250-500K protesters at DC: I thought that this was supposed to be hard?

Transterrestrial Musings gives two different ways to measure the crowd; the first one estimates between 240K-320K for the marchers and the second estimates between 330K-500K at the Capitol itself.  Either way: use this as your baseline for what an actual populist, grassroots protest looks like.  I mention this mostly for the Other Side, who seem highly incensed that we’re making this sort of thing look easy.

Which it is, actually: you just have to be on the side of righteousness, that’s all.

Moe Lane

PS: More via Instapundit.

Crossposted to RedState.

One thought on “250-500K protesters at DC: I thought that this was supposed to be hard?”

  1. Hi – I’m the guy who got frustrated and ran those crowd estimates last night. I was deliberately conservative in my assumptions. This morning, there’s firm data that the actual numbers were considerably larger.

    My estimate of 240K-320K on the march itself was based on the assumption that the marchers averaged 6 to 8 square feet per person, and marched at 1 mph. Now, from http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2009/09/912-march-it-wasnt-just-numbers.html, there’s actual data – someone had a people-meter at 11th St along the march route and counted 450,000 people passing. (Go with the higher crowd density and assume the actual march pace was closer to 1.4 mph, and voila, the estimate gives 450,000 marchers, matching the actual count on the route. There’s nothing like real-world data to refine an analytical model.)

    Stacy McCain goes on to provide considerable additional information from onsite about transport backups slowing arrivals, people arriving via routes other than the march, and people arriving and leaving the whole time. Combined with the photos I’ve seen since of LOTS of protesters backed up across 3rd St and down the Mall, it starts to make an overall total in the high hundreds of thousand, possibly approaching a million, look highly plausible.

    Bottom line: Given the 450,000 people-meter number for the march itself, it was provably “hundreds of thousands”, and possibly as high as a million overall. All the media outlets minimizing the turnout as “tens of thousands” could stand to be firmly corrected. I’m sure there are people reading here who’d enjoy the exercise

    Henry Vanderbilt

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