Tim Walz took a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook at his Friday night rally with Vice President Kamala Harris: He bragged about the size of their crowds.
In Philadelphia, the new Democratic ticket packed a 10,000-person arena. A similar crowd showed up in Eau Claire, Wis. “On Wednesday, the largest crowd of the campaign showed up in Detroit, Michigan,” Walz boasted.
Then the vice-presidential pick beamed out at the audience in suburban Phoenix — more than 15,000 people, Democrats said — and delivered the punchline with a big grin.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Walz said.
For years Trump, the GOP nominee for president, has been the one boasting about how many people he could pack into a venue. Now Democrats are eager to play the crowd game, too. With enthusiasm surging for their new presidential ticket, they have spent the week needling Trump on a topic he famously obsesses over.
Trump has pushed back with tallies of his own — often inflated.
“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds,” Trump said at a news conference this week. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”
He bragged, implausibly, that his Washington speech on Jan. 6, 2021 — just before a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol — drew more people than the famous “I Have a Dream” speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Trump returned to the subject Friday night at his rally in Bozeman, Mont., hours after Walz made his jabs. He mocked the recent attention on Harris: “They said, ‘Oh, she had a big crowd, oh what a crowd’ — the press is talking about the crowd.”
He pointed to his own massive rallies. What about the tens of thousands of people that came to a rally in New Jersey? What about his event last year in Pickens, S. C.? (Trump claimed 82,000 people; local officials pegged a 2023 rally at about 50,000). What about the “Front Row Joes” who show up at every event?
“We have so many people,” Trump said.
A Trump campaign spokeswoman also dismissed Democrats’ newfound interest in large audiences. “Isn’t it funny how the Democrats and Fake News want to talk about crowd sizes now after they have ignored and downplayed the unprecedented and massive crowds that President Trump has been pulling for eight years,” said spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who suggested that Harris’s use of celebrity performances at some rallies amounts to bribery.
Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump has been “rage-Truthing about our grassroots enthusiasm and melting down publicly, both online and in front of cameras” while Harris and Walz hit battleground states.
“Donald is welcome to keep doing his thing — our campaign will be putting in the work it will take to win this election,” Chitika said.
Trump has always treated crowd size as an all-important metric. His big 2016 rallies were an early sign of the loyal base that propelled him to the White House and a point of contrast with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump began his presidency with the false claim that more than 1 million people showed up for his inauguration; his then-press secretary Sean Spicer dug in to declare, incorrectly, that Trump drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
Facing Joe Biden in 2020 and again in 2024, Trump loved to mock Biden for holding smaller events and his campaign delighted in sharing pictures of extra seats at Democratic gatherings. At rallies, Trump often accused the media of ignoring his crowd sizes and demanded that the cameras pan around. His supporters sometimes pointed to the scale of Trump’s rallies to support their false claims that Trump actually won the 2020 election.
Facing pressure this summer to drop out after a devastating debate performance in June, Biden began to point to crowd size: “How many people draw crowds like I did today?” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
Stephanopoulos responded: “I don’t think you want to play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw big crowds.”
Now — with Biden out of the race and Harris finding momentum — Democrats are leaning into the subject, jabbing at Trump and reveling in comparisons to the enthusiasm once generated by Barack Obama.
On social media, Harris’s campaign was eager to compare their big Friday night rally in Glendale, Ariz. to a recent Trump event at a smaller venue in Phoenix. The campaign also jabbed at Trump’s Friday event in Bozeman. “Meanwhile at @realdonaldtrump’s rally …,” Harris’s campaign wrote on X over a video clip showing empty Trump seats — ignoring the fact that Trump was set to speak later than Harris and that many people were still filtering in. The roughly 8,500-person venue in Montana was ultimately packed and rowdy.
Leavitt, the Trump spokeswoman, jabbed back at the Harris team Saturday by noting that black drapes covered some seating at the arena in Arizona.
In interviews, Trump supporters in Bozeman brushed off the show of force by Harris this week. Warren Armstrong, 73, blamed “the fake news” when asked about Harris’s crowds and said, “They make things look great.”
Onstage, Trump vented at the media, too. He claimed media outlets ignored the size of his New Jersey crowd — though many did cover it. “They don’t talk about it because they’re fake,” Trump said.
In Arizona, Julie Jonuska, 63, a yoga therapist from Scottsdale, said Harris “has created more excitement, for sure,” gesturing around the Desert Diamond Arena where thousands of supporters still lingered while Harris and Walz worked the rope line Friday.
Jonuska — who wore a button of Harris’s face reading “say it to my face,” the line Harris deployed at her Atlanta rally daring Trump to debate her — said she believes Harris can reach an audience that Biden could not, saying that “now Trump’s the old man.”
“The crowd is your everyday normal people,” she said. “It’s about the people, and not about one person, like Trump is the party of Trump.”
Knowles reported from Bozeman, Mont. Dylan Wells in Glendale, Ariz., contributed to this report.