Why can't the tea party be as popular as the Coffee Party is?

He estimated that just 150 people showed up for the tiny rally, and had his camera pan across the empty sidewalk. (You can watch the video of that news report here.) Meanwhile, California’s state capitol saw “the largest Tea Party rally on the west coast,” according to other news reports they cited. But the size of that rally was only around 2,000, according to the Associated Press. And I witnessed the event and saw even fewer people. Three of the four sides around Sacramento’s capitol building were nearly empty, while the crowd clustered around the stage on the capitol’s west end. (It’s an 80% drop from last year’s Sacramento rally, which organizers estimated at over 10,000 people.)