Beware the crowdsmanship: Does the size of political rallies really mean much?
By Robert Mann
Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing large crowds at rallies almost everywhere he goes. Nearly 10,000 in Wisconsin; 8,000 in Dallas; more than 7,000 in Portland, Maine; more than 5,000 in Denver; and 3,000 in Minneapolis.
That, according to some political observers, is evidence that Sanders is a threat to the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. “Sanders’s audience—in a state not among those with traditional early nominating contests—rivaled the largest drawn by Clinton and the Vermont senator in recent weeks,” Washington Post reporter John Wagner opined of Sanders’ recent Denver rally. “The extraordinary turnout was the latest evidence that Sanders, 73, has tapped into the economic anxiety of the Democratic electorate.”
Not to be outdone, Donald Trump recently bragged that the size of his rally in a Phoenix hotel ballroom “blows away anything that Bernie Sanders has gotten.” Most journalists covering the event pegged the crowd’s size at 4,000 to 5,000. Trump’s staff told Fox News that 15,000 supporters were on hand. Trump later tweeted that he had attracted more than 20,000 (in a ballroom with a maximum legal occupancy of 2,158).
Some in the media were duly impressed by Trump’s crowds on his recent western tour (he also held events in Las Vegas and Los Angeles). ABC News described the campaign events in an online story headlined, “Trump Talks Immigration to Record Crowds in Border State.” The headline of MSNBC’s story about Trump’s weekend: “Donald Trump draws massive crowds during campaign swing.”
I have bad news for Sanders, Trump, their supporters and some in the news media fixated on the numbers at candidates’ rallies: The size of rallies has long been a flawed measure of a campaign’s vitality. Journalists often survey an arena brimming with enthusiastic supporters and mistakenly use a head count to gauge the campaign’s prospects. Candidates and their staffs are eager to bolster that faulty notion, sometimes feeding reporters exaggerated crowd estimates (there’s no evidence Sanders’ campaign has done that).
Such a misreading happened in 2012 when spokespeople for President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney bragged about the size of their rallies and pointed to enthusiastic crowds as indications of growing support. Consider this piece in Politico less than a month before the election:
It may be his supporters, or it may be those getting a glimpse of the GOP nominee for the first time, but Mitt Romney’s crowds are getting bigger in the campaign’s final stretch.
Since his strong presidential debate performance last Wednesday night, Romney has seen a bump in the number of people attending his rallies, which the campaign calls a sign of new enthusiasm in the final month of the campaign.
In the past week alone, Romney’s campaign says at least three of its rallies have, per the campaign’s crowd counts, exceeded 10,000 people: an Oct. 4 event with country singer Trace Adkins in Fishersville, Va., which was Romney’s largest event ever at 14,000 people; a rally last Sunday in Port St. Lucie, Fla., that drew 12,000; and one in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, that fire marshals estimated also drew 12,000. . .
“Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more fired up about this election, and fired up about Gov. Romney,” Gorka said. “The debate helped crystallize that energy and it’s translating to our events.”
What Romney and Obama did was an age-old political practice. “We are entering the season of crowdsmanship, counting up the people who gather to see the presidential candidates on these autumn days,” the late political columnist Hugh Sidey observed in a Life magazine article in September 1968. “The prehistoric political ritual is being practiced in 1968 with fresh fervor.”
Unlike some political reporters today, Sidey wasn’t fooled by the hype over crowd size, observing, “it is almost worthless as a campaign measure in this age. It may even be worse – it may totally mislead the contenders and the country.” Sidey was right to be skeptical, as he noted: “Richard Nixon, a consummate practitioner of crowdsmanship, ecstatically passes out figures – 150,000 in San Francisco, 450,000 in Chicago. Victory is only a crowd or two away. George Wallace assembles 10,000 in Springfield, Mo. and claims the largest political crowd in the city’s history. It gives him nocturnal visions of sitting in the Oval Office.”
Exaggerating the size of rally crowds is a mostly a ritual in presidential races near a campaign’s end, when crowds often do grow in size and intensity. Campaign spokespeople often develop – or spin – the burgeoning size of their rallies into a narrative about a groundswell for their candidate. And the reporters following them often adopt those narratives.
(Romney’s campaign apparently took “crowdsmanship” one step further in 2012, altering on Instagram a photograph of a Nevada rally, which made the crowd appear larger. In June, Trump’s campaign was accused of padding the audience of his New York announcement rally, paying actors $50 each to show up and cheer the candidate’s speech.)
This year, the “crowdsmanship” has begun earlier than ever. All the boasting and exaggerations of campaign flacks and the creative work of Photoshop artists should give political reporters pause. These journalists often work in a protective bubble controlled by the candidate, so it’s understandable that they will occasionally be susceptible to the spin. But that makes it all the more important to be cautious and resist the urge to read too much into the size of campaign crowds because, clearly, even some losing campaigns are adept at generating large crowds. As former Vice President Walter Mondale wrote in his memoir, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, the crowds at Hubert Humphrey’s rallies in 1968 began to swell in late October/early November: “Suddenly, the rallies started drawing bigger crowds. Money started coming in again, and volunteers too. . . . Humphrey was getting jubilant crowds and great press.” Four years later, enormous crowds flocked to rallies held by Democratic nominee George McGovern, who would lose to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Here, for example, is how the New York Times reported a McGovern rally in New York on November 2, 1972, in a story headlined, “Police estimate 20,000 at McGovern’s rally.”
More...http://bobmannblog.com/2015/07/20/beware-the-crowdsmanship-does-the-size-of-political-rallies-really-mean-much/
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's whether you can out troll the other candidate online. 
I suspect that's the case in many of Sanders' college towns.
As former Vice President Walter Mondale wrote in his memoir, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, the crowds at Hubert Humphrey’s rallies in 1968 began to swell in late October/early November: “Suddenly, the rallies started drawing bigger crowds. Money started coming in again, and volunteers too. . . . Humphrey was getting jubilant crowds and great press.” Four years later, enormous crowds flocked to rallies held by Democratic nominee George McGovern, who would lose to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Here, for example, is how the New York Times reported a McGovern rally in New York on November 2, 1972, in a story headlined, “Police estimate 20,000 at McGovern’s rally.”
This is what we're witnessing with Trump & BS.
