Does crowd size matter? If you ask political beancounters on the left and right, it matters a lot, and if you ask President Donald Trump, it’s all that matters.
Pundits are comparing the crowd size of the March for Life event against that of the Women’s March, and it looks like this year both marches had a huge attendance, though, one may have garnered more celebrity endorsements.
|
Advertisement |
An estimated 650,000 attended a huge March for Life rally in D.C. in 2013. In previous years, numbers ranged around 400,000. According to The Washington Post, this year’s event was likely to draw hundreds of thousands of participants, similar to previous years. 
A more exact estimate isn’t yet available as of the time of publication, but we will add the number once it is. (A very early version of this story erroneously put the number at 20,000, which was actually the attendance at the very first March for Life event.) President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Cardinal Timothy Doland, and Sen. Joni Ernst were among the people who spoke during the rally, to an excited and enthusiastic crowd. Other “sister rallies” took place in other parts of the nation. If you look specifically at comparing crowd size, this event was not estimated to be quite as big as the Women’s March or Trump’s inauguration, but it still had a very sizable attendance. Organizers told The Washington Post that they didn’t expect to match the Women’s March or the inauguration attendance, but they did expect hundreds of thousands to show up. The Women’s March on Washington was attended by an estimated 485,000 people last Saturday. And numbers for Trump’s inauguration ranged from 700,000 to 900,000, with a couple unverified sources estimating the numbers as being even lower. So when looking at the events from this past week, all the events were quite large. Back in 2013, 650,000 people were estimated to have attended the March for Life in D.C. But the biggest win in crowd size still goes to President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, with an estimated 1.8 million attending. h/t heavy
Other similarly large events included a March for Women’s Lives in 2004, with an estimated attendance of 500,000 to 1.15 million, a Million Moms March in 2000 with an estimated attendance of 750,000, and an anti-Vietnam protest in 1969 with an estimated attendance of 600,000.