60K or 1.5 Million Protesters?

We have to give credit for all the folks that took off from work and attended the 9/12 Taxpayer March in Washington D.C. on September 12th. I’ve heard a lot of different crowd estimates circulating the Internet. At one point, I heard this was the largest public demonstration in United States history with over 2 million attendees.

“Teabaggers” claiming, erroneously, that they had over 1.5 million protesters. There’s organizers that are even stating ABC News made the crowd estimate claim first, which has been disproven. ABC never said there were 1.5 million people at the march. In fact, ABC only said that the Washington DC fire department claimed there were 60k to 70k protesters.

Nate Silver, from FiveThirtyEight, writes:

But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That’s not a twofold or threefold exaggeration — it’s roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn’t “in error”, as Malkin gently puts it. He lied.

Malkin, who to her credit later corrected the error, frets that it might be used to by liberals to “discredit the undeniably massive turnout”. She’s right to be worried — it absolutely will be used that way. If you don’t want to be discredited, then don’t, as Kibbe did, tell a ridiculous (and easily disprovable) lie.

So there you have it!

At tops, there were possibly 70K demonstrators, which is a large number of frustrated citizens, angry with our central government and their overzealous spending spree. Regardless the actual crowd total, the pictures clearly demonstrate (some) Americans are not satisfied with the current operations of this federal government and their administration.

Most of those in attendance at 9/12 Taxpayer March were Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents.

Note: President Obama’s inaugural address had approximately 800,000 attendees based on satelitte images taken at 11:20 EST. Comparing the images of both events, Obama’s swearing-in and address had about 15 times more attendees than the September 12th march.