Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders, an underdog in comparison to his competitor Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination, drew larger crowds over the weekend than Clinton did at an event Monday in New York City.
Clinton hosted a “women only” event in New York Monday, but ticket sales tanked, and at the last minute, the event was opened to men and ticket sales were extended, as Breitbart News previously reported.
Tickets cost $2700 per person. “The ‘Conversation With Hillary Clinton’ event at Midtown law firm Akin Gump was originally aiming to attract 125 women. An email invitation seen by Page Six said the event is ‘just for women,'” reported Ian Mohr for the New York Post.
However, as of Friday before the Monday event, “They’d only sold 50 tickets, so they threw it open to men,” a source said. “Ticket sales were supposed to close at 10 a.m. Sunday, but the hostesses were working the phones and pushed the deadline till Monday.”
Fox News’s Bret Baier reported roughly 90 people showed up to the event where Clinton spoke for half an hour. One of the 90 guests included her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
In contrast, “overflow crowds” greeted the underdog Sanders at his event over the weekend in Iowa.
“Sanders attracted overflow crowds in Ames and Davenport, then Sanders capped his three-day trip with a Saturday night stop in Kensett, where more than 300 people greeted him,” Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson wrote.
In fairness, Sanders’s event was open to everyone—at no cost.
Kurt Meyer, chairman of the Tri-County Democrats, encouraged all Iowans to come meet Sanders.
“Everyone is invited… people who support the Sanders campaign, people who are curious and anyone interested in meeting a presidential candidate,” Meyer said.
His popularity continued on the last day of his tour when Sanders packed a “gym [and] stairwells in Iowa City,” as one publication noted.
The Burlington Free Press wrote, “An estimated 1,100 people turned out to hear Bernie Sanders speak on the final day of his three-day campaign tour to the state.”
Instead of hosting town halls and fielding media interviews, Clinton originally opted for smaller pre-planned events when she visited Iowa.
Clinton visited Iowa after officially launching her presidential campaign Sunday, April 12th. And by the following Tuesday—just two days later—she was sitting down at a community college in Monticello, Iowa, hosting a roundtable with students and teachers as “part of a concerted effort by her campaign to tamp down big expectations and hold personal ‘conversations’ with voters,” reported WKRN.
“I won’t take anything for granted. I’m going to work my heart out to earn every single vote,” Clinton wrote in an email to supporters about fundraising the day after her formal announcement.
WKRN reported two days after Clinton’s White House bid:
Clinton is taking that same low-key approach to fundraising, forgoing the celebrity-studded fundraisers that marked her husband’s presidency, as well as the high-dollar private events put on this year by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a potential GOP rival. Instead, Clinton’s initial appeals for money will be for small-dollar donations collected over the Internet instead of in swanky fundraising blowouts in New York, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.
Ironically, Clinton’s event Monday was both “high-dollar” and in “New York.”