Charles Bethea writes in the New Yorker about the rally held at a train depot in Montgomery, Alabama for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, featuring Sarah Palin and Sebastian Gorka, following a Moore vs Strange Lincoln-Douglas style debate he calls “cartoonish”:

Early Thursday evening, after a cartoonish debate between Roy Moore and Luther Strange, the Alabama politicians who are competing for Jeff Sessions’s old Senate seat, around five hundred people were gathered outside the train depot in Montgomery to rally in support of Moore. Heading into the event, Moore, a former Alabama State Supreme Court chief justice who twice was removed from office, was leading the incumbent, Luther Strange, by at least eight points in the polls. With the notable exception of President Trump, who endorsed Strange, the Republican Party’s anti-establishment wing has rallied behind Moore. Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump adviser, would be stumping at the depot on Moore’s behalf, as would Sarah Palin. At least one flyer touted the evening as a “Sarah Palin Rally with Judge Roy Moore.” An Asian woman, one of perhaps a dozen minorities in attendance, held a sign aloft that read “mr. president and mr. vice president, i love you but you are wrong!

Debbie Dooley, a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party, drove a hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to attend the rally. As members of the Bikers for Trump group flexed their muscles for TV cameras, young children waved American flags, and churchgoers clutched copies of Palin’s books, hoping to get them autographed, Dooley worked the crowd urgently. By 7 p.m. it was still nearly ninety degrees outside, but Dooley—e-mailing, texting, and talking in equal measure—was unfazed. She had come to explain the importance of next Tuesday’s G.O.P. runoff, and of voting for Moore, to anyone still sitting on the fence.

Read the rest of the story here.