Trump Rallies Draw Fewer Crowds as Election Campaign Winds Down

Donald J.Trump has spent parts of the last 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, Mr.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.The former president kicked off Monday, the final day before Election Day, at the Dorton Arena in Raleigh, N.C., 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.During the final week of his campaign, Mr.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, N.C., 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 on Friday.Crowd sizes are not a perfect sign of political or electoral support, particularly in the final stages of a race in states that Mr.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience whi...