It’s silly of the organizers to inflate the D.C. numbers when they have a ready excuse for poor turnout. Namely, there were rallies going on all over the country yesterday. If the protest underperformed in Washington, that could be because demonstrators who otherwise would have come to the capital chose to stay closer to home to march. One estimate has total national turnout at 1.1 million people.

In D.C., though? Just 200,000 or so with a margin of error of 15 percent, i.e. 230,000 at the upper-end estimate. Organizers were aiming for twice that number.

Maybe America hates Marco Rubio less than everyone thought.

The peak crowd size was 202,796 people, with a margin of error of 15 percent, the firm said. The crowd reached its largest size at 1 p.m., according to the company’s estimates.

The organizers put the total number of attendees at closer to 800,000. The largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history was the 2017 Women’s March, with a crowd size of 440,000 people, according to DDIS’ estimates.

There’s always a discrepancy between numbers gathered by the pros and numbers gathered by an event’s organizers — ahem — but 200,000 and 800,000 is a bigggg discrepancy. It’s hard to look at a fourfold overestimate and not see bad faith rather than misjudgment. The organizers could have guesstimated 500,000 to try to top the Women’s March but I think the benchmark they were looking at was different: Mashable notes that 800,000 would arguably put them ahead of Trump’s inauguration crowd. If you’re looking to send a message with your left-wing rally, it makes sense that you’d want to show your political muscles are bigger than MAGA Nation’s rather than those who came out to oppose Trump in the Women’s March.

Maybe they underperformed because most high-school students aren’t as anti-gun as the Stoneman Douglas organizers?

A USA TODAY/Ipsos poll taken after the Parkland shooting found fewer than half of students 13 to 17 think tightening gun laws and background checks would prevent mass shootings. The Pew Research Center, in an April 2017 poll, found 39% of people 18-29 said protecting gun rights is of chief importance. Compare that to 58% who favor gun control…

Pro-gun high school students told USA TODAY the school shooting problem is complex, but they maintain guns aren’t the problem. They say more can be done as it relates to school security, mental health and background checks. Some argue those calling for gun control are uninformed about and unfamiliar with firearms…

Many of the students who spoke with USA TODAY oppose banning the AR-15, and most said teachers should be able to be armed if they choose, as long as they pass a background check.

Here’s one of those pro-gun high-school students, Kyle Kashuv of Stoneman Douglas High, wondering why he wasn’t invited to speak at the march since “as Americans, we all have different points of views and it’s important to represent them all equally.” That wasn’t the point of the march, though. Since when do political rallies aim to promote a variety of viewpoints rather than just one? It wasn’t even the point of last month’s CNN town hall, which was billed as an advocacy event (“Stand Up!”) rather than a conversation about gun policy. The point of the march and the past six weeks of ubiquitous media coverage for the student leaders, as I said yesterday, was catharsis for gun-grabbers. That’s why David Hogg and Cameron Kasky, the two who are quickest to smear their opponents, are the most heavily covered. Kashuv would have been an especially discordant note as a speaker at the march because he’s soft-spoken, unassuming, and polite, the opposite of the caricature of gun-rights supporters that gun-controllers are eager to promote. Why the hell would you want a likable kid like him there spoiling your “Rubio’s a vampire sucking the blood of children” rally?