Posted on 05/19/2024 1:00:20 PM PDT by Libloather
Where’s the 80 million supporters?
Them and stacks of ballots packed away for late night scanning.
In 1976, Pres Gerald Ford visited Champaign, Illinois, and drew a crowd of about 1000 at a high school. I was 24 and not very political. I didn’t care much one way or the other about Ford, but went and stood along the route of his motorcade. People were 2-4 deep, at least where I was. The two things I remember: 1) I was surprised at how emotional I was at seeing our president, and 2) Ford’s car had an open roof and he was standing up and waving to the crowd (surprising to me that presidents still exposed themselves to the public like that).
Rallies aren’t difficult to organize. Romney had huge rallies. Obama had none. Obama beat Romney by 4%.
People keep pointing to Trump rally size, but the fact is rally size means very little for get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drives. People who show up for rallies are already voting for the guy. A pol who does big rallies is just wasting his supporters’ time and his own campaign money. Traditional GOTV involves paying canvassers to get voters to the polls. Trump’s rallies were expensive, with one in Tulsa costing $2.2m. That could have paid for 100,000 canvasser hours.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/politics/trump-tulsa-rally-cost.html
Most campaigns don’t do big rallies because they don’t have unlimited cash. They can do rallies or they can have paid staff bring people to the polls. I’ve seen an estimate of $10 per ballot harvested. Trump’s $2.2m Tulsa rally, for a state that was already in the bag by 30+ points, was inexplicable, and could have been spent on harvesting 220,000 ballots in swing states. But rallies are the closest thing we have to a Roman triumph, and Trump likes the pageantry, so he spent the cash.
Remember when Trump set up a rally in the 2020 post-lockdown environment and something like **only** 6,000 showed up? CNN and the other rags were all screaming about what a dismal failure he was and how it proved his unpopularity.
81 million voters and none ever show up. Not here, not anywhere else. Hmm...
I saw that somewhere election night, but it soon disappeared online. Did you capture it?
The Demonicrats will just have to print more phony ballots and rig the voting machines a little more this time.
I’ve seen bigger mobs than that trying to get into a Five Guys joint.
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