Both presidential campaigns agree that seven swing states are likely to determine the outcome of this year’s election. California, which has not voted for a Republican in a presidential race since 1988, is not one of them.
But that did not prevent former President Donald J. Trump from heading there anyway on Saturday evening to hold a rally in Coachella, which is better known for its annual music festival with headliners like Lana Del Rey and Bad Bunny than it is for being a stop on a presidential campaign trail.
It was an unusual choice 24 days before the election. In 2020, Mr. Trump lost the state by more than five million votes to President Biden. Four years earlier, Mr. Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton, who got more than 60 percent of the vote. The last Republican to win the state was George H.W. Bush.
Although Mr. Trump is not expected to be competitive in California, the rally showed that he could turn out a crowd. Throngs of people at Calhoun Ranch, where it was held, braved the desert sun and temperatures that hovered near 100 degrees, with several attendees requiring medical attention for heat-related illnesses.
“I want to give a special hello to Coachella,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, soon acknowledging how hot the desert sun was and putting on a red Make America Great Again cap.
It was Mr. Trump’s second foray into a blue state in two days. On Friday, he visited Aurora, Colo., where he made a series of nativist attacks and promoted falsehoods about crimes committed by migrants in a state where Ms. Harris is safely ahead in polls. And word surfaced this week that Mr. Trump was planning to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York City, on Oct. 27. That would be his third major campaign event in New York, a state that was once his home but is also solidly blue. He has already held rallies on Long Island and in the South Bronx this election cycle.
But the choice of California was audacious even by Mr. Trump’s standards. Speakers taunted Vice President Kamala Harris, who represented California in the Senate and served as its attorney general, for the problems California has faced. At the rally on Saturday evening, Mr. Trump called it a “paradise lost.”
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump regularly jeers at California’s Democratic standard-bearers with schoolyard insults, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Representative Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial of the former president and is now running for Senate.
Mr. Schiff’s opponent, Steve Garvey, a perennial baseball All-Star for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres in the 1970s and 1980s, did not attend Mr. Trump’s rally, a campaign spokesman said.
The spokesman did not address remarks made by Mr. Trump last month saying that Mr. Garvey was making a “big mistake” by not embracing the Make America Great Again movement.
The Desert Sun reported that Mr. Garvey would be out of the state at a symposium in Philadelphia for women in sports media.
Both Mr. Trump and his critics tried to use the iconography of his Coachella rally to energize voters. The former president posted a photo on social media of himself with palm trees and snow-peaked mountains that are synonymous with the desert oasis to show he was headlining Coachella. And the Lincoln Project, a prominent anti-Trump group, created its own “Trumpchella” social media post, resembling a music festival poster but with a lineup that included “Trump Federal Power Seizure” and “Trump Loyalists in All Federal Positions.”
Mr. Trump is no stranger to Coachella. His name once graced a casino just five miles from the site of Saturday’s rally as a part of a short-lived business partnership with a Native American tribe, which eventually bought him out while his company was going through bankruptcy.
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