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By Tom Norton
Fact Check Reporter
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Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz began their battleground tour this week, visiting Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada in preparation for the 2024 presidential election.
The Democratic nominees have attracted sizable audiences, with the Harris campaign reporting 14,000 attendees at Temple University in Philadelphia on Tuesday, between the venue and overflow areas. Former President Donald Trump rallied at the same venue on June 22 in front of a crowd of nearly 4,000 people, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian.
The Harris-Walz campaign has since mocked the Republican presidential nominee by sharing photos from the two rallies on Trump's social media network, Truth Social.
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One photo shows Harris and Walz on stage with the crowd filling the space. The second photo is blurrier and appears to show Trump at his rally with the top tier of seats empty, a visual that some noticed at the time.
Media reports about the Harris turnout have now seemed to have led Trump to comment about what he saw as double standards between the coverage of his campaign and that of his opponent.
"If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes 'crazy,' and talks about how 'big' it was - And she pays for her 'Crowd.'" Trump said on Truth Social on Wednesday. "When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn't talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!"
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Throughout the election season and before, Trump has boasted about the size of his rallies, often relying on substantiated evidence or guesswork.
Newsweek has debunked previous claims the former president made about attracting 60,000 people to a rally in Dayton, Ohio, in March 2024 and 50,000 people to an event in Pickens, South Carolina, in July 2023.
While unafraid to overestimate the size of his audience, Trump has not often claimed to attract as many as 100,000 people. The only rally that Trump said brought such a large audience was a May 2024 rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.
During an interview on influencer Logan Paul's podcast in June, the former president said, "I'll tell you when you look at the people when you look at the crowds. I did a rally in New Jersey. We had 107,000 people that you saw that last week..."
Contrary to his claims that the media never covered Trump rallies said to be that big, there was extensive coverage of Wildwood, including pre-rally reporting on the crowds of people who had slept along the town's boardwalk to get in and views of the crowd taken from the air.
Many of these reports remarked on the crowd size, with estimates bandied on the day of between 80,000 to 100,000.
However, as Newsweek reported, the 100,000 estimate seemed to be based on faulty information.
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Lisa Fagan, a spokesperson for the city of Wildwood, had initially told the Associated Press that she estimated a crowd of between 80,000 and 100,000 people attended the Trump rally on Saturday based on having seen "dozens" of other events held in the same space.
However, in a follow-up published by Insider NJ, Fagan provided a comment from Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano, Jr., who said the estimate was based on the town's population.
"As a tourist town, we speak in tourism numbers," Troiano said.
"When we see that volume of people attending a beach event, we know that 80,000+ people are in our town.
"We see a quarter of a million visitors every weekend in the summer on our 1.89-mile boardwalk, not to mention our five-mile island, so we know what that volume looks like.
"They were watching and listening from the beach and boardwalk, in bars and restaurants, at hotels and second homes. People even lined up along the streets parade-style. We defer to the Trump Campaign for the exact count on the beach."
While it's true that there may have been others outside watching Trump's speech, it was also reported that thousands of people left during his speech, so any amount of onlookers watching it would be set against the lines of people leaving the event.
News analysts and other journalists, including Fox News's Jesse Waters, brought the figure down to as low as 30,000 people.
"That's still a packed venue, and that's still, I would say, 29,500 more than Joe Biden's ever had," Watters said on Fox News's The Five.
Newsweek'sown analysis found that the total unobstructed capacity of the Wildwood rally site would have been somewhere between 75,000 to 77,000 people.
However, the site was obstructed, with Trump's stage, a runway, engineering and sound areas, crowd walkways, and other infrastructure that would have limited the capacity further. Counting for obstructions and the observed density of the crowd, the figure was likely to have been less than 60,000.
Newsweek was unable to find examples of other rallies where either Trump or analysts have observed an audience of 100,000 or more.
Newsweek reached out to a media representative for Donald Trump via email for comment.
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