About a third of the seats were empty when
Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders stopped to give a lunchtime talk to seniors here [
Manchester, NH] during a
swing through the state.
This is from an article in the
Boston
Globe. It doesn’t look good for Bernie. A few months ago he drew an
audience of 10,000 in
Portland,
ME.
However, at the same time
the Burlington Free Press ran an
article under this headline: Overflow crowd lines up to hear Bernie Sanders in N.H.
This article was also picked up by USA TODAY.
What are you supposed to believe? While some “news” media purposely distort
or even misrepresent news item, as far as I know,
The Boston Globe and
USA TODAY are pretty straightforward. So
which one of these articles is true?
The fact is, both articles are true, but they describe events in a different
context. The
Globe article tells us
that the senator was speaking to a bunch of seniors, but it never specifies
more. Presumably it was some kind of senior center in
Manchester, NH.
In the room where Bernie spoke, a group of seniors were playing cards. They
didn’t come to hear a presidential candidate. They came to play cards. The
event was part of a two-day swing through
New Hampshire. By itself it was not a big
deal.
The overflow crowd was in another
New
Hampshire town, Warner. In Warner, Sanders spoke in
the town hall. Evidently it had been talked up more than the event in
Manchester had. There was
not enough room in the building for everyone to get in. After Bernie spoke to
the audience inside the building, he came out and spoke to the overflow
crowd.
So, is Bernie’s support falling, or is it surging? You can’t tell from these
articles, especially the
Globe article.
Except to say that he senator spoke to a group of seniors, it does not say
where. One-third of the seats were empty. How many were full? What was the
capacity of the room where he spoke? How well was the speech publicized ahead
of time? The article says that Bernie "stopped to give a lunchtime talk." The wording suggests that the event might have been impromptu.
The
US TODAY article, on the other hand, tells
us that the event was in a town hall in a small
New Hampshire town (population 2800). Having
grown up in a small town in
New
Hampshire, I know that the town hall could not hold
more than a couple of hundred. We do not know how many people the place where
Bernie spoke in
Manchester
could hold.
Before we can draw valid conclusions about these speeches in the
Granite State, we need to know more facts than
we are given in these two news articles.
