Crowd size matters to the media only when the cause is liberal

One, it was not long ago at all – as recently as the afternoon of Election Day – when liberals were broadly united in scorning crowd sizes as a measure of popularity. As you may recall, a number of pundits had pointed to the crowds drawn by Mitt Romney in 2012 and Sarah Palin in 2008 as a sign of Republican enthusiasm, and they decisively lost the argument to Nate Silver and other data analysts who derided the idea that crowd sizes trumped polls. In 2016, Trump drew yuge crowds all across the country, and he and his supporters bragged about them incessantly. While polls were still a better way of looking at the world than crowd sizes, those crowds did speak to how he activated a particularly devoted segment of the electorate, and certainly everyone on the Democratic side was united all the way through the election in snarking at the significance of Trump’s crowds. It’s hard to credit the sincerity of those same people now getting excited about crowd sizes.

Two, there are obvious reasons of geography, demographics, and history why Obama in 2009 in particular drew large crowds for his inauguration, and Trump did not. Obama was enormously popular in DC and its surrounding areas, winning well over 90% of the vote in the District and carrying Maryland and Northern Virginia by wide margins; Trump did especially badly in those areas in the primaries and the general election. It’s always easier to get people to show up to an event within an hour’s drive than to travel in from Michigan or Iowa or Western Pennsylvania. That’s doubly true of poor and working-class people who can’t easily take multiple days off of work and pay for hotel rooms and travel (Obama’s inauguration was on a Tuesday in 2009, a Sunday in 2013; Trump’s was on a Friday). And of course, today’s marches are hard to compare, since they’re distributed across the country and held on a Saturday. Also, it’s hardly surprising that Obama drew big crowds in 2009, given that a lot of people who knew or cared little about his politics were inspired by the simple fact of inaugurating the first African-American president. It was already true that Hillary won tremendous support in the big cities of America, while Trump did unusually poorly there and unusually well in rural areas, so you would expect that marches and demonstrations held in big, media-friendly cities would paint an asymmetrical portrait of a nation of Hillary backers.

Three, the liberal and media enthusiasm for touting large crowds as a sign of popular sentiment is roughly 100% certain to evaporate completely next Friday when the March for Life comes to Washington to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and pray and protest for its reversal and the extension of legal protection to all human life in the United States. Held annually for four decades, the March for Life routinely draws massive crowds in DC, as well as local events across the nation, and just as routinely gets a tiny fraction of the media coverage that is being lavished on today’s marches.