A KAMALA HARRIS CROWD: BIG AND HAPPY. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania — In the days before Vice President Kamala Harris came here, on Friday the 13th, some Trump supporters in this northeastern Pennsylvania town speculated that she would have trouble attracting a big crowd to her rally. Even when attendees began to show up, the detractors said the number was small and perhaps they had been paid to attend.
Former President Donald Trump himself promoted the idea a few days earlier at his debate with Harris. “People don’t go to her rallies,” Trump said. “There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”
The idea of the Wilkes-Barre rally was for the Harris campaign to go into a Trump stronghold. The former president won surrounding Luzerne County by 14 points over Joe Biden in 2020 and by 19 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The point was not to win Luzerne County in November but to make progress there as part of winning Pennsylvania overall.
Trump has paid a lot of attention to the area. He has held rallies there several times, most recently on Aug. 17 at the Mohegan Arena, which can accommodate somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 people, depending on how it is set up. Some accounts called Trump’s August crowd “near capacity” — the exact crowd size has gotten caught up in a lot of trolling from the Harris campaign and some media outlets. But Trump undoubtedly drew a lot of people.
Entering Republican territory, Harris set a lower bar for herself, holding the rally at the McHale Athletic Center at Wilkes University. It’s a good deal smaller than Mohegan, and not designed to accommodate arena-size crowds. Harris filled it up; local news reports said…
