Donald Trump has always been fixated on crowd size, to the point that it’s one of the defining features of his approach to politics. There’s undoubtedly some psychology that might be unpacked here; his interest in the audience is certainly downstream from his past celebrity and intermingled with his focus on television ratings and opinion polls (when favorable). But it is what it is and, for Trump, it is a metric of incomprehensible importance.

One thing about crowds, though, is that attendance depends on there being something to attend. And in 2024, Trump is giving his supporters fewer opportunities to form a crowd.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer reported on Trump’s grumbling frustration with Vice President Kamala Harris’s energetic campaign. Among the complaints? “Trump has also repeatedly raised the large crowds that Harris is getting compared with [President Joe] Biden,” Dawsey and Scherer report.

Sure enough, on Thursday morning, Trump complained about coverage of Harris’s audiences on social media.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was,” he wrote, “And she pays for her “Crowd.” When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

There is no evidence that Harris pays people to attend her rallies or needs to. When Trump launched his campaign in 2015, people were paid to attend and to fill out the audience.

But again, Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.

A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.

In 2020, the landscape was different for two reasons: the restrictions that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic and the fact that Trump was president. He held public events on nearly every day in July and August of that year, including a number of rallies held by conference call. (You may recall that Trump even tried to trademark the term “telerally.”) There were 13 rallies over those two months that year, about half of which were in person.

In Trump’s stead, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has been holding news events in places where Harris is speaking at campaign events. On Thursday morning, Trump also announced that he’d be holding a news conference in the afternoon — albeit from his home at Mar-a-Lago. (Thursday is the second anniversary of the FBI’s search of that property.) The attendees at the news conference will presumably be limited to the aforementioned “enemies of the people.”

There’s plenty of time for Trump to gear his campaign back up, certainly, and it’s likely that he will. But it’s silly to fret about Harris drawing more support when Trump isn’t holding many events to which supporters can be drawn.

PHILADELPHIA — She had backed Democrats in every presidential election since the political rise of Barack Obama. She had knocked on doors, taped up campaign signs and called strangers to ask: Are you ready to vote?

Now her party’s nominee was only three miles away, drawing exuberant crowds in the urban heart of this swing state, and Leah Shepperd couldn’t even bring herself to watch on television.

“I just can’t stomach it,” she said.

Over at Temple University, Vice President Kamala Harris had just introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). Applause for the pair cracked “120+ decibels,” one journalist at the Tuesday rally reported, citing his Apple watch. Walz thanked Harris for “bringing back the joy.”

Shepperd, 49, could feel none of that joy. Not when the United Nations had accused Israel of a “crime against humanity,” and when, in her view, the White House — Harris included — wasn’t doing enough to help the people of Gaza.

“I do want to vote,” she said. “But ethically, I’m stuck.”

During the primaries, pro-Palestinian activists urged voters to withhold their support for President Joe Biden over his handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Roughly 700,000 Democrats nationwide checked a no-candidate option such as “uncommitted,” left their presidential ballot blank or wrote in someone (or something) else. While that represents a tiny sliver of the electorate — and analysts lack data on each voter’s motivation — some liberal strategists said the apparent protest turnout revealed weak spots for the emerging Harris campaign in some of the election’s most competitive battlegrounds.

In Michigan, home to the nation’s largest Arab American communities, 13.3 percent of Democratic primary voters selected “uncommitted.” In Wisconsin, where Biden won in 2020 by roughly 20,000 votes, more than double that number signaled the same status. And in Pennsylvania, where the margin is expected to be just as razor-thin, about 60,000 people, including Shepperd, wrote in some version of not-Biden. All three states carry outsize importance in determining November’s winner.

In a late Wednesday statement, the Harris campaign said the vice president remains focused on securing a cease-fire while ensuring that Israel is protected against “Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.” It also nodded to her earlier pressure on Israel to lessen Palestinian agony.

