As Democrats play to massive, raucous crowds, the Republican ticket is busy courting angry young men.

PHILADELPHIA — One is running a high-decibel campaign. The other is waging a high-incel campaign.

The Harris-Walz ticket debuted this week as “joyful warriors” before massive, raucous crowds. The Trump-Vance ticket focused its outreach on angry young men.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz were rallying newly optimistic Democrats in seven battleground states. In Wisconsin, people abandoned their cars in cornfields and walked to the event rather than wait in a traffic jam. Here in Philadelphia on Tuesday, people began lining up 12 hours before Harris was expected to speak despite intermittent rain and temperatures that reached 90 degrees.

From my seat in the press section on the arena floor, I measured the noise when Harris and Walz took the stage at 107 decibels. That’s approaching rock-concert levels, but it wasn’t coming from the sound system; it was entirely from the lungs of 12,000 Democrats.

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A low-energy Trump, by contrast, scheduled only one rally, in Montana. Instead, he and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, made a series of overtures to the “manosphere,” an online community of right-wing — and frequently misogynistic — men.

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At Mar-a-Lago, Trump sat down for an hour and a half with 23-year-old live-streamer Adin Ross, who has been banned from the streaming platform Twitch for “hateful conduct.” For the benefit of Ross’s hypermasculine young audience, the two men discussed their shared fondness for Ultimate Fighting and compared their “favorite fighters,” and Trump praised the “good heart” of antisemitic rapper Ye. The two also discussed their admiration for the Nelk Boys (“great people,” Trump said), other far-right influencers who, like Ross, have promoted self-described misogynist Andrew Tate, known for celebrating violence against women and who is facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania.

Vance, in turn, recorded a TikTok video and a podcast with the Nelk Boys to boost his candidacy, which has been struggling since comments surfaced in which he disparaged childless women as “cat ladies.” Vance followed Harris around the country this week, but his crowds were generally in the dozens or low hundreds. When the Harris and Vance planes were on a Wisconsin tarmac at the same time, Vance and a phalanx of bros approached Air Force Two in an unsuccessful effort to confront the vice president and, he told reporters, to “get a look at the plane because hopefully it’s going to be my plane.”

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Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) commented on the photo Vance posted of his entourage (there appeared to be nine White men in suits) on the tarmac. “Looks like @JDVance brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today,” she wrote.

Things weren’t much better for Vance in Philadelphia, where he drew all of 200 people and fielded a reporter’s question about cat ladies. “This cat lady loves you,” somebody in the audience called out.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Vance.

“Every type of white man that gets a hasty ‘swipe left’ on his dating profile was in attendance,” wrote Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, including “glowering loners staring at the two women under 40 like cats watching birds out a window.”

The Trump campaign appears to think angry men can send him back to the White House. Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt at the Republican National Convention. Trump went on professional wrestler Logan Paul’s podcast and joined UFC boss Dana White ringside. At an event on Aug. 3, Trump told the crowd how his wife hates it when he groans and moans onstage, pretending to be a girl struggling to lift a barbell. He praised a waitress he met while campaigning: “She grabbed me. She gave me a kiss. I said, I think I’m never going back home to the first lady.”

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Now, Trump allies are launching what the Wall Street Journal says will be a $20 million “Send the Vote” initiative aimed at young men. They’re hoping all of this will improve Trump’s standing among men under 30, a demographic that is about 5 percent of the electorate.

But it’s almost certain to hurt Trump’s standing further among a group that votes in very large numbers. Only 39 percent of women, and just 27 percent of college-educated women, view Trump favorably in the new NPR-PBS-Marist poll. Only 28 percent of women, and 24 percent of college-educated women, have a favorable view of Vance.

Many other women see the Trump-Vance buffet of abortion bans, cat-lady barbs, vulgar insults and ultimate fighting for what it is: gross.

Richard Reilly woke up at 3 a.m. at his home in Kingwood, N.J., so that he could arrive at the Harris event in Philadelphia by 5:30 a.m. for the 5:30 p.m. event. He has a long white beard and wore a red Santa hat, T-shirt and shorts to be sure he stood out.

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Would he have gone to the same trouble if President Joe Biden were still the nominee? “Probably not,” Reilly admitted. “I just felt that it was going downhill fast.”

A few places back in line was Vevette Cundari, from Yonkers, N.Y., who came down the night before so she could be in line at dawn. She, too, wouldn’t have made the trip for Biden. “I was not optimistic,” she said. “But now there’s been a resurgence of hope.”

Trump has always drawn large crowds from his cultlike following; they gather, as though for a reunion, to compare their Trump-themed apparel and homemade signs. But in Philly, I saw an energy among Democrats I hadn’t experienced since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Outside, they danced and chanted Harris’s name while a drum corps played. A guy waved his “Kamala is Future” sign, decorated with coconuts. The few anti-Israel protesters who demonstrated outside the event (I counted four of them) were largely ignored by the crowd.

Inside, dozens of Black women wore the pink and green of Harris’s college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. A guy in a turban danced behind the stage. They wore their recently acquired merch for the new nominee: “Yes We Kam,” “Swifties for Harris,” “Old White Men for Harris,” “Kamala Harris for the People.” From the upper level, attendees dangled a bedsheet declaring “Madam Vice President” with “Vice” crossed out. A young woman, DJ Diamond Kuts, pumped up the crowd with hip-hop music, followed by a Motown singalong. The campaign handed out rock-concert-style wristbands that flashed red, white and blue. Two hours before Harris appeared, each of the 10,000 seats in the arena was occupied, and the floor was full.

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And it was loud — even for the warm-up acts. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny showed me the double noise-canceling earpieces he was using. “For Biden rallies, this was not necessary,” he told me.

“I work........

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