Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally in Georgia sets a record for her campaign
According to 11Alive reporter Faith Jessie, the Harris campaign said that 23,000 people crowded into James R. Hallford Stadium outside of Atlanta, the biggest throng the campaign has seen to far.
The stadium, which holds high school football games and other athletic events, has a 15,600 seat capacity. But images and videos from Thursday’s protest, which included Bruce Springsteen and former President Barack Obama, also showed a large number of people standing on the field.
Trump was the main attraction at a rally in Tempe, Arizona, earlier on Thursday. The gathering at the 5,000-seat Mullett Arena seemed to be at or close to full, according to social media photos.
Later, at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Trump was the main attraction at a rally organized by Turning Point Action. The Nevada Independent reports that the arena, which can accommodate around 19,000 people, was crowded during Trump’s address.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said that Harris needed to “play second fiddle” to Springsteen in order to increase the size of her audience.
“Kamala Harris had to drag out and play second fiddle to Bruce Springsteen to help bolster her crowd size,” Cheung said. “Meanwhile, President Trump is the star of the show and has commanded over 100,000 people at his rallies.”
Trump has often claimed that 100,000 or more people had attended his rallies, but there is no proof to back up this claim.
In a paper published in mid-August, Harvard University political scientist Jay Ulfelder said that statistics gathered by the university’s Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) indicated that the average attendance at 28 of Trump’s rallies over the first eight months of the year was around 5,600. Ulfelder pointed out that the CCC recorded 37 Trump appearances at political rallies during that time, but only 28 of those events included audience size data.
Trump rallies drew an average of 4,600 people in 2023 and 5,200 in 2022. Compared to the average of about 15,000 across eight events in 2021, such numbers were lower.
Ulfelder noted that crowd sizes at Harris’ six campaign rallies between late July, when she entered the race after President Joe Biden withdrew, and mid-August ranged from roughly 10,000 to 15,000, with the CCC’s data indicating an average of roughly 13,400.
The CCC doesn’t “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 said. “We limit our perspective in such situations to estimates from the mainstream media, law enforcement, and other reporters and observers since Mr. Trump often and egregiously exaggerates the size of the crowds at events he highlights.
“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.”