“As she has said, it is time for this war to end in a way where: Israel is secure, hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinian civilians ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, and self-determination,” the statement said.

Four days after Biden dropped out of the contest and endorsed his running mate, protesters in the Keystone State aimed a fresh effort at Harris. Volunteers shared a digital pledge that declared: “If they want our votes for President, they must do everything in their power to bring about a cease-fire.”

“You want my vote?” asked one signee, Aniqa Raihan, a 28-year-old law student at Temple University. “You have to treat Palestinians like real human beings.”

Even as a line to see Harris snaked for blocks around the campus this week, Raihan had no fear of missing out as she dodged that scene in the comfort of her apartment.

Since the deadliest-ever Hamas attack on Israeli homes and the kidnapping of civilians on Oct. 7, Israel’s counteroffensive has killed at least 39,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. International aid groups have accused Israel of blocking assistance to more than 2 million civilians, including starving children — the majority of whom have lost their homes. (Israel has denied that charge.)

It disturbs Raihan that the United States continues to supply Israel with weapons. When the White House asserted last month that a temporary cease-fire was closer than “ever,” she wondered why Biden and Harris hadn’t cranked up the pressure sooner.

“If I voted for Kamala right now,” Raihan said, “that would be like telling those kids, ‘This doesn’t matter to me.”

It’s tough to know how many Democrats would stick to a no-vote threat in November. Yet the Harris campaign should not underestimate the grass-roots movements focused on Gaza, said Joe Corrigan, a Democratic strategist in Philadelphia.

“These are incredibly committed voters and activists,” he said. “They’re the same people who will knock on doors, make phone calls, volunteer to text-bank and organize their workplaces.”

At the same time, he noted, Harris vowing to upend the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict could sour voters loyal to Israel, especially as the Middle East teeters on the brink of a broader war.

“Any move is risky,” Corrigan said.

Shepperd, a child-care provider, had braved the rally traffic to visit a new friend’s South Philly rowhouse.

Hannah Zellman, 42, hadn’t felt like tuning into the live stream, either — no matter how much the internet was gushing about Harris and Walz. The star of her living room was a pit bull named Cinna.

“No amount of phone calls or protesting has worked, ” Shepperd told her, scratching Cinna’s brown-spotted ears.

“Nothing has been working,” agreed Zellman, a social worker.

They’d met through Pennsylvania’s “no cease-fire, no vote” group. Both had signed the pledge: If strikes on Gaza do not halt by the election, and Harris hasn’t committed to an arms embargo on Israel, they will not cast a ballot.

Shepperd had joined the movement after learning that her 7-year-old son’s former teacher was an organizer. It was an easy “yes,” she said: The photos she had seen on Instagram — the rubble, the bodies, the bloodied children — were haunting her.

Neither woman has ties to the Mideast. Both are Jewish. Both think the leaders in Washington have been too soft on Benjamin Netanyahu, who, over the last nine months, has taken no steps toward compromise. They blamed him, too — but they couldn’t hold the Israeli prime minister accountable at the polls. Both believed the United States should not keep arming a military accused of mass-slaughtering civilians.

“This is our leverage,” Zellman said.

“This is all we have,” Shepperd agreed.

“This” meaning their swing-state vote.

In such a close race, they understand that denying support for Harris could benefit Donald Trump, whose platform Zellman described as “deadly and dangerous.”

“What’s really helping Trump,” she said, “is that this administration is not listening to the voters who support a cease-fire.”

Plenty of their friends disagree with their November boycott. Shepperd’s husband isn’t thrilled about it, either. He fears, among other things, what a second Trump term could do to the Supreme Court.

She is scared, too. Still, she said, she can’t ignore her conscience.

“I want to be able to vote,” she said.

Three miles away, across the ideological chasm, Harris was wrapping up her speech. She had not mentioned Israel or Gaza. At a rally the next evening in Detroit, though, pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted her.

“If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” Harris remarked, according to clips proliferating on social media. “Otherwise, I am speaking.”

