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 comparison, 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 has been under the spotlight in recent weeks, as Democrats have made a point of getting under his skin over his “weird obsession” with crowd size, as former President Barack Obama called it back in August.
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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 his often long and meandering speeches. Last month Trump defended his wordy 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 political reporter Greg Bluestein 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.
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.
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.
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.