Crowd sizes don’t necessarily translate into votes, the press should now that by now:
After a few days on the Huckabee campaign bus recently, we walked into a Hillary Clinton event outside Cleveland last night. What a difference the possibilty of winning versus the likelyhood of losing makes. The Clinton event is in a packed gym with a gospel choir and a marching band. I don’t think the cumulative audience at Huckabee’s four events in Wisconsin matches the size of this one Clinton event. The Huckabee campaign just rented a sound system and played a few CDs…so few the songs repeated a few times.
Here, they just announced a crowd of 2,500, with some 800 more watching a live feed in an overflow room. Yes, McCain draws much bigger crowds than Huckabee. We were with him in Florida and elsewhere. One of Romney’s largest crowds was one of his last in Long Beach, Calif. That was smaller than this.
Hmmm…where have I heard that before? Oh, yes:
By 9 a.m. on Friday, throngs of John F. Kerry supporters clogged the city center, blocking the garage where Julie Edwards parks for work. So rather than fight the crowd, the 41-year-old Republican joined it.
Four hours later, as the Democratic nominee was wrapping up his stump speech, Edwards finally made it through security. As she trudged toward the stage, it was not the candidate who amazed her but the massive crowd that turned out for him, even as President Bush was speaking just outside town.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, surveying the more than 40,000 audience members. “This is going to make a real statement, a swing state turning out [for Kerry] like this, especially with Bush in town. I worry for Bush.”
BTW, this is just observational, I’m not implying that President Obama won’t trounce McCain in November 🙂 I’m just saying that crowds aren’t necessarily filled with voters.
BTW, you may notice that I’ve decided to embrace the inevitability of Obamania and accept his future victory on election day. Whether I believe it or not really doesn’t matter because everyone else does.