Shepperd watched the exchange and wondered: Where is the empathy?

Note to self, she thought: Mass-text the link to join “no cease-fire, no vote.”

Scott Clement and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Jesse Watters is onto it. Onto the whole thing. He’s figured it out.

The Fox News host knows that the media — that is, the media outside of his own right-wing channel — is hopelessly in the tank for Vice President Kamala Harris. And he has the evidence to prove it, as he revealed Wednesday afternoon on the show “The Five.”

“The media’s just gonna protect and elect” the Democrats, Watters declared. “They’re juicing the polls! I just found out, this country identifies R plus-2. And all the polls we’ve seen with Kamala doing so well, their samples? R plus-7! R plus-8! R plus-4!”

“These are fake polls!” he added. “Trump is going to kill her!”

“Well, we’ll see,” co-host Jeanine Pirro replied, moving on to another subject.

Perhaps she was confused, as you might be, about what Watters is saying. Perhaps she took it in stride, given that Trump’s campaign similarly disputed a poll this week. Or perhaps she realized, as you may already but certainly will in a moment, that Watters doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The first thing to point out here is that Watters misspoke. He was trying to say that the polls showing a lead for Harris were D plus-7 or plus-8, not R. Because the claim he’s making is that the population is more Republican than Democrat — that Republicans have a 2-point (plus-2) edge in identification — while the polls include more Democrats by a 7- or 8-point margin.

The next thing to point out is that the “R plus-2′ thing is a misrepresentation of what polling shows.

Watters is probably referring to Gallup’s regular polls in which they ask Americans “as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?” The most recent result, completed in the first three weeks of July, had Republicans with a 2-point advantage, as Watters states.

But you’ll notice on that graph that the two-party total comes up to less than 60 percent. That’s because the actual most-common identifier is “independent.” America is an “I plus-11″ country, if you want to put it in Wattersian terms.

Gallup, like other pollsters, then asks people whether they tend to vote more with the Republican or Democratic Party, which most independents do. Overlay that data, and you see that, in a sense, America is an “R plus-6′ country!

Or at least it was in early July, before President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for reelection. When Trump was leading in the polls, this was the Republican edge. It may change.

We should also note that this is self-identified partisanship. In actual voter registrations, Democrats have a substantial edge. L2, a political data firm, shows more registered Democrats in states where voters register by party and a growing advantage in its modeled partisanship for states that don’t have partisan registration.

(The modeled values, shown with the outlined bars below, use other indicators, including primary voting history, to estimate a voter’s partisanship.)

In other words, while Republicans have an advantage in identification at the moment, Democrats have one in registration.

All of this, though, ignores the other fundamental problem with Watters’s self-confident dismissal of polling: the results of a statistically accurate poll are essentially never an exact reflection of the people who participate in it.

You understand how this works in your own life. If you’re buying a Christmas present for your niece and nephew, you might get suggestions for popular video games from other teenagers. You find a representative opinion that you feel confident answers your question.

Pollsters have a far more rigorous way of doing this same thing. If they are trying to determine the likely results of an election, their poll has two components: talking to poll respondents and figuring out who is likely to vote. Then, using relatively complicated math, they ensure that the responses reflect the electorate.

Let’s say that you ask 100 Democrats and 80 Republicans how they plan to vote in an election, with 90 percent of each group picking their party’s candidate and 10 percent selecting the other party’s. By itself, that’s a 54 percent to 46 percent margin in favor of the Democrat. If you think, though, that the electorate will be 50-50? You can simply treat each Democrat response as eight-tenths of a response — what pollsters call “weighting.” The result is a 50-50 race.

This assumes, of course, that the estimates about who will vote are correct, which is by itself fraught. But, again, pollsters spend a lot of time and energy figuring out what the target population looks like across a range of demographic groupings. Then they do their best to match their respondent poll to the target population and weight the results to make up the difference.

