For college football fans, they are temples of the sport: the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium and the Big House at the University of Michigan.
But to the presidential campaigns, they are this Saturday’s soundstages: ready-made stops for former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president, to try to prove their Everyman mettle to any battleground-state voters who might be in the stands or watching from afar.
“College football in the fall is the only place where you can find 100,000 potential voters in one location and you don’t have to pay for it,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist and Alabama football loyalist.
“To pay for the amount of coverage and publicity and a crowd like that would cost millions,” she added. “They’re getting it for free — and you get to see a really good football game.”
Mr. Trump is headed to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where the second-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, the gridiron pride of the neighboring swing state, will meet the No. 4 Alabama Crimson Tide. Mr. Walz is scheduled to visit Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, trawling for votes in one of the country’s biggest battlegrounds as the 12th-ranked Michigan Wolverines, last season’s national champions, host Minnesota’s Golden Gophers.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz cannot reliably assume they will be Saturday’s star attractions as the campaigns encroach on a sport that is a cultural mainstay and surpasses Washington for ancient feuds and partisan obsessives. But their visits have been designed to invite a crush of local news coverage and social media posts and, their allies hope, cameos during national broadcasts that will soak up viewers in Michigan and Georgia.
Less than a year after Alabama and Georgia met in the Southeastern Conference championship game, a duel that averaged about 17.5 million viewers, ABC will air their latest bout in prime time. And while it is virtually certain that the Michigan game will pull a smaller audience than the matchup in Tuscaloosa — the Wolverines already have one loss, and Minnesota is not exactly a ratings engine — Fox has the contest in its premier slot for the Big Ten Conference, which has schools in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But with Alabama, Georgia and Michigan routinely enticing viewers regardless of their athletic allegiances, any televised glimpses of Mr. Trump or Mr. Walz will be noticed in all of the battlegrounds and beyond.
“I don’t think it’s a particular campaign stop that wins you elections in isolation, but I do believe it has a compounding effect to reinforce that you’re an everyday person,” said Walt Maddox, the mayor of Tuscaloosa who was the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor in 2018.
“There’s going to be a couple of hundred thousand votes combined that are going to determine this election,” Mr. Maddox said. “Every time you appear authentic, it certainly helps you with that undecided voter.”
To that end, Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz have both leaned into football.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign have often referred to Mr. Walz as “Coach,” a nod to his stint as the defensive coordinator for a high school team that won a Minnesota state championship. More than a dozen of his former players appeared onstage at the Democratic National Convention in August. (Unfortunately for Mr. Walz, the Nebraska Cornhuskers he revered before he moved to Minnesota are not scheduled to play in any battleground states before Election Day. But Penn State will visit Wisconsin on Oct. 26 — an opportunity for either party to blend terrific tailgating with swing-state politicking.)
“The benefit is, up here in the Midwest and Big Ten country, we love our football, we love our football coaches,” said Phil Skaggs, a Democratic member of the Michigan House who was eager to note that Michigan leads Minnesota in the Little Brown Jug rivalry that goes back to 1892. “The Midwest, and Michigan specifically, gets to see an authentic, regular Midwesterner in his natural habitat.”
Mr. Trump played football as a boy but has no coaching pedigree. He did, however, own the New Jersey Generals before the first iteration of the United States Football League collapsed. Since he launched his first presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has made sports a recurring part of his public image, especially if a contest involves a state tied to his political fortunes.
Though he attended a World Series game in Atlanta in 2021, he has been a far greater fixture around college football.
“Our politics is tribal, and college football is tribal,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican consultant in Georgia. “This is a signal to Georgia voters: ‘I’m one of you. I like the same, simple Americana pleasures as you.’”
As president, Mr. Trump stopped by two college football championship games, including an Alabama-Georgia meeting in Atlanta. He traveled to Tuscaloosa in 2019 for an Alabama game against Louisiana State. Last year, as the Republican primaries neared, he went to rivalry showdowns in Iowa and South Carolina.
And in 2020, as the pandemic threatened to derail the football season, Mr. Trump called the Big Ten commissioner to offer federal assistance with virus testing. The league balked, wary that it would become caught up in election-year politics. That decision made no difference: After the league played, without the resources the White House offered, Mr. Trump claimed during a debate that he had “brought back Big Ten football.”
Ms. Harris has not made football nearly as much a part of her brand as Mr. Walz, but her campaign announced Saturday that it was planning a significant presence at homecoming events at historically Black colleges and universities in swing states.
Ms. Harris herself visited Atlanta last year for a game that pitted her alma mater, Howard, against Florida A&M. More recently, with North Carolina in play, Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, appeared when East Carolina played Appalachian State.
Jeers are a known risk when any politician appears at a sporting event. Ms. Horn, though, argued that the biggest hazard for Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz might be the threat of seeming to favor one team. Tie color, she said, might matter. So could the timing of a smile or a thumbs-up.
“If Alabama beats Georgia, do you act happy about it?” Ms. Horn said. “In the South this weekend, there is a bigger divisive factor than Democrats versus Republicans: It’s Alabama versus Georgia, and you don’t want to take sides.”
Mr. Walz, who was planning his trip to Ann Arbor before Ms. Harris picked him in August, might have the trickier choice to make given his new gig: picking from contrived neutrality; a flagship school of a state he and Ms. Harris very much need to win; or the biggest university in the state where he is governor.
In Tuscaloosa, a short drive from a state that Mr. Trump is desperate to carry, Mr. Maddox conceded that the former president could probably afford to risk the ire of Alabama stalwarts.
“I think Alabama would still vote for Donald Trump even if he wore a Georgia sweater,” the Democratic mayor chuckled. “And, knowing how close this election is, he might want to appear in the Georgia section.”
The post The Fans Want to Watch Football. Trump and Walz Will Be There, Too. appeared first on New York Times.
