RALEIGH, N.C. — Former President Donald Trump has spent parts of the past week of his campaign speaking in self-aggrandizing reverence about the arenas he has filled and the size of his enthusiastic audiences. Never again, he has said, will there be crowds like the ones he has attracted this year.

But in the closing stretch of his third run for the White House, Trump — a 78-year-old whose voice lately has strained at times, whose speech has been slurred and whose energy appears to be flagging — is not quite the candidate he used to be. And neither are his crowds.

Trump kicked off Monday, the final day before Election Day, at the Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the section behind the stage still had several dozen empty seats when he finally took the stage about an hour later than expected. There were a couple thousand supporters inside, but the back of the arena had several empty rows. And there was no line outside.

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Trump Boasts Big Crowds

During the final week of his campaign, Trump has at times been delivering boasts about crowd size in arenas that are far from packed to the rafters. And when he insists that thousands more are waiting outside, they are often not.

On Saturday, his campaign curtained off the upper bowl of an arena in Greensboro, North Carolina, that Vice President Kamala Harris had filled. Seating in the lower bowl wasn’t packed either. And whole sections of Fiserv Forum, his last stop in Milwaukee, were empty on either side of the stage Friday.

Crowd sizes are not a perfect sign of political or electoral support, particularly in the final stages of a race in states that Trump has visited frequently. His Greensboro rally was his second event in the city in two weeks. And North Carolina, in particular, has had a record early turnout: The state’s Board of Elections announced that nearly 4.5 million voters cast ballots during early in-person voting.

But Trump often uses his audiences as an indicator of his support, particularly as he reminisces about his 2016 campaign, when he beat Hillary Clinton. And as he tries to defeat Harris this year, he uses his crowds to back up his insistence that his election is all but assured, making the empty gaps in his venues more notable.

Over the nine years since Trump rode down a golden escalator toward his political career, his ability to keep audiences captivated throughout increasingly long, winding speeches — and through lengthy delays as he runs behind schedule — has also seemed to weaken.

Harris, in an attempt to needle Trump, brought up the exits at their presidential debate in September. “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said, an attack that sent him on a tangent that night.

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Trump Said Harris Lied About People Leaving His Rallies

Trump has at several rallies since then falsely insisted that Harris was lying and that people would never leave his rallies early, even as some were in the process of doing so.

“We’ve done this for nine years,” Trump said at a rally last week in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. “We had the greatest rallies in the history of the world, chancellors and prime ministers. People would tell me they watch the rallies from Europe.” He added: “They try and demean us like that horrible, horrible person that I debated where she said, ‘And people leave early.’ Nobody leaves early.”

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On Sunday, he arrived two hours late to a small airport in Kinston, North Carolina, where hundreds were waiting on the tarmac. But within five minutes of the start of his speech, a stream of audience members began heading for the exit, a steady exodus that never quite abated.

The crowd at his jam-packed Madison Square Garden rally, billed as the signature event of his closing stretch, didn’t stick through his speech.

And at a speech at an arena last month on the Penn State campus in State College, Pennsylvania, Trump opened with several direct promises to boost the fortunes of young voters, before groups of them began leaving minutes later. Trump took the stage at 5:40 p.m. A Penn State football game was scheduled to kick off less than two hours later.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael Gold/Doug Mills
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