Joe Biden is a BILLION points ahead of Bernie Sanders in the polls!
Okay, that is a bit of exaggeration but it somewhat reflects the Biden hype the mainstream media has been reporting recently about the 2020 campaign. However, the big question is if Biden is so far above his primary opponents in the polls then why is the turnout of his campaign crowds so small?
That is the question that Marc Caputo and Natasha Korecki of Politico tried to answer on Tuesday primarily by relaying lame excuses provided by Team Biden:
He’s dominating in the polls, his fundraising is going gangbusters and he’s showing broad support from key political players in the early presidential states.
So where are the big energetic crowds, the lines around the block to get into Joe Biden’s events?
Bring on the lame excuses! Here we go:
To Biden’s campaign, attendance figures are a meaningless metric. Focusing on crowd size is Trump’s game, it says, an emphasis on style over substance that attempts to turn audience engagement into an argument about the 76-year-old Biden’s energy level.
Didn't the Democrats and the liberal media also say that about Trump's crowd sizes during the 2016 campaign while insisting that he had no path to 270 electoral votes:
Crowd size, after all, is an imperfect metric to measure a campaign’s vitality. While it can be a revealing indicator, it still lacks the scientific underpinning of polling or the fixed-dollar figures associated with fundraising. Nor does it account for the judgment of elected and influential Democrats across the country.
Team Biden made that excuse the first time, Politico need not make it rhyme (click “expand”):
Last Saturday, when Biden held a rally for his headquarters’ opening in Philadelphia, his campaign estimated the crowd size was 6,000 — a count that some local observers thought might be generous. One local elected Democrat who supports Biden privately told POLITICO the rally was smaller and less energetic than expected.
The event fell far short of the size his surrogates predicted in one of the nation’s largest Democratic cities. Just before Biden formally announced his candidacy last month, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped organize a fundraiser for Biden, had loftier expectations.
“He’s enormously popular here,” Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor, said in a late April interview. “We could get tens and tens of thousands of people … For one rally, I think we could do that.”
It’s not just the size of Biden’s events that are modest, he’s also holding far fewer of them than his primary competitors. Since his launch, he’s visited Iowa only once. And while Democrats crisscrossed early presidential primary states during the long Memorial Day weekend, Biden took it off.
Pssst! Hey Politico. While relaying the excuses for Biden's low crowd sizes, you might also have noted that many in those crowds might have been drafted to be there due to being union members.
We now finish up with an amusing excuse provided by James Carville:
James Carville, one of the masterminds behind Bill Clinton’s campaigns for president, said those criticisms miss an essential point about the kind of no-frills-no-thrills campaign he is running.
“He’s never been a candidate who has run on excitement. He has run on ‘you can trust me. I’m a good guy. My heart is in the right place. I’m human. You know me. I’m well-liked,’” Carville said. “Their theory of the case is people are tired of the circus. And it takes an experienced hand to settle everything down to get us back to some era of sanity.”
Got that? Joe Biden is drawing small crowds because he's.... BORING!
