More evidence of an impressive attendance at Stewart and Colbert rallies

Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" are now a little over one month away.  Despite only having two weeks of official promotion, the online following for the "dueling rallies" has grown substantially.  If just half of the cyber followers behind the event actually show up, Stewart and Colbert easily will outperform Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally.

As of early this morning, the Facebook page behind Jon Stewart's rally has 167,000 people pledging to attend and 90,000 saying they might attend.  Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" has 70,000 people pledging to attend and 28,000 people saying they might attend.  As a point of comparison, Glenn Beck's "Rally to Restore Honor" had 184,000 followers when it was done.  Still, there are a several factors which may affect the actual number of people who show up in Washington D.C. on October 30th, including:

(1)  How serious were people in pledging to attend Stewart's and Colbert's rallies?  Some may have thought that "attending" means watching the event on television or online.  Still others may have thought the entire event was a joke.  Other may have pressed the button to attend, but without the time or resources to actually go to Washington D.C.

(2)  Many of the pledged attendees who were serious may lose their enthusiasm and commitment between now and October 30th.  Between now and then, college students will start having exams, many couples who were planning on attending together will break up, and the budgets of many more will tighten.

(3)  Some people who attend may not be on Facebook, and still more may be on Facebook but still be completely unaware of the event's Facebook page.  As a result, some poeple who likely will attend are not showing up in the Facebook numbers.

(4)  Finally, the two rallies overlap and the groups of people pledging to attend the rallies undoubtedly also overlap to some degree.  At this point there is no way of telling how many of Stewart's pledged attendees also are being included in Colbert's numbers.

All of these factors make predicting the attendance at the Stewart and Colbert events about as reliable as predicting the weather.  Having said that, there are some anecdotes that suggest tens of thousands really will attend the event.  The Washington Examiner reports that hotel bookings spiked about 25% after Stewart and Colbert announced their events.  Hotel operators said that this rate of reservations exceeded the rate of reservations at the same time before Beck's rally.  In addition, the forums on Stewart and Colbert's website have many people organizing car pools and planning to share hotel rooms.  There is no way of adding all these individual stories together to get reliable statistics, but there is some hard evidence that many people are making plans to physically attend the event.  For example, one couple from Oklahoma is chartering a bus with 33 other people to attend Stewart's rally.  If Stewart and Colbert are attracting dozens of people from Oklahoma (a relatively rural and conservative area), it surely is a good sign for their attendance come late October.