Tulsa Advance

The President’s Tulsa rally was a disappointing campaign event, but it offered useful lessons for those of us who stage events for a living, as I have done for presidential campaigns in every election cycle since 2004. The pandemic has forced all event planners to re-examine public gatherings in the era of social distancing, but the big lesson from Tulsa for me is that the fundamentals still hold. 

Remember the news reports that six members of Trump’s advance team tested positive for the coronavirus? That’s what I used to do. They call it “advance” because you arrive in the city in advance of the event, work with the United States Secret Service, production vendors and volunteers to make sure a visit goes off without a hitch, and then go on down the road to the next town to do it all over again. We are the roadies of politics and know that the highest and best use of a bicycle rack is not to store bicycles. 

And I can tell you, watching the news out of Tulsa was like seeing my nightmares come to life. I would stay up the night before large crowd events and scare myself wondering if we had overestimated the crowd size for the following day's event. Because the dirty little secret about campaign events is that they are not really about the people in attendance.

To advance staff, as much as I hate to admit it, it is all about the images that will, hopefully, outlive the event. Sure, the campaign’s field and digital teams will do their best to collect data from those in attendance. But from an advance staffer's point of view, we will easily spend six figures on one large rally to produce content for local, national and international media. Advance’s goal is for the earned-media value of an event to justify the campaign’s investment.

This is why an advance staffer’s hardest job is to pack nearly every single attendee into a venue, often up against fire marshal code limits, so that the event looks and feels dramatic in the news coverage. It's all smoke and mirrors, and if you do enough events you get pretty darn good at predicting rally sizes (calculating for flake rates, aka the percentage of people who RSVP’ed likely to be absent) and designing events to convey the campaign’s message for that day. 

The campaign did not just fail to accurately anticipate the number of attendees but made the error of overpromising a massive, spillover crowd. Trust me, this was not the message the campaign was hoping for. Claims have been made that TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans "sank" the rally by hyping up RSVPs. I will tell you, they most certainly did not help the campaign, but trolling alone cannot explain the massive disconnect between what the President's advance team was expecting and the crowd that ultimately showed up. 

You never announce you are going to address an overflow crowd, let alone promise ahead of time that the President will speak there. First rule of overflow event space, no one talks about the overflow event space. You are even supposed to make it look like you had to scramble to get the overflow site space up and running in the first place. I have done this so many times in rural New Hampshire or Ohio; the press just eat it up. 

The consequence of bragging ahead of time about the massive crowd that was coming likely also convinced many not to come. A Morning Consult poll in May found that Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to say they’d be comfortable with attending a political rally before November. But that same poll found that only 13% of Republicans said they’d be willing to do so as early as June. Hyping the crowd probably told people who RSVP’d that they would be stuck in a packed crowd if they attended the rally and not missed if they skipped it.  

Tulsa was an unforced error by the Trump campaign. An advance staffer’s goal is to make sure the images that come from an event convey excitement, popular support, and momentum. None of that happened this weekend. The President used to be famous for saying, "You're fired!" I predict we will hear that phrase very shortly in relation to Saturday's event.