Trump predicts ‘big crowd’ for Saturday night’s rally in New Hampshire

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Trump to hold outdoor rally in New Hampshire, campaign will strongly encourage masks

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson weighs in on keeping the public safe during campaign events on 'America's Newsroom.'

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. – His advisers are hesitant to forecast how many people will attend President Trump’s rally Saturday night in New Hampshire, but the president himself has no qualms making a prediction.

“We’re going to have a big crowd and we’re going to have a great crowd,” the president declared Friday morning in a radio interview on “New Hampshire Today with Jack Heath.”

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The president’s rally in the key general election battleground state – which will be held outdoors on the tarmac at Portsmouth International Airport – will be his second since the coronavirus pandemic swept across the country in March.

The first rally – last month in Tulsa, Okla. – was held indoors at an arena.

The president and his campaign touted a few days ahead of the event they had received 1 million requests for tickets to the rally. But the crowds never materialized, and large portions of the arena’s upper deck were empty as the president spoke.

Since announcing the New Hampshire rally at the beginning of the week, the Trump reelection team has avoided making any crowd size forecasts.

“I think it’s going to be difficult to tell,” Trump campaign director of strategic communications, Marc Lotter, said Friday on the same radio program. “I don’t have a good guess on that right now.”

And Trump campaign senior adviser Corey Lewandowski – asked a day earlier about the expected crowd size at the New Hampshire rally – said, “I learned from the Tulsa, Okla., thing, never make an expectation.”

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On Friday morning, the Trump campaign in New Hampshire took to Twitter to tell supporters tickets were still available for the rally.

In the days after the Tulsa rally, the Trump campaign pushed back on suggestions that the president failed to draw a big enough crowd, noting that the event attracted over 4 million viewers “across all of the campaign’s digital media channels” and spotlighting that Fox News – which carried the event live – had its best Saturday night ratings in its history.

Lotter touted that the “Tulsa rally had 22 million people watching it.”

“One of the things that we obviously take away from Tulsa is that people can now look at these rallies and watch them through different platforms. And there will be many who want to come out and be a part of that energy,” he noted.

But with deep health concerns amid the coronavirus pandemic, he added, “If you happen to be someone who might be at high risk for a negative outcome with COVID or someone in our family is, we’d encourage you to stay home.”