Seriously, it’s not: it’s an observation. Always pick a venue with LESS capacity than you expect. LESS, LESS, LESS.
Panorama of crowd and stadium here in Mobile. #trump. pic.twitter.com/rLDMDzIrKo
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) August 22, 2015
I think that that stadium has 40K seats, and my quick eyeball of it says that it’s about half full. Having 20K show up for a primary stump speech is great. Especially if you have them show up at a 18K-rated venue, ‘forcing’ you to have an overflow section. But see what that NBC reporter did? She made that image into a ‘candidate brings in fewer people than expected’ narrative. You don’t want reporters to do that. Especially if you’re running as a Republican. Because the Media hates you, and wants you to die in a fire.
Look, I don’t pretend to be anything except self-taught in this stuff. But I have been in this gig for a decade, and I think that – based on this – Donald Trump may not have a campaign manager with the ability to tell him ‘no, we do it this way and we have a reason for doing it this way.’ This choice of venue wasn’t a blunder, but it was in fact a mistake.
Moe Lane
On the other hand, it’s probably difficult to gauge what the crowd size would be at such an early stage. On the gripping hand, 20k at one event probably eclipses the number of people that have turned out for Hillary this entire year. Or Jeb.
Apparently, and to NBC’s discredit, the venue was moved at the last minute from the 2000-seat civic center, and 30,000 showed up.
.
It probably was the only venue in the area that could handle at least 20K, so the spinnable optics had to be endured.
As I said, unless you’re a Democrat you can’t trust the Media to not screw you over. 🙂
It turns out, he did.
The planned venue only held 2,000. The stadium was a last minute “oh sh!t!” substitution. CNN put attendance at “over 30,000”.