Obama’s Empty Arena Had 5 Times More People In It than Romney’s Ever Drawn

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Last updated on May 8th, 2012 at 10:05 am

The reality about Obama’s empty arena is that he drew nearly five times more people to his event in Ohio than Mitt Romney has drawn for any event all year.

On ABC’s This Week David Axelrod pointed out that Obama drew 11,000 more people to Ohio yesterday than Mitt Romney has drawn to any event all year:

Here is the transcript from This Week:

TAPPER: One of the issues that you guys are going to be facing, one of the headwinds is the lack of enthusiasm, or at least less enthusiasm. When I covered you guys, your campaign in 2007, 2008, you would — you and your staff members would excitedly regale us with the huge numbers of crowds, crowd estimates. At OSU, at Ohio State yesterday, in a stadium that seats about 18,000, there were roughly 14,000 people there. Now, granted, those 14,000 were very excited. They supported the president. But there were still more than 4,000 empty seats. Doesn’t that indicate that there is a problem you’re facing when it comes to fewer people who are excited about the president?

AXELROD: Jake, you should have gone along on the whole trip. In Virginia, there was an overflow crowd. And that’s the way it is. But the fact is that 14,000 is 11,000 more than the largest crowd that Mitt Romney has ever drawn. So I think there’s enthusiasm for the president’s candidacy. And, you know, we’ve got tremendous volunteer response. Just from that event, we got thousands of more volunteers in our campaign. I am certain that we are going to

The rally that Alexrod was referring to took place outside of Denver in Centennial, Colorado on the night before the state’s Republican primary. Why did 3,000 people show up to see Mitt Romney that night? Centennial is the home of the Denver LDS temple. The area also contains a high Mormon population, which is why Romney was able to draw 3,000 people.

President Obama still drew 11,000 more people to his rally than Romney has drawn at any event since his presidential campaign began. What’s going on here is that the Romney campaign is desperately trying to project their enthusiasm problems on to Obama. It seems like only those who share his faith are excited about voting for Romney. In order to cover up the fact that few people like their nominee,the Republicans are going to seize on every empty seat at an Obama rally as chance to proclaim that there is no enthusiasm out there for the president.

The right is so desperate to proclaim Barack Obama a failure that they used a photo taken of the arena before Obama was speaking as “evidence” that the building was empty. The whole point of the photo and meme was to get the media to assume that Obama has an enthusiasm problem. By suggesting that Obama has an enthusiasm problem, Republicans are trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that will depress Obama supporter turnout in the fall.

Every action that the Romney campaign has taken and will take in 2012 has been based in negativity. The Republicans know that they can’t motivate their voters to supporters to support Romney, so their only chance of winning is to demotivate Obama supporters and depress turnout. The only ways Mitt Romney could draw 14,000 people to a rally is if there were a lot of Mormons, or he were paying people to show up.

Mitt Romney couldn’t draw a crowd with an Etch A Sketch.

If Republicans continue to insist on having this discussion, the Obama campaign will be happy to oblige. Every time the right focuses on crowd size, they highlight the fact that President Obama is much more popular than their nominee.

The Romney people better start firing up the buses and getting those Mormon college students on board, or prepare for a barrage of stories about how low the attendance is at Romney campaign events. Enthusiasm should be judged comparatively. And compared to Mitt Romney, people are exponentially more enthusiastic about supporting a second term for Barack Obama.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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