When Size Does Matter

6,200 people at Trump rally in Tulsa. Acts that had bigger crowds at the same venue in 2019:

- Sha Na Na
- The Pips (w/o Gladys Knight)
- Loverboy
- John Tesh
- The West Virginia Touring Company of La Traviata

— Al Franken (@alfranken) June 21, 2020

One thing I have learned this weekend is that people are really, really bad at estimating amounts based on pictures.

“We all saw the pictures last night,” [Chris] Wallace explained. “The arena was no more than two-thirds full. And the outdoor rally was cancelled because there was no overflow crowd. What happened?”

Except it wasn't even 2/3rds full.  It wasn't even 1/3rd full:

(Update on Sunday at 10 a.m.: Even saying half empty may be an exaggeration. Andrew Little, the Public Information Officer for the Tulsa Fire Department, told Forbes that attendance at the rally was just under 6,200 people. Update at 1:30 p.m.: A Trump campaign official said 12,000 people entered the arena.)

"Even saying half empty may be an exaggeration," because the Slate article headline says the arena was "half-empty."

This is why we leave such estimations to the "experts" and even then, we are dubious:

Crowd sizes are perhaps the most meaningless metric and one good outcome from last night would be if the media paid less attention to them going forward, but probably the opposite will happen and they will become an even bigger deal.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 21, 2020

On the other hand, context is all:

When the many thousands of people who have been taking to the streets over the past theee weeks vastly outnumber the meager attendance of an aggressively publicized and over-hyped presidential rally, that is not meaningless.

— Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) June 21, 2020

Sometimes size DOES matter. Especially crowd size.  Sometimes that shifts the whole balance of the world.