Adam at the St. Louis Activist Hub catches St. Louis Teaparty guru Bill Hennessey wildly overstating the strength of his support.
Hennessey wrote a letter to Claire McCaskill claiming that 10,000 St. Louisans go to tea parties (a figure that itself is highly debatable) and that for every single one of these, one thousand more support their ideals. As Adam points out, that would mean Bill has 10 million St. Louis area supporters.
There are less than six million residents in the entire state of Missouri.
that analysis of the sign-in sheets at meetings with members of the House of Reps showed that over thirty % were not from the district of the particular representative. I think that you might see lots of the same people at each of these events that Claire has set up — which is fine since she is a state senator — but does rather indicate that these folks are staging a show where there really isn’t one.
They always inflate their numbers as well. At the meeting between McCaskill staff person and AFP, AFP clailmed 1000 attendees — I counted about three hundred and added another hundred to be charitable. Same with tea parties in Feb. Local TV crew and observers estimated about 150-300 people — a few weeks later I read where the organizers (Dana Loesch this time) were saying that 3000 had attended.