JD Vance was met with multiple empty seats at a campaign event in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania over the weekend.
Donald Trump’s running mate spoke at JWF Industries, a factory for military vehicles in the steel industry city of Johnstown, on Saturday.
Photos from The Associated Press show rows of empty seats on one side of the venue, while Vance is on stage speaking.
The audience filled around half the seats in the venue, according to The New York Times journalist Chris Cameron, who was reporting from Johnstown.
JD Vance speaks at a campaign event at JWF Industries, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on October 12. Rows of empty seats were seen at Vance’s event that day.
AP
Conversely, Vance was met with a crowd of more than 2,000 people later that same day, when he held a town hall in an airport hangar in Reading, the local newspaper Reading Eagle reported.
Vance discussed American manufacturing, issues facing small businesses and how to make homes more affordable.
Although the crowd at JWF Industries was seemingly not big enough to fill out the whole venue, Vance was met with a lot of support there, in the county of Cambria County, which Trump won by 38 points in 2020.
When reporters questioned the Ohio senator about the 2020 election, on whether Trump lost it or it was “rigged,” some supporters stood up on their chairs to boo the media, The NYT reported.
Newsweek has contacted Vance’s team, via email outside of normal working hours, for comment.
JD Vance speaks as moderator Sage Steele listens during a campaign Town Hall, in Reading, Pennysylvania, on October 12. Vance addressed a town hall after holding an event with empty seats beforehand.
AP
This year’s election has seen a constant battle for optics over rally crowd sizes between Trump and his Democratic counterpart Kamala Harris.
During their one and only presidential debate on September 10, hosted by ABC News, Harris took aim at Trump’s crowd sizes when she said: “I’m actually going to do something very unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump‘s rallies, because it’s really interesting to watch.
“You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer, and what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Trump responded: “She said people start leaving, people don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there, and then showing them in a different light. So she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Last week, both candidates had similarly-sized crowds in Colorado and Arizona.
Trump appeared in front of a packed crowd at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday and Harris did the same at the Rawhide Event Center in Chandler, Arizona, on Thursday.
Both venues list capacities of up to 10,000. The Trump campaign said that free tickets for the event in the Denver suburb were sold out, according to The Denver Post, although it was unclear how many tickets were available. Organizers of the Phoenix-area event said that around 7,000 Harris supporters attended, according to The Arizona Republic.
