Going to a national campaign rally is a lot like going to a block party: You will hear loud and strange noises, there will be lot of weird looking people and you know at some point the police are going to show up.

All you hope for is that you can leave before a snaking line of armed officers file through the crowd, shining piercing light in your eyes and demanding you back away from them. At least that was the case at presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday.

The police presence grew as the size of the crowd grew. Secret Service agents locked down the Farm Show Complex and the rodeo arena inside. Meanwhile, police monitored a thick line of Trump supporters, trailing halfway down the building and around the side of it. By the end of the event, police swarmed out of a bus parked in front of a line of squad cars that backed up to Cameron Street.

When hundreds of people spilled out of the dirt-floored arena, something had changed. The friendly faces that waited patiently in line during the day suddenly became twisted in the night. Trump had energized the crowd and there was no telling how that energy would be released.

It did not bode well when their first sight after leaving the complex was a coalition of anti-Trump and pro-Bernie Sanders supporters. About 150 of them waited across a bus drop-off lane with vulgar signs and even demeaning chants. Trump supporters responded with their own obscenities and insults, and the police were the only thing stopping a full-blown riot from breaking out.

A standoff ensued between hundreds of people. It became clear the entire event was as much for individuals to make a statement as it was for Trump.

His speech started early and was interrupted frequently. The attention was as much on banishing protestors as it was listening to Trump’s message. The crowd greeted his calls to build the wall on Mexico ‘s border and to end unfair trade deals with China with chants of “USA.” But his real message was about winning. It was about the inevitability of him taking hold of the country, and he would not back down to critics who said he is not presidential material.

The people who love Trump, and hate him, made their feelings clear. It was a stark contrast to the atmosphere at Sen. Bernie Sanders’ rally at Gettysburg College on Friday. Sanders supporters were like helium-filled balloons waiting to be popped and let loose to fly across the room. The energy was, in some ways, even greater than at the Trump rally.

Every time a campaign worker walked out of the curtain from backstage with rally signs, the crowd exploded with as much noise as when Sanders himself came out. His vast young crowd tapped into every storehouse of adrenaline they had. Their fanaticism and obsession with Sanders compared to children in a candy shop.

The crux of the difference between Sanders and Trump was not entirely their issues — it was their delivery. Sanders openly took the moral high ground to convince people his cause was righteous, while Trump spoke with such certainty that his moral integrity was assumed as obvious.

Sanders stuck to preaching his campaign issues so strictly, you wondered how a dinner conversation went in his Vermont home.

“The potato inequality on my plate compared to yours is immoral and outrageous,” you can imagine him growling at his wife, Jane. “Almost all of the new potatoes being cooked are going directly to the top 1 percent of this household.”

Unlike Trump, Sanders was not interrupted by protestors. (Not that one could even pull the senator off his message with fireworks and an air horn.) Even the people who did not support Sanders were still happy to be there. A supporter of presidential candidate Gary Johnson and a Trump follower sat with their pro-Sanders friends, waiting with anticipation like everyone else to hear the democratic-socialist speak.

Trump and Sanders barnstormed the region, proving to Pennsylvanians what they have proven across the country — they are not like anyone else, and do not plan to change that.

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