Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz began their battlefield excursion this week, visiting Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada in preparation for the 2024 presidential election.
Democratic challengers have drawn huge crowds, with Harris’ rally reporting 14,000 attendees Tuesday at Temple University in Philadelphia, between the venue and overflow areas. Former President Donald Trump rallied at the same location on June 22 before a crowd of about 4,000 people, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Since then, the Harris-Walz crusader has mocked the Republican presidential nominee by sharing photographs of both rallies on Trump’s social network, Truth Social.
A photo shows Harris and Walz at the level of the crowd filling the space. The photo of the moment is blurrier and appears to show Trump at his rally with the most sensible seats empty, an image that some saw at the time.
Media reports about Harris’ involvement now appear to have led Trump to comment on what he sees as a one-two punch between the politics of his crusade and that of his opponent.
“If Kamala brings another 1,000 people to a rally, the press goes ‘crazy’ and communicates how big the rally is, and they pay for their ‘crowd,'” Trump said Wednesday on Truth Social. “When I organize a demonstration and 100,000 other people attend, the fake news does not communicate anything about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION THE SIZE OF THE CROWD. Fake news is the enemy of others!”
Throughout the election season and before, Trump has boasted about the scale of his rallies, depending on evidence or educated guesses.
Newsweek refuted the former president’s previous claims that he drew 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 he is not afraid to overestimate the length of his hearing, Trump has not claimed to have drawn as many as 100,000 people. The only rally Trump said drew such a giant crowd was the 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’re in the crowd, when you’re in the crowd. We saw 107,000 personas. la last week. . . “
Contrary to his claims that the media never covered Trump’s rallies deemed so important, Wildwood covered extensively, adding pre-rally reports about crowds of other people who had slept along the city’s waterfront to get in and crowd perspectives taken from the air.
Many of those reports pointed to the size of the crowd, with estimates for the day between 80,000 and 100,000 people.
However, as Newsweek reported, the estimate of 100,000 appears to be due to misinformation.
Lisa Fagan, a spokeswoman for the city of Wildwood, first told The Associated Press that she estimated 80,000 to 100,000 more people attended Trump’s rally on Saturday, after seeing “dozens” of other events held in the same space.
However, in a follow-up published via Insider NJ, Fagan provided comment from Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano, Jr. , who said the estimate was based on the city’s population.
“As a tourist city, we communicate tourism numbers,” Troiano said.
“When we see so many people attending an event on the beach, we know that there are more than 80,000 people in our city.
“We see a quarter of a million visitors every summer weekend on our 1. 89-mile boardwalk, not to mention our five-mile island, so we know what that volume looks like.
“They saw and heard from the beach and the boardwalk, in bars and restaurants, in hotels and second-hand houses. People even lined up in the streets as if it were a parade. We refer to Trump’s crusade for the count in the beach. “
While it is true that there would possibly be other people outside watching Trump’s speech, it was also reported that thousands of other people left his speech, so the number of viewers watching it would be compared to the rows of other people coming out. the event.
News analysts and journalists, adding Fox News’ Jesse Waters, lowered that number to 30,000.
“There’s still a full room, and there’s still, I would say, 29,500 more than Joe Biden ever had,” Watters said on Fox News’ The Five.
Newsweek’s investigation found that the total unhindered capacity of the Wildwood rally would have been between 75,000 and 77,000 people.
However, the venue obstructed, along with Trump’s stage, a runway, engineering and sound areas, crowd aisles and other infrastructure that would have limited extra capacity. Taking into account the obstructions and the observed crowd density, this figure is probably less than 60,000.
Newsweek may not find examples of other demonstrations where Trump or analysts observed an attendance of 100,000 people or more.
Newsweek has emailed a media representative for Trump for comment.
© 2024 DIGITAL NEWS LLC