MARCH SADNESS: Washington, D.C. Anti-Gun Rally Draws HALF As Many People As Initially Predicted

Initial crowd projections seem to indicate that Saturday’s March For Our Lives drew around 200,000 anti-gun protesters to Washington, D.C. — less than half of what organizers predicted.

According to The Daily Caller, March for Our Lives organizers had predicted anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 attendees, and major progressive organizations across the country worked hard to handle the logistics of getting thousands of students — and thousands more adult protesters — to Washington, D.C.

Those numbers would have made the March for Our Lives one of the largest protests to ever descend on the National Mall — larger even than the Women’s March (440,000), the 1995 Million Man March (approximately 400,000), and the annual March for Life (approximately 250,000 to 300,000).

But at the end of the day, the official count was barely 200,000. DDIS, a Virginia-based firm working with CBS News to estimate crowd size, said that “[t]he peak crowd size was 202,796 people, with a margin of error of 15 percent.” The March took place officially between noon and 3 p.m. EST. The March reached its peak, the firm told CBS, around 1 p.m.

March for Our Lives organizers were telling media on Saturday that 800,000 people were involved in the Washington, D.C. demonstration. Clearly they vastly overestimated attendance, either out of wishful thinking or a strange desire to misrepresent their own numbers. DDIS’s numbers indicate that attendance was a fraction of that total.