INDIANOLA, Iowa — It’s not a great sign of confidence when a campaign books a modest room for a rally the day before the caucuses. It’s even starker when the campaign intentionally shrinks the room’s capacity by putting the camera riser in the middle of the room.
That’s exactly what Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has done, unnecessarily, here at Simpson College for a morning rally. Her campaign chose a conference room with a capacity of slightly over 600 for the rally. Then they put the press riser with all the cameras in the middle of the room and filled the back half of the room with press tables (more than are being used) and a couple of hundred square feet of empty space.
This configuration, according to a fire marshal, means the room can hold only about 375 people, not counting the press. This makes the room look packed on camera, even with the small crowd.
This precaution was perhaps a mistake, as more than 600 people showed up for this event.
Hundreds of would-be attendees are locked out of the rally in an overflow room. Warren briefly addressed the overflow crowd just before the event.
The big crowd is a good sign for Warren, who has been flagging in polls. But not everyone in the room is a Warren supporter.
A group of high school students from the Blake School in Minneapolis is here with a politics class. A dozen or so foreign political consultants are in the room as part of a caucus tour. And plenty of the attendees are undecided, even leaning toward other candidates.
