The crowd size attending a JD Vance event in Michigan is coming under scrutiny on social media, after the Republican Vice Presidential candidate spoke outside a trucking company in Byron Center Wednesday.
Some folks have posted photos of a small crowd, with a few empty chairs.
One picture doing the rounds, with multiple empty chairs, was reportedly taken a few hours before the event started, before the full audience had arrived, according to multiple people, including journalist and Democrat-supporter Kelly Scaletta.
This picture is going around suggesting that this is everyone who showed up for Vance’s rally today.
That’s not fair. This was at least an hour before the speech, and almost all 200 seats were filled by the time it started. pic.twitter.com/hw8MfSh3ET
— Machine Pun Kelly
(@KellyScaletta) August 15, 2024
Indeed, a livestream recording posted by APN shows almost every seat filled by the time Vance takes the stage.
That said, the number of seats available in the first place seems to be fairly small, with Scaletta estimating there were 200 chairs.
Smaller events in rural areas often only have a few hundred attendees. Byron Center, in Kent County is fairly suburban–and is near the larger city of Grand Rapids.
Newsweek has contacted Vance via email, to ask for confirmation on how many people attended and for any comment.
During his speech, Vance spoke about “taking back the White House” and “restoring the whole country,” starting in the state of Michigan.
He also threw his support behind several candidates for Michigan district representative candidates.
It comes as Vance is yet to 100 percent confirm that he will debate his Democratic counterpart Tim Walz in a debate on CBS News on October 1.
On Wednesday, the network posted an invitation to both men, giving them two dates in September and two dates in October to debate in New York City.
Walz responded on X, formerly Twitter, saying: “See you on October 1, JD.”
Later on, Vance told Fox News he had only been asked about the debate three hours before chatting to Fox, when he was landing from Michigan. He went on to say he “strongly suspects he will be there on October 1, but he wants to make sure certain conditions are met first.
He said: “I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates, Laura, where they don’t actually have an audience there, where they don’t actually set the parameters in the right way where we can have a good exchange of ideas.
“In other words, we’re not going to walk into a fake news media garbage debate, we’re going to do a real debate and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it.”
