Pierre Poilievre is boasting about his rallies. But does size indicate success?
CBC
At a news conference in Edmonton on Tuesday, it was Pierre Poilievre who decided to ask the media a couple questions, specifically about the size of the crowd at his rally in the city the night before.
Before a Globe and Mail reporter was able to ask her question — whether the size of his rallies matter — Poilievre was inquiring to her how she liked his campaign event.
He has asked reporters this question before, at other events that have drawn thousands of people.
This time, in reference to the Edmonton event which the campaign said may have drawn around 15,000 people, the Conservative leader also asked when was the last time Canada had a rally that big.
"I think to have 10 to 15,000 people at one political rally, this is a movement like we've never seen because people want change," Poilievre said. "They want to put our country first for a change."
Poilievre's comments about his rallies, it seems, are to indicate his campaign's momentum, despite polling that shows the Conservatives trailing the Liberals.
But the size of a political rally may not be indicative of wide-scale support or predictive of electoral success, some analysts say.
"Crowd sizes are not a good measure of political support," said Nathaniel Rakich, the former senior elections analyst with the now-defunct political analysis website FiveThirtyEight.
Polls, Rakich said, really are the best indicator of how a campaign is faring.
"Polls are scientific. They take a representative sample of the population and measure support among that. Crowd sizes are not scientific," he said.
Rakich said there is some recent data that calls into question the value of crowd sizes as a measure of candidate support.
The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, collected data on U.S. political crowds. It compared the average size of the crowds at rallies featuring then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Despite his boasts to the contrary, Trump's crowds were actually much smaller than Harris's, according to CCC. Although Harris had a much shorter time to campaign, CCC looked at the size of six of her rallies, which it said ranged from 10,000 to 15,000, for an average size of about 13,400.
For Trump, who had been campaigning longer than Harris, the CCC looked at the crowd sizes of 28 of his rallies. His average crowd size was about 5,600.
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