As Donald Trump makes his last pitch to voters on the eve of Election Day, the GOP presidential nominee’s supporters are failing to show up en masse at his campaign events.
The former president, who has spent months boasting about his crowd sizes and MAGA enthusiasm, struggled to pack the seats of his final rallies, despite claiming otherwise.
Trump’s multi-stop trip to North Carolina began with rows of empty seats at his rally at the Dorton Arena in Raleigh. The former president, taking the stage an hour behind schedule, spoke to a couple thousand of his supporters inside after failing to pack the stadium.
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The day prior, video shows supporters leaving a Kinston, North Carolina event five minutes into the Republican presidential candidate’s speech (to which he was two hours late).
On Saturday, the Trump campaign resorted to curtaining off the upper bowl of an arena in Greensboro, North Carolina, (a venue that Kamala Harris was able to fill), and left seats in the lower bowl vacant.
The former president told his Greensboro crowd, “We have had the biggest rallies in the history of any country, and every rally is full. You do not have any seats that are empty. You did not have anything.” But, immediately after his comment, a cameraman for NTD.com panned the stadium, zooming in on empty sections and supporters leaving early.
The former president’s crowd issues were apparent outside of North Carolina as well with entire sections of Fiserv Forum, his final stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Friday, remaining empty on both sides of the stage. His Sunday appearance in Georgia, also failed to pack seats, with attendees leaving during Trump’s remarks despite his claim that “Nobody leaves early.”
While crowd sizes are not integral signs of political or electoral support, especially in the final days of a race, Trump has repeatedly invoked his audience size as an indication of his robust fandom. And, throughout the tail end of his campaign, the former president has falsely claimed that that not only is he selling out venues, but that thousands of his fans are waiting outside when they are not.
Polling numbers released on the eve of Election Day, however, signal potential trouble for the former president. According to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll, Harris has the support of 51 percent of likely voters compared to to Trump’s 47 percent, a lead that falls outside the survey’s 3.5-point margin of error. The last-minute results show the vice president gaining traction among men, a demographic she struggled to court, reportedly closing the gender gap in half.
Regardless of polling, Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion said, “It has been and remains a close election.”
