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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Former President Donald Trump was confronted with multiple empty seats at a campaign event in Atlanta on Monday, as the two presidential candidates focus their efforts on the country's key swing states with just over a week to go before the election.
By contrast, Kamala Harris' campaign said that as many as 21,000 people were present at a campaign event in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the same day, during which the Democratic candidate and her running mate Tim Walz tried to appeal to the younger generation of voters.
Trump's ability to attract and retain the attention of large crowds during his rallies—which he has said is one of the hallmarks of his success as a campaigner—has been under the spotlight in recent weeks. Democrats have made a point of getting under his skin over what former President Barack Obama described in August as Trump's "weird obsession" with crowd size.
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The Harris team has also pushed on the issue to shift focus onto Trump's age and his fitness to serve, accusing him of driving his supporters away with long and meandering speeches. Last month Trump defended his speeches, saying he does "the weave," talking about "nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together."
While Trump has claimed that he regularly attracts larger crowds than Harris, recent photographic and video evidence from his events have cast doubt on this. A video of the Atlanta rally shared on X, formerly Twitter, by reporter Greg Bluestein, who covers Georgia politics and is an MSNBC and NBC News contributor, shows a partially empty venue after half an hour of the Republican candidate's speech.
The McCamish Pavilion, the indoor area inside the Georgia Institute of Technology campus where the campaign event was held, can host as many as 8,600 people, but Bluestein's video shows hundreds of empty seats—suggesting that the total size of the crowd was somewhere under 8,000. Newsweek contacted the Trump campaign for comment on the crowd size in Atlanta on Tuesday early morning, outside of standard working hours.
However, as the McCamish Pavilion has a capacity of 8,600, the Trump event could not have matched the potential maximum crowd size of the Harris event.
According to polling aggregator 538, Trump is narrowly leading Harris in Georgia, on 48.6 percent to her 47.2 percent—making it one of the few battleground states where either candidate is ahead by more than 1 point. President Joe Biden, with Harris as his running mate, won Georgia by only 11,779 votes in 2020.
A recent study by Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation found that Trump often exaggerates the number of supporters at his campaign events, while the numbers shared by Harris' teams tend to be confirmed by reports from news outlets and eyewitnesses.
Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist, wrote that 28 of Trump's rallies held during the first eight months of the year had an average crowd size of about 5,600. However, his rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday, with a capacity of 19,500, was sold out. Harris' six campaign rallies held between late July, when she entered the presidential race after Biden dropped out, and mid-August had an average crowd size of about 13,400, Ulfelder said.
Photos of Harris and Walz's event in Michigan shared on social media show a huge crowd cheering and greeting the two in the traditionally Democratic stronghold. Harris is narrowly leading Trump in Michigan, according to 538, on 48 percent to his 47.2 percent.
That doesn't mean that the Trump supporters who do show up at his rallies are any less enthusiastic than those attending Harris' events. Atlanta News First reported on Monday that Trump supporters were lining up outside the McCamish Pavilion in the early hours of Monday morning, wanting to be "a part of history," as one told the news station.
When Trump asked the crowd how many people in the audience had already cast their vote, half of those in the venue raised their hands. Some 46 million Americans have already cast their vote ahead of Election Day, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab. In Georgia, up to 70 percent of ballots are expected to come from in-person early voting, as reported by Reuters.
Updated, 10/29/24, 3:15 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
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