People noticed Monday that it looked like there were empty seats at the Democratic National Convention. While some conjectured that it pointed to low turnout, reports revealed a different story.
Just north of the United Center in Chicago, Ill. – where the convention was being held – several thousand protestors marched, and WBBM reporters were on the scene to witness it. While the organized demonstrators initially stuck to a planned route, some broke through a metal fence barrier at around 4:45 p.m., prompting dozens of Chicago Police Department officers in riot gear to respond.
According to the Wall Street Journal, around 100 protestors participated in the breach. It said they were protesting the war in Gaza. Israel declared war on the Palestinian military group Hamas in October after it conducted a large-scale terrorist attack and the U.S. has since provided aid to Israel, its longtime ally. However, there has been criticism from humanitarian groups and some on the left for the war and the number of civilian casualties associated with it.
By 5:30 p.m., the protestors were cleared and four were arrested, WBBM reported. Thousands of remaining protestors continued on to the planned route, which went east to Chicago’s Union Park.
The Wall Street Journal reported that protests in the city delayed some delegates, thus leaving some empty seats. As the protestors clashed with police, around 20 buses were stuck around a half mile from the venue and the event was delayed by 20 minutes, it said.
According to USA Today, conservatives on social media began posting photos of the half-empty United Center (a stadium that can hold up to 23,500 people) Monday. Overall, 50,000 people were expected to arrive in Chicago for the four-day convention.
“Conservative YouTuber Blaire White claimed there were ‘more people outside protesting the DNC than people inside,’ adding, ‘This is not the turnout of a party that can win,’” said the outlet.
Newsweek shared other posts citing conservative outlet RSBN that compared the crowd size to the Republican National Convention held last month in Milwaukee, Wisc. It noted that both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention were “sparsely attended when they began,” and that RSBN “carefully selected images” to compare the events.
“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,” said Newsweek. The outlet also went on to say that: “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.”
In fact, by the time Vice President Kamala Harris – the presumptive Democratic candidate – took the stage, there was a large crowd at the United Center. In an X post, Bloomberg writer Josh Wingrove wrote that some delegates were being denied access to the venue due to capacity concerns.
Doug Sovern of KCBS Radio and Craig Dellimore of WBBM, who discussed the first day of the convention for Audacy’s “The On Deadline Podcast”, said that the large crowd’s enthusiastic cheering actually made the fist day of the convention event run quite long.
“He was not able to speak for several minutes,” said Dellimore of Monday’s keynote speaker, President Joe Biden.