Pollsters, after all, are in the business of accurately capturing public opinion and they know how to do their job effectively. If a pollster were consistently giving its clients inaccurate results, it would quickly find itself losing clients (unless the clients wanted inaccurate results, of course).

As Watters has said, he’s in the business of championing disarray on the left. If that means distorting crime data or misrepresenting how polling works, so be it. Watters knows how to do his job effectively, too.

Lenny Bronner contributed to this report.

Democrats have, until recently, spent much of the 2024 election fretting. And high on the list of reasons was the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who they feared would pull more votes from their side.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t just risen in the polls; she has shifted that third-party dynamic. She now does better when you include other candidates.

And there’s increasing evidence that independent candidate Kennedy, in particular — a candidate once elevated by Donald Trump’s allies when he was challenging President Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries — is pulling significantly more votes from Trump than Harris.

Since the Democratic ticket turned over from Biden to Harris last month, a half-dozen quality polls have tested both a Trump-Harris matchup and a crowded race that included independent and third-party candidates. In all of them, Harris performed better in the crowded race.

She led by an average of 1.5 points in those head-to-head matchups, and 3.3 points in the crowded fields.

Just about all of those numbers are within the margin of error, and the shifts are small. But given this is now a half-dozen polls, and that these shifts are among the voters in the same poll, it’s safe to say third-party candidates are now hurting Trump more.

This is also a change from the way third-party candidates affected the race in prior versions of these same polls. The third-party impact as a whole was more evenly distributed than a lot of people appreciated, and Kennedy looked like he was at least threatening to take more from Trump than Biden. But Biden gained ground in only one of the same six polls with the crowded field.

And when you dig into the more recent polls, you begin to see how Kennedy in particular — the only other candidate generally polling higher than 1 percent — is now evidently hurting Trump.

A new Marquette University Law School poll released Wednesday is Harris’s best high-quality poll yet. It shows her leading by six points (53 percent to 47 percent) among likely voters in a head-to-head matchup, and by eight points (50-42) when you include third-party candidates.

Kennedy takes just 3 percent of both Democrats and Republicans in the poll, while taking 13 percent of independents. But the independents he takes come at Trump’s expense: Kennedy wins 8 percent of Democratic-leaning independents, compared with 23 percent of Republican-leaning independents.

If you lump Democratic-leaning independents in with Democrats and Republican-leaning independents in with Republicans, Harris loses just five points from her base in a crowded field (dropping from 95 percent to 90 percent), while Trump loses eight points from his (dropping from 94 percent to 86 percent).

The story is similar in a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted shortly after Biden dropped out last month.

The race overall shifted from Trump up one (48-47) in a head-to-head matchup to Harris up one (44-43) in a crowded field. And again, Kennedy voters came more from Trump’s side.

When Kennedy supporters were asked to choose between Trump and Harris, 50 percent chose Trump, while just 21 percent chose Harris. (The other 29 percent either said they didn’t know or refused to answer.)

That’s a shift from the Times/Siena poll in late June and early July, when about as many Kennedy voters came from Trump’s side (40 percent) as Biden’s (38 percent).

Those numbers get at the caveat for Harris in these polls. One way to look at them is that these voters are coming at Trump’s expense and could hurt him in November; another is that they are more predisposed toward him if and when they decide to vote for one of the two major-party candidates — probably bringing the race closer to the head-to-head numbers.

And that’s what generally happens as an election progresses. We’ve already seen the share of third-party voters shrink significantly; Kennedy was polling in the double digits for much of the race, and he’s now averaging about 5 percent. The other candidates — Libertarian Chase Oliver, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West — usually pull 1 percent or less.

But small margins do matter; the last two elections were decided by a point or less in the decisive states. And however large the ultimate impact, you’d rather have these candidates pulling voters from your opponent than you. That appears to be what’s happening right now for Harris.

The initial elevation of Kennedy’s campaign on the right — including by Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon and House Republicans at a hearing last year — is now looking even more like a real potential blunder.

