I do not understand their obsession with crowd size. 
This is ancient history; the sparkling old dude was a two-year-old in diapers when it happened, back in late October 1948.
There's a certain photograph that was famous for years, where a photographer from the
Omaha World-Herald snapped a picture of presidential candidate Harry Truman making a campaign speech in Omaha. The place was vast.....and empty. Maybe about twelve, a dozen or so, people in seating set up for a few thousand.
That photograph was published nationally, and based upon that, many people figured Harry was done for; if those were the crowds he was getting, Thomas Dewey was going to bury him in a landslide.
Ooops.
You and I understand, sir, that not all tools by which one measures popularity (polls, crowd size, television appearances, whatnot) are accurate. But that's a little too deep for the primitives, with their lesser intelligence, to "get."