Again with the Grossly Inflated Numbers, Part Deux

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Tim Blair joins the crowd of right wing bloggers trying to spin up the attendance numbers at the Washington DC tea party, responding to my post about Metrorail ridership by quoting the Heritage Foundation, who, as we all know, are completely unbiased (ahem): BIGNESS ENSMALLENED.

…Comparing September 12, 2008, to September 12, 2009, won’t yield reliable information – because the first date fell on a working day (Friday), while the second was a Saturday. The Heritage Foundation’s Mark Kelly digs further into DC’s rail stats:

For a fair comparison, we looked at the Saturday after Labor Day in 2008, which is when September 12 fell in 2009. On September 12, 2009, 437,624 rode metro rail. By comparison, on the Saturday after Labor Day in 2008, 202,528 rode. The difference is 235,096.
Considering various other factors, Kelly arrives at a tentative estimate of 313,000 to 433,000 – much lower than the extreme high-end figures (two million) Johnson dismisses, but far more believable than 70,000, which anyone who’s both familiar with Washington and spent considerable time at sports events among 70,000+ crowds (me) knows is ridiculously inaccurate.

I was going to respond to Tim’s post (because the numbers are being spun outrageously by the Heritage Foundation), but Tim Lambert beat me to it at Scienceblogs: How Many People Attended the September 12 March in DC?

Let’s look at all the figures for Saturdays in September:

Saturday, September 03, 2005 - 295,346
Saturday, September 10, 2005 - 330,385
Saturday, September 17, 2005 - 301,752
Saturday, September 24, 2005 - 464,398
Saturday, September 02, 2006 - 252,003
Saturday, September 09, 2006 - 302,374
Saturday, September 16, 2006 - 300,746
Saturday, September 23, 2006 - 283,604
Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 349,339
Saturday, September 01, 2007 - 312,378
Saturday, September 08, 2007 - 310,703
Saturday, September 15, 2007 - 358,071
Saturday, September 22, 2007 - 325,301
Saturday, September 29, 2007 - 372,669
Saturday, September 06, 2008 - 202,528
Saturday, September 13, 2008 - 362,773
Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 360,571
Saturday, September 27, 2008 - 339,213
Saturday, September 05, 2009 - 300,963
Saturday, September 12, 2009 - 437,624

The numbers range from about 300,000 to 350,000, but there are two outliers: September 6, 2008 with 202,528 and September 24, 2005 with 464,398. What happened on those two days?

On September 6, 2008, Tropical Storm Hanna hit Washington DC:

The first tropical storm to hit the Washington area this season left the region windblown and thoroughly soaked yesterday, causing one fatal car accident, flooding dozens of roads and turning quiet suburban creeks into fast-rising, muddy rivers.
Clearly it is wrong for Blair and Kelly to use the day Hanna hit DC for comparison.

And September 24, 2005 was the day of an anti-war march:

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, who walked the march route, said the protesters achieved the goal of 100,000 and probably exceeded it. Asked whether at least 150,000 showed up, the chief said, “That’s as good a guess as any.
Based on the increase in ridership over a normal September Saturday, the September 12 march was 80% of the size of the September 24, 2005 one, suggesting there were at least 80,000 people and possible as many as 120,000.

Tim Lambert’s analysis of the figures from a wide range of similar dates completely backs up my own totally unscientific estimate of about 100,000 people.

And Lambert points out that Tim Blair was much more willing to accept my arguments on crowd size back in 2005:

And what did Blair say about the September 24 anti-war march? “Numbers seem a little inflated.” To support this he linked to Charles Johnson, whose arguments that the numbers were inflated were somehow much more persuasive to Blair in 2005 than they are now.

And by the way, Tim (Blair, not Lambert), I also have quite a bit of experience with very large crowds — as a touring musician with Al Jarreau, Stanley Clarke and George Duke, I played in front of many very large audiences. The largest was probably the first “Rock in Rio” festival (we shared the stage with Queen, Rod Stewart, and others), which had about 250,000 to 300,000 attendees. From all the pictures and video I saw, the tea party was nowhere near the size of that crowd.

But at least they’re starting to revise the exaggerations downward.

UPDATE at 9/21/09 3:28:01 pm:

There’s another factor in play here (hat tip: AngusMcP): the National Black Family Reunion was held in Washington DC on September 12-13, and was expected to draw about 500,000 people over those two days. So that estimate of 100,000 people may need to be revised — further downward.

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