Now to resume our “numbers game.” Hillary Clinton drew 90.9% of the votes in District Columbia during the 2016 presidential election. The counties in Maryland and Virginia surrounding the District voted in her favor by smaller but still significant margins, rating from 65.3% in Fairfax County, Virginia to above 75% in Baltimore, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in Maryland. The point is that the vast majority of the people living closest to the national’s capital tend to vote for Democrats, and they did not vote for Mr. Trump – so one would expect that they might turn out in smaller numbers to celebrate the inauguration of a Republican than of a Democrat. The consensus is that Mr. Spicer’s and President Trump’s claims were wrong – and Mr. Spicer has said that his statement was based on incorrect information. President Obama drew a much larger audience, but President Trump probably drew a larger crowd than any other Republican president. It would have been better had Mr. Spicer left it at that,
Some Trump folks think that inflating the numbers will make him look more popular; some anti-Trump folks see crowd size as one more tool to minimize his presidency. In the end, the size of the crowd is significant but not vital. In the United States the crowd size that counts the most is the number who turn out on election day – not on inauguration day.