Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally in Georgia on Thursday set a record for her campaign with reportedly more than 20,000 people in attendance, according to reports, while former President Donald Trump headlined rallies in Arizona and Nevada attended by smaller crowds the same day.
With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, the candidates on Thursday took their closing messages to some of the battleground states where thin margins are likely to decide the presidency.
The Harris campaign said 23,000 people packed into the James R. Hallford Stadium outside Atlanta—the largest crowd so far for the campaign, according to 11Alive reporter Faith Jessie.
The seated capacity of the stadium, which hosts high school football games and other sporting events, is listed at 15,600. However, photos and videos of Thursday’s rally—which featured former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen—showed many attendees also standing on the field.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump headlined a rally in Tempe, Arizona. Photos shared on social media showed that the event at the 5,000-seat Mullett Arena appeared to be at or near capacity.
Later, Trump headlined a rally hosted by Turning Point Action at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. The arena has a seating capacity of about 19,000 and was packed during Trump’s speech, according to The Nevada Independent.
Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns via email for comment.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, previously told Newsweek via email that Harris had to “play second fiddle” to Springsteen to bolster her crowd size.
“Kamala Harris had to drag out and play second fiddle to Bruce Springsteen to help bolster her crowd size,” Cheung wrote. “Meanwhile, President Trump is the star of the show and has commanded over 100,000 people at his rallies.”
There is no evidence to support repeated claims by Trump that his rallies have been attended by 100,000 or more supporters.
Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist at Harvard University, wrote in a piece in mid-August that data compiled by the university’s Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) found 28 of Trump’s rallies held during the first eight months of the year had an average crowd size of about 5,600. Ulfelder noted that the CCC logged 37 political rallies where Trump appeared during that period, but only had information on crowd size for 28 of them.
In 2023, the average crowd size of Trump’s rallies was 4,600 and in 2022, it was 5,200. Those figures were down from the average of nearly 15,000 across eight events in 2021.
Ulfelder wrote that Harris’ six campaign rallies held between late July, when she entered the presidential race after President Joe Biden dropped out, and mid-August had reported crowd sizes ranging from about 10,000 to about 15,000—and the CCC’s data calculated an average crowd size of about 13,400.
The CCC does not “regard Donald Trump as a credible reporter of the crowd sizes at his own rallies and therefore do not include his assertions about those numbers in our estimation process,” Ulfelder wrote. “Mr. Trump regularly and often grossly exaggerates the size of the crowds at events he headlines, so we restrict our view in those cases to estimates from the news media, law enforcement, and other reporters and observers.
“By contrast, estimates of rally crowd size provided by the Harris campaign so far have lined up with observations made by news outlets and other eyewitnesses, so we do include those in our records when they are reported, as we did with President Biden.”
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