conventional vehicles.
   
6. A woman named Sarah, who said she is a Marine veteran, asked Trump what he will do to improve veterans’ healthcare. Trump talked at some length about a program called VA Choice and a plan called the “right to try” untested medicines. 

And that was it. Between questions was banter between Trump and Steele, as well as Trump entertaining the audience. Trump has done 12 such town halls in the general election campaign, and anyone observing them versus his rallies would probably say the town halls are a better format for him. Although he will always say whatever is going through his mind, the format imposes a certain amount of discipline on him. It also keeps things shorter — the entire event was an hour and 13 minutes long, versus speeches that can run far past that time. (Harris’s much more tightly controlled event was 39 minutes long.) And Trump seems to interact well with moderators. He was sharp and performed well with Steele, as he had done with former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in an earlier town hall.

What to make of the two events? At first glance, the famous description of Democrats as the “mommy party” and Republicans as the “daddy party” comes to mind. But that is not quite right. While the Harris-Cheney event was certainly a mommy party affair, the Trump event was more diverse than the daddy party. The audience was about equally divided between women and men, and their concerns were more universal than a political consultant’s list of issues designed to appeal to centrist women in a key swing state. Focusing heavily on the economy, they also tracked with what voters nationwide say is their top issue. Trump’s was a bigger event, in every sense of the word. And it was all done with a more freewheeling feel than the Oprah-without-Oprah production in Malvern. 

Of course, two town halls do not tell the story of an entire campaign. But the Pennsylvania events, from the people who planned them and performed in them to the people who attended them, offer a pretty good picture of how Harris and Trump approach the task of running for president of the United States.