The very first fight Donald Trump picked with the media after being inaugurated as president was about crowd size.

On Jan. 21, 2017, the day after his inauguration, Trump visited CIA headquarters as a sort of olive branch after having disparaged the intelligence community’s determination that Russia had worked to aid his election. While there, Trump claimed that “a million, million and a half people” had been present for his speech the previous day, which was obviously false. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, gamely attempted to defend the claim without success.

As he seeks to be inaugurated again next January, Trump is again making bold, indefensible claims about crowd size. During a news conference on Thursday, though, the claim was about another January speech he gave near the National Mall: the one that preceded the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman questioned an assertion Trump made shortly beforehand that there was a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Trump used the question to talk about how many people came out to hear him speak that day.

“The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was that day,” Trump said. “And I’ll tell you, it’s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people, relatively, going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd. The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken — I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. ”

Then he went further, comparing the crowd to the one present for the March on Washington in August 1963.

“If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything — same number of people. If not, we had more,” Trump said. “And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.” He chuckled. “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything’s the same because it was — the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to, from Lincoln to Washington, and you look at it and you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd — we actually had more people.”

He didn’t.

Trump is correct that there aren’t many pictures of the crowd to which he spoke on Jan. 6. Or, at least, there aren’t a lot of aerial pictures that show the extent of the crowd. Instead, we mostly have street-level or slightly elevated photos.

Here, for example, is a video of the view that Trump might have seen when he was speaking. As with the crowd at the inauguration in 2017, the crowd looks more densely packed from ground level or a slight elevation than it actually is because of foreshortening.

In this video, from a slightly higher vantage point, you can get a better sense of the spread of the crowd.

From a camera to the side, though — here, MSNBC’s from that morning — you can see that the crowd near the stage on the Ellipse south of the White House was fairly contained.

We know from the House select committee that investigated the riot at the Capitol that Trump was unhappy with the orientation of his audience that morning.

“The way that we would always try to build rallies out was long and narrow, because that made for a better picture,” White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson explained to the committee in her sworn testimony. That morning, though, Trump was frustrated with “how people were spread so far out,” she said, and with obstructions that made photographing the crowd difficult. This was why he wanted to skip the security screening process, as she famously testified: to more rapidly fill in the area in front of the stage. Trump, she wrote in a text message, was “furious” with the situation — perhaps helping to explain the former president’s lingering irritation about the photos.

Regardless, the part of Trump’s response in which he compares his crowd to King’s is flatly incorrect. Yes, King’s speech did include a large crowd that occupied some of the “same real estate” — the space between the Washington Monument and the White House. You can see it in the photo below, from the Library of Congress.

It’s hard to compare that section of the crowd to Trump’s because of the different angles. You’ll also notice that, on the left side of the photo from 1963, there are several buildings that are no longer present. Constructed to serve as office space during the world wars, the last buildings were removed during the Nixon administration.

It doesn’t really matter. After all, you will recall that King spoke not from the Ellipse south of the White House but from the Lincoln Memorial. The distance between the Washington Monument and where Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, was about a third of a mile. The distance between the Washington Monument and where King spoke is about three-quarters of a mile, more than twice as long — and was packed with people.

As can be seen in the photo below, also from the Library of Congress.

The National Park Service estimates that about 250,000 people attended King’s speech, not a million. There was no similar estimate offered of the crowd at Trump’s speech.

But Trump presented one, as soon as he began speaking that day.

“Media will not show the magnitude of this crowd,” he said. “Even I, when I turned on today, I looked, and I saw thousands of people here. But you don’t see hundreds of thousands of people behind you because they don’t want to show that.”

What people remember from Jan. 6 isn’t that there were hundreds of thousands of people at his speech, since that’s an exaggeration. What they remember instead is the thousands who swarmed Capitol Hill and the nearly 1,500 (as of writing) who would ultimately face federal charges for participating in the riot.

King’s speech is remembered for what he said. Trump’s is remembered for what it preceded.