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The Incredible Shrinking Trump Rallies

By Cheryl Rofer

On September 24, 2022

At 10:17 am

In General

2083 Views

Photos like this show up from time to time:

This one is from a rally last Saturday in Ohio. The article notes that it was held at the same time as a college football game between Ohio State University and the University of Toledo.

Jay Ulfelder and the CrowdCounting Consortium are here to help out.

How do the crowd sizes at recent Trump rallies compare to ones in previous years? I recently backfilled some elements of the @crowdcounting dataset so I could answer that Q. Here's what I found. pic.twitter.com/CIXlPWuW1U— Jay Ulfelder (@JayUlfelder) September 23, 2022

We've got 192 of these events in total, including 17 so far in 2022. The year with the most of these rallies was 2020 (91), followed by the midterms year of 2018 (45), then 2019 (20), then 2022, then 2017 (10), then 2021 (9).— Jay Ulfelder (@JayUlfelder) September 23, 2022

The chart confirms what I suspected: Trump rallies are shrinking. The lowest average is 2020, but that includes a number of events where attendance was capped in the 100s due to COVID. Excluding that exceptional year, 2022 is the lowest yet. /end— Jay Ulfelder (@JayUlfelder) September 23, 2022

Trump’s rallies really are shrinking, and by a lot. For those reading quickly (or not at all), I’ll repeat: the numbers in the bar graph are estimated crowd sizes, not numbers of rallies or other variables that might be affected bigly by the fact that this year is not completed yet. I suspect they’ll shrink further as he drops down the Q rabbit hole.