Where’s the 80 million supporters?
Rallies aren’t difficult to organize. Romney had huge rallies. Obama had none. Obama beat Romney by 4%.
People keep pointing to Trump rally size, but the fact is rally size means very little for get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drives. People who show up for rallies are already voting for the guy. A pol who does big rallies is just wasting his supporters’ time and his own campaign money. Traditional GOTV involves paying canvassers to get voters to the polls. Trump’s rallies were expensive, with one in Tulsa costing $2.2m. That could have paid for 100,000 canvasser hours.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/politics/trump-tulsa-rally-cost.html
Most campaigns don’t do big rallies because they don’t have unlimited cash. They can do rallies or they can have paid staff bring people to the polls. I’ve seen an estimate of $10 per ballot harvested. Trump’s $2.2m Tulsa rally, for a state that was already in the bag by 30+ points, was inexplicable, and could have been spent on harvesting 220,000 ballots in swing states. But rallies are the closest thing we have to a Roman triumph, and Trump likes the pageantry, so he spent the cash.