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"... 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. ... And as he tries to defeat Ms. Harris this year, he uses his crowds to back up his insistence that his election is all but assured, making the empty gaps in his venues more notable.
... Mr. Trump has at several rallies since then falsely insisted that Ms. Harris was lying and that people would never leave his rallies early, even as some were in the process of doing so.
... On Sunday, he arrived two hours late to a small airport in Kinston, N.C., where hundreds were waiting on the tarmac. But within five minutes of the start of his speech, a stream of audience members began heading for the exit, a steady exodus that never quite abated.
The crowd at his jam-packed Madison Square Garden rally, billed as the signature event of his closing stretch, didn’t stick through his speech. ..."
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Somewhat notable that the NY Times is reporting on this.
