“This wasn’t an artificial crowd,” Sanford told host Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room” when asked about his last town hall. “It wasn’t manufactured.”

“Nobody that I was aware of [was] from outside the state,” Sanford added of his latest event, which was held last Saturday in Mount Pleasant, S.C. “Certainly some people from outside the district.”

“The bulk of people were local, they were from the district, they were passionate about what they believed. It was real people with real concerns in terms of what came next on healthcare.”