9-12 Protest Rally Attendence Estimates Vary Widely

Saturday's "Tea Party" rally in Washington, D.C. may have far exceeded almost all expectations.

Some liberal websites and blogs are putting the number much lower, with estimates ranging anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000. Based on photographs and video footage of the event the numbers would appear to be much larger than those estimates. The ticketed area of the National Mall alone has a capacity of 240,000 and the crowd clearly filled that area and beyond. The public access area of the Mall holds nearly 950,000 and photographs of that area show it to be at or near capacity, although it has been reported that other groups were holding events in that area.

Many right-wing pundits wildly overestimated the number of conservatives who marched on Washington, D.C. this past Saturday.  In actuality, ABC News estimated that between 60,000 and 70,000 people were at the rally. Certainly, that's a significant amount of people, but two million it is not. Fox News put the number at "tens of thousands," a figure echoed by the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press.

FreedomWorks, the main organizers of the Tea Party event in Washington this past weekend, has dramatically lowered its estimate for the size of the crowd at the event from 1.5 million, a number the group now concedes was a mistake, to between 600,000 and 800,000 people -- though this is still substantially more than the tens of thousands that most mainstream media outlets have estimated, and which FreedomWorks wholeheartedly rejects.

As many as 30,000 demonstrators are expected to congregate first thing this morning at Freedom Plaza and march from the White House to Capitol Hill, where grassroots organizers and Republican members of Congress, including Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Representative Tom Price of Georgia, will speak.

The line of protesters spread across Pennsylvania Avenue for blocks, all the way to the capitol, according to the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.