How Many Attended The Tea Parties?
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight.com: Here is a VERY long (but far from comprehensive) list of crowd size estimates at today’s Tea Party protests across the country. I’ve tried to take estimates provided by reporters or police officials only, rather than estimates provided by the organizers or attendees themselves, although surely this is an imperfect science. I’ve also tried to avoid taking any data from explicitly partisan (including left-leaning partisan) news sources. Collectively, these reports account for an attendance of 111,899.
Are these figures impressive? I’d say they’re reasonably impressive. Then again, 111,899 isn’t much more than the number who attend a typical University of Michigan football game or who attended a single Barack Obama rally in Portland, Oregon last year.
But, the list is far from complete. This covers 126 rallies, whereas the most common figure I’ve seen is that there were about 750 such protests nationwide — about six times more than we’ve accounted for.
So, can we simply multiply the estimate by six to estimate the overall number of attendees across the country, which would imply that about 670,000 tea-baggers?
