Empty Rooms

Lesson One

I think I was sixteen years old, which would have made it 1973.   I was working on my first official political campaign, Judge Frank Davis for Juvenile Court Judge.  My teacher and first political mentor, Eve Bolton, was managing it.  I don’t think Davis won, but I remember learning a lot from her in my first chance at “getting my hands dirty” in electoral politics.

One of the very first lessons was never, ever, ever let the candidate speak to an empty room.  Empty rooms meant no one cared, and was an absolute failure of political planning.  In fact, make sure the candidate only spoke to packed rooms, with no place left to sit and people crammed in standing against the walls.  That was always the goal.  If you thought one hundred would come, get a room for fifty.  Expecting a thousand, get a room for five hundred.  Outside: make the “audience area” small enough to feel like it was packed.

Energy

It was important to generate the energy in the crowd.  It was important to get the candidate “ginned up” to gain progress in the campaign.  And it was most important so that the cameras caught the feel of a “packed house”.   The television picture of the camera being jostled because there were so many people gets that energy across on the airwaves.  A picture of empty seats and “socially distanced” crowds (a term we never heard of then) sends all the wrong signals.

In all of my forays into campaigns I’ve applied the “venue rule”.  When we had school levy rallies at our high school, we never had them in the “big” gym.  We packed crowds in the cafeteria, or we used the smaller gym at the middle school. The high school gym only looked “packed” with two thousand people or more.  There was no reason to diminish the impact of five hundred or a thousand by putting them in an “empty” room.

The Rally and the Message

Saturday night, the forty-fifth President of the United States held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  As often is the case, the Trump Campaign flew in the face of common sense, holding a mass rally in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Oklahoma’s infection rate is setting records daily and the Trump rally would be the first mass event in the area since the pandemic impacted the United States in March. A “super-spreader event” (another term we never heard of) might be the result, but the Trump campaign can’t care about that. 

Trump’s message is that the pandemic is “over” and we need to “open up”.  It’s a simple campaign calculation:  if the economy doesn’t improve, Trump’s chances for reelection are doomed.  So they have to presume that “life” can start up again, and convince America to do that, even if the death toll from COVID continues to grow.  They are pressing that message in the denigration of “science” on social media, in the President’s stubborn refusal to wear a facemask, and now in their campaign schedule.

And they also want to send a message to their loyalists.  In our current era of “Black Lives Matter” and concern for American institutional oppression, the Trump campaign originally chose Juneteenth for the rally date. They also picked Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the United States’ worse race riot, as the place.  The not so subtle message:  don’t worry, we will soon get back to the “normal – whites in charge” world.  We really don’t have to care about all of this “racial stuff”. 

It Used to Work 

Brad Parscale, the Trump 2020 Campaign Manager, announced that there were over a million requests for tickets.  The venue, the nineteen thousand-seat BOK Center Arena, surely wouldn’t be enough, so the campaign set up a second overflow venue outside, enough for another fifty thousand cheering fans.   Big screens, huge sheets of bullet proof glass, and an outdoor concert-style venue was added.  

The Trump Campaign rally strategy is to offer tickets online that grants the opportunity to stand in line to get in the venue.  Actual admission to the venue is not guaranteed:  it allows the campaign staff to literally select the crowd they want to have.  It also lets them weed out potential protestors or disruptors, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they allow a few to slip in.  It all becomes part of the big “Trump” show, and another foil for the President to riff off of at the lectern.

Never, ever, ever, let the candidate speak to an empty room.  Estimates of the Trump crowd in the BOK center are between six and ten thousand (Forbes).  Roughly half the seats in the arena were empty.  And the big outdoor venue:  they started tearing it down before the President even stepped to the podium.  The camera shots were of empty seats behind the speaker, and the giant bulletproof glass sheets being loaded on trucks.  

What’s the Lesson?

Parscale and the campaign are blaming the “media” for focusing on empty seats and loading trucks.  They’re claiming that fear of “protestors” and COVID kept their crowd away.  I guess the Trump fans are the “snowflakes” after all.  

And then there’s the social media rumor that Parscale was the victim of a “dirty trick”.  Rumor is that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of teenagers requested tickets that they never intended to use.  “Shenanigans” is what MSNBC is calling it. I haven’t checked, but I bet Fox News will have a more sinister term for it.

But here’s the reality check for the reality TV star.  He went to the heart of “Trump Country”, and he couldn’t draw a crowd.  Mr. Trump couldn’t fill a room.  He was literally the only show in town, and they didn’t come to see him.  That might get Parscale fired, and it might get Trump panicked.  But, for a campaign that depends on rallies as their mainline strategy, they might have an even bigger problem.  

Maybe, after four years of chaos and incompetence, “the crowd” is looking for someone else.