One Protester, Two Protester, Three Protester, Four

Dave Weigel moderates the controversy around the size of this weekend's protests:

This dispute won’t end soon, as any veterans of anti-war protests could tell conservatives; it’s tough to get accurate crowd counts and tough to believe that something that felt massive was not, in fact, historically large. This was the largest march on Washington by conservatives in anyone’s memory. But Washington was home to one of the largest public gatherings of the decade just nine months ago, when 1.8 million people filled the mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial for President Obama’s inauguration, and that has given future protesters a barometer for their success. The reports of “2 million people” on the mall this weekend were always ludicrous.

Nate Silver also weighs in.