The Official Blog of National Taxpayers Union
Tax Day Tea Party Turnout By State
Posted by Dominic Rupprecht - April 16, 2009While MSNBC and CNN were busy making
obscene jokes, more than a quarter million Americans turned out for Tax Day Tea Parties.
The numbers aren't exact with countless tea parties, like the one held in my favorite place on earth (
Lewisburg, Pa), flying under the national radar. However, fivethirtyeight.com is estimating turnout at
262,025 and Pajama's Media is estimating
299,211 came out.
Relying on the FiveThirtyEight.com prediction (because they have news links to all their numbers, although they did leave out Lewisburg and Harrisburg, Pa) here's what I came up with for turnout by state:
Incidentally, I think Alaska should get a gold star for turning out as many people as Pennsylvania even though it has about 1/20th of the population.
Add Comment -
Sharilee said on Apr 17 2009 at 4:40pm
The map is way off for Massachusetts. The two biggest tea parties were Worcester, MA at 2000+ and Boston at 1000+.
See pics from the Worcester Tea Party at http://worcesterteaparty.com/?page_id=164
Just Plain Bill said on Apr 17 2009 at 5:06pm
Redding CA had three parties, estimated attendance is 3000+ source is www.shastax.org.
Demian said on Apr 18 2009 at 9:21pm
A freeper is reporting 750K:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2232343/posts
Dominic Rupprecht said on Apr 20 2009 at 9:40am
Because the tea parties were organized at the grassroots in small towns and communities rather than a grand march on Washington (because, let's face it, taxpayers have jobs and can't go to DC to parade) it's exceedingly difficult to aggregate all these numbers.
That said, I think it's fair to take a couple things from the above chart:
1. A lot of taxpayers turned out.
2. They turned out in all states, red, blue, and purple.
I think it's also fair to assume the news media probably underestimated or missed numbers in relatively equal numbers, so while the raw numbers are obviously not accurate, I think it's not unreasonable to use these numbers to get a sense of which states had the biggest turnouts.
That said, if you have reports on your tea parties, keep passing them along. We LOVE reporting on all the great work you're doing!
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