RICHMOND, Va. — The crowds packing into arenas to hear Barack Obama speak may be smaller at times then they were in 2008, but on his first day of official campaigning in 2012 the audiences the president addressed in Ohio and Virginia — his first campaign stops — were much larger than just about anything Mitt Romney’s been able to pull.
The Obama campaign told TPM the crowd at Virginia Commonwealth University here Saturday (Obama’s second stop of the day) numbered 8,000, a capacity crowd for VCU’s basketball arena. Republicans noted empty seats at Obama’s first stop on the campus of Ohio State University, but the Obama campaign trumpeted the 14,000 it says it packed into the 18,000-person OSU arena.
By contrast, Romney crowds are still usually measured in the hundreds.