Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris held similarly-sized campaign rallies this week in Colorado and Arizona.
Trump, this year’s Republican nominee for president, appeared in front of a packed crowd at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday. Harris, the Democratic nominee, greeted supporters 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.
Images shared to social media of each rally showed what appeared to be similar crowd sizes. Spectrum News DC reporter Taylor Popielarz remarked that the Trump crowd was “one of the largest I’ve seen in recent months” while sharing images and video of the event on Friday to X, formerly Twitter.
“Listen to this crowd in Aurora, CO!!!” Trump campaign staffer Margo Martin wrote on X while sharing a video of the crowd greeting the former president. “They want TRUMP back!”
Meanwhile, Bianca Buono, a reporter for Arizona NBC affiliate KPNX, shared videos of the Harris rally on Thursday that showed what looked like an equally enthusiastic welcome for the vice president.
Harris supporters attended the event despite a sweltering 105-degree heat wave. Washington Post reporter Dylan Wells noted on X that there were “lots of calls for medics” due to attendees passing out, while one rallygoer was spotted “throwing up near the press pen.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Trump and Harris campaigns via email on Friday evening.
If the Trump event was fully at capacity, and the Harris rally attendance figures are accurate, around 3,000 more people may have attended the former president’s rally.
However, Trump and his campaign frequently boast about rally crowd sizes and the ex-president has previously artificially inflated attendance numbers, sometimes even beyond the capacity of venues.
Well-attended Harris campaign rallies seemingly prompted the former president to make false claims about the Democratic ticket using artificial intelligence to fake large crowd sizes in August.
Harris continued campaigning on Friday in Arizona, one of at least seven battleground states that could prove critical to either candidate in November. According to an average of recent polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, Trump had a 1.4 percent lead over Harris in Arizona at the time of publication.
Colorado is not considered a battleground, with a number of recent polls showing the vice president ahead of Trump in the state by double digits. Trump is set to appear at another rally in Coachella, California, on Saturday. President Joe Biden won California by nearly 30 percentage points in 2020.
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