X posts
stated on August 14, 2024 in a post:

Photo from an Aug. 14 campaign event in Michigan shows “JD Vance couldn’t fill a small room.”

Elections Michigan X posts

J.D. Vance speaks at campaign event in Byron Center, Michigan 08-14-2024 — Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, speaks at a campaign event, Aug. 14, 2024, in Byron Center, Mich. (AP)

By Sara Swann
August 15, 2024

Viral photo misleads on crowd size at Vance’s Michigan campaign rally

If your time is short

The photo misleads about the crowd size at Republican vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s Aug. 14 campaign rally in Byron Center, Michigan. It was shared on X almost two hours before Vance took the stage.
Other photos and videos taken show a fuller crowd of a few hundred people closer to the event’s start and throughout the rally’s duration.

See the sources for this fact-check

Crowd size has become a 2024 presidential race talking point.

But a viral photo claiming to show low turnout at Republican vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s western Michigan campaign event is misleading.

An X account called Kamala’s Wins shared a photo Aug. 14 from Vance’s rally that day outside Cordes Inc., a Byron Center, Michigan, trucking company. The photo showed a sparse crowd and rows of empty white folding chairs.

“BREAKING: New photos are emerging from JD Vance’s rally today. While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are filling up massive venues, Donald Trump is incapable of campaigning in person and JD Vance couldn’t fill a small room,” said the X post, which had been viewed more than 1.3 million times as of Aug. 15.

Figure 1: Photo claims to show small crowd at Vance Michigan rally graphic

(Screengrab from X)

The Kamala’s Wins account bio reads, “Keeping Score of Kamala Harris’ wins. The largest online community supporting soon to be President Kamala Harris.”

Sarafina Chitika, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson, told PolitiFact that this X account is neither affiliated with nor run by the Harris-Walz campaign. The Democratic presidential campaign’s official X account is @KamalaHQ.

The photo of the sparse crowd, which has been widely circulated on X, is misleading. Other footage from that day shows more people in the audience by the event’s start time.

Kamala’s Wins shared the photo at 12:13 p.m. About an hour later, at 1:30 p.m., Meryl Kornfield, a staff writer at The Washington Post, posted on X a photo from the Vance campaign event that showed a bigger crowd with almost every seat occupied.

“The photo of a virtually empty Vance rally going around doesn’t accurately depict the crowd size now. Pretty much every seat is full and there are attendees hanging out in shady areas that aren’t in this photo,” Kornfield wrote in the X post.

Vance took the stage just after 2 p.m., according to C-SPAN footage.

Photos and video from The Associated Press, Getty Images, The Detroit News, C-SPAN and WZZM-TV before, during and after Vance’s speech show few empty seats in the crowd. The Detroit News reported that there were a few hundred people at the event.

Although the Byron Center venue was smaller than some other places former President Donald Trump and Vance have campaigned, the event didn’t have low attendance as the Kamala’s Wins photo had intimated.

We rate this claim False.