Thursday, September 9, 2010

Evaluating the Crowd Size for the 9/12 Rally

The St. Louis Tea Party claims that their rally this Sunday is going to be "massive." They're being bankrolled by the national group Tea Party Patriots (Ensuring Liberty and the Prop A ballot initiative proved that they're not able to fundraise from their local membership), and this is one of three national events on 9/12, so the crowd will be representative of a much larger group than just the St. Louis area. So how should we evaluate the size?

First of all, it's worth noting that the St. Louis tea party earlier claimed that they could get similar crowd sizes as the Glenn Beck rally in D.C.:

If you live in reality, that number was 87,000 people, give or take 9,000 (this is the number a professional firm came up with). If you live in tea party world far away from reality, that number is 700,000. Either way, it's pretty obvious that they won't have anything NEAR that crowd size, and it's hilarious that they claimed they would.

They also claimed that this would be the "Best Tea Party Evah!"

Now, "best evah," if you live in tea party world, was 10,000 people in Kiener Plaza. If you live in reality, and realize that the maximum capacity of Kiener Plaze is 3,000, you'd probably say around 2,500 or so. If the tea party got these numbers, it'd probably be enough to keep the media happy, but would not really be a show of strength. Getting only the same numbers as they had previously, in a rally where busses are coming in from Dallas, etc., would mean that their local support has dropped precipitously.

So I'd say anything less than a couple thousand people would be a complete disaster. My guess is that they'll get about 2 or 3 thousand, and they'll call it 20,000. Any other guesses?

2 comments:

  1. My predictions: REAL numbers: 3,200

    What some of them will end up claiming as:
    Dana Loesch: 100,000+
    Jim Hoft: 100,000+
    Bill Hennessy: 65,000
    Gina Loudon: 40,000

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  2. I agree. They have less than 4,000 fans on their fb page. I'm betting they'll get around 3,000 tops.

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