The Rally to Restore Sanity has come to a close, and crowd estimates are beginning to trickle in. It is clear that a huge number of people attended the event (see photos from the rally here), but the calculations vary among sources.
According to CBS News, 215,000 people showed up for the rally on Saturday. By comparison, CBS estimated that 87,000 — just 40% of the Sanity Rally estimation — attended Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in August.
Canada’s CTV, meanwhile, wrote that 250,000 people were estimated to have partaken in the Rally to Restore Sanity.
Earlier on Saturday, Brian Stelter tweeted that the Parks Service approximated that “well over 200,000” attended Saturday’s rally.
For full coverage of the rally, check out HuffPost’s comprehensive live blog of the event, including videos, photos and more.
6 thoughts on “Rally To Restore Sanity Attendance Estimated In Hundreds Of Thousands”
I found this article really helpful in explaining the method for (relatively) accurately estimating crowd sizes – which many news sources seem to dismiss in favor of guessing. I don’t know if this outside company also made any estimates on the Rally to Restore Sanity, but their estimate of Beck’s rally and the accompanying photos made it understandable how they got to 87,000 +/- 9,000 (still a lot of people).
https://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20015214-503544.html
I loved the show…BUT come on! 87,000 for Becks rally? Are you kidding? Most estimates were 300 – 500 thousand! Stop the politics and just report the news.
Um, that’s the news, not the politics. The 87,000 figure came from AirPhotosLive, an objective nonpartisan company that specializes in high-altitude, photo-based crowd estimation. The higher estimates you heard were totally subjective and not based on any measured method (I as there man, and I’m telling you, it was *huge*!). No, that doesn’t count. Neither does Beck’s own claim of 500,000. He demonstrated no mathematically rigourous method to support that figure, and if he had, he clearly had a vested bias on the subject…as would have Jon Stewart if he had reported an estimate for this Rally.
87,000 is the official estimate for Beck’s rally, not the biased estimate.
I live in D.C. and, believe me, Becks rally wasn’t even close.
The 87,000 IS the news. The 300-500K is the politics.
Sorry to burst your bubble, kiddo.
What did the sanity rally have that Beck’s didn’t? A bunch of satellite rally’s in other metroplitan cities across the country making the numbers rather important actually. If you count all the people involved in the sanity rallies, not just in D.C., you get a whole lot of sanity in the U.S. Amen!
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