Hillary Clinton’s keynote address at the National Baptist Convention in Kansas City, Missouri on Thursday evening failed to draw a crowd of the size that organizers and Clinton’s campaign expected, so they partitioned the room to hide thousands of empty seats.
A reporter for NBC’s Kansas City affiliate, Brian Abel, tweeted that event organizers shut off the lights in a large portion of the unoccupied room and then partitioned it off from where attendees were sitting.
Convention hall turned out lights in un-occupied part of hall for @HillaryClinton speech, now partitioning it off pic.twitter.com/O5Az8EfiRD
— Brian Abel (@BrianAbelTV) September 8, 2016
KCUR national correspondent Frank Morris tweeted a picture of a guy helping partition off the room, saying that the room size was being reduced by a third.
Workers cutting the room down by a third with lower than expected turnout for #clintonkc speech. pic.twitter.com/L60YFfBpO1
— Frank Morris (@FrankNewsman) September 8, 2016
However, KMBC reporter Michael Mahoney reported Thursday evening that the event organizers reduced the room size by half.
Abel tweeted out later during the keynote speech that the approximate size of the crowd was roughly 3,000 attendees.
Just in: attendance for @HillaryClinton speech in KC is roughly 3k
— Brian Abel (@BrianAbelTV) September 9, 2016
Event organizers originally anticipated the crowd size to be approximately 9,000 people. KCTV reported that event organizers said the small crowd size for Clinton’s keynote address was because she was a last-minute addition to their schedule.
"It has nothing to do with, ‘Well, they don’t like her or they didn’t want to hear her,’" Patricia Carter of Ft. Lauderdale told KCTV. "The schedule for the convention is made months and months in advance."