RALEIGH, N.C. — At a pre-Election Day rally here Monday, former President Donald Trump was speaking at a venue that was about 70% full — a sight that has become increasingly familiar in the past week.
Trump has been holding his signature rallies since he first burst on the political scene in 2015, and in the nine years since then he has routinely drawn massive and enthusiastic crowds around the country, from the urban cores to the remote rural fields, where supporters have consistently shown up despite sometimes icy conditions or extreme heat.
The events were so packed that thousands wouldn't be able to get in, and they'd remain outside the venues to show their support.
That appears to have changed since Trump's controversial rally at Madison Square Garden in New York last week, which included racist jokes about Latinos and Black Americans from a comedian and numerous speakers who used inflammatory language to describe Trump's opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In Raleigh on Monday, at the first of his four rallies of the day, there were well over a thousand empty seats and no line to get in.
At his second rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, the arena appeared about half-full shortly before Trump was scheduled to begin his remarks. The timing of his address was later pushed back an hour.
Trump drew several thousand people at his third event at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, but even there, the upper deck was curtained off, and some seats were empty.
There have been similar scenes in the past week.
In Macon, Georgia, on Sunday, Trump didn't fill the venue he was speaking at, and people left throughout his address.
His events in Kingston, North Carolina, and Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday likewise drew only a couple of thousand people.
There were some areas where he has still drawn big crowds, including Milwaukee on Friday night at Fiserv Forum, which appeared full. Trump referred to that rally in his speech in Raleigh on Monday, estimating the crowd inside to be 28,000. The maximum capacity for the venue is 18,000. “We could have filled that arena three times, maybe four times,” he said.
On Saturday night, however, he failed to come anywhere close to filling the arena in Greensboro, North Carolina, his team booked — the whole upper deck was blocked off, and there were about three empty sections in the back of the lower bowl.
On Saturday morning in Gastonia — about a half-hour outside downtown Charlotte — he also attracted just a few thousand supporters.
At several of the rallies, the crowds began to thin out more as Trump was still speaking — which he has been defensive about in the past, including during his Sept. 10 debate with Harris. "People don't leave my rallies," he said. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Asked to comment on the smaller crowd sizes, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, “NBC News is pathetic and will write anything to discredit the massive, diverse political movement that President Trump has built.”
Trump has long been fixated on the size of his crowds and often grossly exaggerates the numbers. One of the most notable examples was when he had then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer furiously push back against accurate reports that fewer people attended his inauguration than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” Spicer declared.
More recently, Trump inaccurately claimed in August that his rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol had drew more attendees than Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the National Mall. "We actually had more people," he said.
The crowd for Trump's speech was estimated to be 53,000, according to the House committee investigating the riot. King's crowd was estimated to be around five times that number.
Harris' campaign said around 75,000 people attended her speech last week at the site of Trump's Jan. 6 speech. Trump claimed she'd been busing people to her speech "because they couldn't get anybody to show up for her."
He also repeatedly questioned the size of the crowds Harris has been drawing, accusing her of paying attendees and, in another instance, falsely claiming her campaign was using artificial intelligence to make her crowds look bigger than they were.
Harris has made a point of needling him about crowd size when she can. When pro-Trump protesters interrupted her at a rally in Wisconsin last month, she told them they should "go to the smaller rally down the street." Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has gotten in on the joke, too. Marveling at the large audience at a rally in Phoenix in August, he joked, "It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything."
If Trump has noticed his smaller audiences of late, he hasn't acknowledged it publicly.
"Every rally is full. You don't have any seats that are empty," Trump said in Greensboro on Saturday, despite the number of empty seats in the arena.
The smaller crowds with less enthusiastic participants so close to Election Day have surprised some Republicans, but it's unclear what the cause — and the significance — is and whether evidence of less momentum for his campaign.
Among the possible causes is that he has been in some of the areas frequently — he appeared at the Greensboro arena two weeks ago and spoke to a bigger crowd — and people who have already voted early might not feel the need to go to a rally.
Vaughn Hillyard and Jake Traylor reported from Raleigh and Dareh Gregorian from New York.
