The Tea Party Attendance Count

Pajamas TV currently has it at 462,803. The writeup, obviously done a little earlier...

PJTV's Crowd Estimates for Tea Parties Still Climbing

The estimated number of participants in yesterday's tea parties - sent in by citizen journalists who signed up to the site to enter attendance data from the event they participated in - currently stands at more than 383,000. More than 850 ordinary Americans signed up to report on their community's protest. The number of participants will continue to rise as more of our field observers upload their photos and videos of the events and send us their attendance figures.

PJTV is obviously going to err on the side of a preacher count, so those of you who are rollling your eyes at the tea party business can look to FiveThirtyEight who has it at 300k +

Here are the new and revised listings; followed by a complete list from top to bottom. The new listings bring the cumulative estimate of attendance to 311,460 between 346 cities. The same caveats apply as before: although I've included any estimates I've found that seem even reasonably nonpartisan and credible, there were many protests in which reliable crowd estimates were not readily available or where there wasn't even any press coverage at all. However, essentially all major cities and state capitals should now be accounted for.

I think Nate is trying to be fair, but I didn't see little Dayton, OH in that list and they had the largest attendance of any city event in OH. This is not as surprising as you would think. Everyone knows that Cincinnati is a fairly big "red" population center, but the farming belt in the western OH counties around Dayton are also extremely conservative. This is also John Boehner's district so there you go.

So add another 8k to Nate's count, and likely we'll have a valid number with an upper bound of mid 400's and the lower at 300k. This is not a bad showing, not bad at all. It has at least one scoffer eating a little crow.

Also note that the tea parties dominated the news cycle for two days now. Not bad for a disorganized leaderless mess. Well either that, or Dick Armey is a super genius with astroturfing campaigns and has been hiding it all these years. Who knew?

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