Yahoo has given a click-bait headline to a Reuters report, “Obama makes rare campaign trail appearance, people leave early.” The lede:
President Barack Obama made a rare appearance on the campaign trail on Sunday with a rally to support the Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, but early departures of crowd members while he spoke underscored his continuing unpopularity.
There’s no more information in the piece about the departures. How many left out of how many? Is there evidence that Obama’s speech was what drove them away and not, say, the Ravens game?
No doubt, the president has some very low poll numbers. But his job approval among Democrats—presumably the main participants at a rally for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate—remains quite high, at 73 percent in the most recent national poll. It strikes me as unlikely that large numbers of people would have left because Obama was there. Indeed, if his appearance was advertised in advance, one presumes that a large number of people who would not otherwise have attended a political rally on an October Sunday were in the crowd just to get a glimpse.\
UPDATE: Commenter Nikki points me to a report (“President Obama Campaigns For Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown In Md.”) from the Baltimore CBS affiliate which gives on a decidedly different take on the story. The relevant portions:
Less than three weeks to go until Marylanders hit the voting booths to cast their ballots. One of the men who wants to be governor is getting a big show of support from the president.
Derek Valcourt explains the rally drew a huge crowd of thousands waiting to see the president.
There were so many people at the rally that some of them couldn’t even get in. As expected, the president said Anthony Brown was the right man for the job in a rally that was all about revving up energy for the Democrat’s campaign.
They waited for hours in long lines. Nearly 8,000 people packed an Upper Marlboro high school auditorium for a rally in support of Anthony Brown’s bid to become governor.
[…]
Some of Brown’s supporters and even a few undecideds say hearing from the president means a lot.
“If the president is behind him, he must be doing something great,” said Carlton Davids.
“It just shows he’s a formidable candidate,” said Sheila Hayes.
“I was not sure which way I was going to go, but I arrived for Obama. So if he’s going there, I’m going there with him,” Ogbonna Hopkins said.
Now, it’s still possible some number of people left before the event’s conclusion, possibly even before the conclusion of the president’s speech. But this certainly doesn’t read like there was some sort of mass exodus.
