DNC Crowd Size Compared to RNC in Photos

The 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) kicked off on Monday in Chicago, drawing immediate crowd size comparisons with last month’s Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, took to social media on Monday night to claim that attendance at the DNC paled in comparison to the RNC, comparing photos of the events taken at different times.
“The DNC has kicked off in Chicago as the opening speakers are met with a dismal crowd,” conservative influence Colin Rugg wrote while sharing a short video to X, formerly Twitter.
Multiple Trump supporters also shared images from the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) that showed a lightly attended DNC juxtaposed with a packed RNC.
“This photo comparison of the RNC attendance vs DNC attendance says it all,” @RyanHugeBrain wrote while sharing the comparison.
However, both events were sparsely attended when they began and the RSBN comparison appears to use carefully selected images. Photos taken of the RNC also show significant sections of empty seating visible during the early hours.
Some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris mocked the Trump supporters for attempting to compare the convention crowds at different points by sharing their own photos and videos.
“RNC Attendance,” @rippig wrote while sharing an image from this year’s RNC at a time when there was virtually no crowd.
By the time Harris delivered a short surprise speech at the Democratic convention on Monday night, what appeared to be a very large crowd had gathered at Chicago’s United Center, which has a maximum seating capacity of 23,500.
The crowd and its enthusiasm continued to grow before President Joe Biden closed out the night with a speech. “Kamala’s Win,” a pro-Harris X account, shared a video showing what was clearly a large crowd inside the venue at the time.
Bloomberg reporter Josh Wingrove, who was at the convention, suggested that the United Center was at or near capacity shortly before Biden took the stage.
“Small numbers of delegates are now being denied access back into the lower bowl due to what seem to be capacity worries,” Wingrove wrote on X.
Photos also show that a large crowd was present at about the same point during the opening day of the RNC on July 15, when former President Donald Trump entered Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, which has a slightly smaller maximum seating capacity of 18,000.
The upper seating level of the RNC was empty during the first two nights of this year’s event, according to Milwaukee Business Journal. Shortly before the convention began, an RNC official reportedly claimed that peak daily attendance was expected to top 20,000, or 2,000 above the venue’s listed seating capacity.
While it was not clear exactly how many people were in attendance at each convention on its opening night, crowds fluctuated at both events depending on the time.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the DNC and RNC via email on Monday night.
Trump has a history of boasting about crowd sizes at events that he is headlining, sometimes artificially inflating the number of people who possibly could have been in attendance.
Recent well-attended Harris campaign rallies have seemingly exacerbated Trump’s sensitivities, with the former president this month making unsubstantiated claims about the Democratic ticket using artificial intelligence to fake large crowd sizes.
Update 8/20, 12:12 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include additional social media posts.