April 16, 2010

A big overview of the crowd at yesterday's Tea Party in Madison.

Here — from The Troglopundit. The crowd fanned out to the left and right of what's in that shot. He's got more pictures from the ground, and he repeats the estimate — from the podium — that the crowd size was 12,000. Based on my examination of the overview shot and what I know of the way the crowd extended on either side, I'm going to say 2,000.

12 comments:

MadisonMan said...

Capitol Police said 4500.

Kirby Olson said...

The NYT this morning said that Tea Party activists were better-educated than the liberals. It would be good to go through the crowd and find out what kinds of degrees they had. There were several large rallies in the Catskills yesterday. Biggest rallies since Woodstock, although Woodstock, of course, was not entirely political.

Also, the rallies yesterday didn't have any love-ins that I have heard about.

Peter Hoh said...

That looks like 2,500 on camera, but it's just my educated guess.

Anonymous said...

BTW GAtewaypundit has some great pics of TPers hounding the infiltrators out of their protest. The signs (suggested by Breitbart) are priceless!

Chip Ahoy said...

The thing is, it's not like a an opera or a concert. Here, people are coming and going throughout. Some spend only a short while. A snapshot provides an estimate of one specific point in time, and not an estimate of the total of people who passed through. It fails to account for the number who came and left and were replaced. Also attendeesare coming and going from all directions so it's impossible to calculate a replacement rate, which also changes through time, without actual in/out counts at each entrance point.

Put another way: estimating attendance from a photograph is steeeew-pud.

jimspice said...

Play "Where's Waldo" but this time Waldo is black. He's in there! Don't give up!

Unknown said...

Kirby Olson said...

The NYT this morning said that Tea Party activists were better-educated than the liberals.

Depends on whom they call liberals. There are a lot of die-hard radicals placed in that category who are committed to the World Socialist Workers Revolution. There are a good many true liberals in the Tea Party movement.

WV "spartabu" What the Athenians did during the Pelopennesian War.

Hazy Dave said...

360 degree panorama here.

Not that it's very useful for crowd size estimation, but it's kinda cool.

Hazy Dave said...

@jimspice, if your point is that the crowd doesn't appear very "diverse", consider that most liberal enclaves tend not to be. Madison, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Seattle, etc. There's generally a Milwaukee, Detroit, or Oakland nearby (but not too close)...

Synova said...

I like the Tea Party Barbie pic at the link.

Too cute.

"Glasses, to show she reads."

;-)

Jeremy said...

Kirby Olson said..."The NYT this morning said that Tea Party activists were better-educated than the liberals."

No they didn't. That's a flat out lie:

"Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated"

By KATE ZERNIKE and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
Published: April 14, 2010

"Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."

Unless of course, you consider "the general public" to be exclusively made up of "liberals."

Is that what you think?

Russell said...

The crowd was between 2,600 and 3,000, with the low end of that range being more probable. I know because I counted them. Huge drop from last year:

http://reform-dem.blogspot.com/2010/04/massive-drop-in-attendance-at-madison.html

Since Chip Ahoy doesn't seem to like the idea of actually counting folks, maybe he can propose a more scientific method. Perhaps he would prefer that we all just unquestioningly accept whatever Mark Block chooses to tell us. After all, Block certainly has a long history of spotless integrity, and would never slant the truth for political benefit.