Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump held dueling rallies in North Carolina on Wednesday, but the Democratic nominee’s venue had a significantly larger space for attendees.
Harris hosted a rally in Raleigh at the Coastal Credit Union Music Park, which has a 20,000-person capacity, according to the Walnut Creek Amphitheatre website. Trump, on the other hand, spoke 55 miles away at the Rocky Mount Event Center, which has 4,000 seats according to its website. The final tallies on how many people actually showed up have not been released yet.
Newsweek reached out to both campaigns for their attendance numbers at Wednesday’s rallies.
Kamala Harris speaks at a rally on October 30, 2024, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Donald Trump speaks at a rally on the same day in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
AP Photo/Allison Joyce/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
Harris’ five-times-larger venue follows her increasingly record-breaking rally sizes, with most recently as many as 75,000 people attending her event at the Washington, D.C. Ellipse on Tuesday. Just a few days prior, on Friday, Harris spoke in Houston, Texas, at the Shell Energy Stadium in front of 30,000 people. Her event in Georgia on Thursday had then set the record with reportedly more than 20,000 people in attendance.
Crowd sizes have been an ongoing concern throughout the election cycle for the Trump campaign—and a joke for those within the Harris campaign.
Trump has made a series of posts on Truth Social regarding crowd sizes, complaining that Kamala Harris and the “Fake News” exaggerate her crowds while underreporting the numbers at his own rallies.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was—And she pays for her ‘Crowd,'” he wrote on August 8. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
Trump had also claimed in August that his opponent used artificial intelligence to portray a nonexistent crowd at one of her events. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote in an August 11 Truth Social post. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
During his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, former President Barack Obama spoke about Donald Trump‘s “obsession with crowd sizes.”
“[Trump] has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances,” Obama said.
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“It has been getting worse now that he is afraid of losing to Kamala. The childish nicknames, and crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” he said, drawing his hands close together to indicate something small. The DNC crowd laughed and then continued into a roar of approval.
Harris’ campaign, which has started to announce crowd sizes more publicly since Trump’s complaints, released an ad highlighting Obama’s joke and then showing empty seats against the sound of crickets.
While Trump and his campaign have argued it, attendees have been seen leaving his campaign at multiple rallies, including one exodus that Newsweek reporters caught on film.
Harris herself made a joke about crowd sizes when she was interrupted by protesters at a Wisconsin rally on October 17.
“I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street,” Harris said.
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