Just over a week ago, Fox News host Glenn Beck announced that he would be rolling out a series of “educational conventions” to be held around the country starting in Orlando, Florida, next spring on March 27 at the UCF Arena. He told a crowd at The Villages retirement community in that “up on GlennBeck.com we’ve partnered with a company called Eventful” where people can vote for their area. The whole series is supposed to culminate on August 28 in Washington, DC, “at the feet of Abraham Lincoln” (a date and location that ought to make students of the civil rights movement wince).
Since then, more than 37,800 people have gone onto Eventful to “demand” that Beck come to their town. Their numbers are spread over nearly 5,000 locations, with Houston at the top of the list with 846 and tiny Hartford, South Dakota one of several towns with just one “demand” for Beck.
I checked with Alex Hunsucker, a senior product manager at Eventful, to see how this compared with other political figures who have used the site. “Only two candidates ever reached this total number of Demands – Barack Obama and Ron Paul.” Ron Paul had 36,769 total during the campaign, which means he’s already been surpassed by Beck. Obama has 151,688. Hunsucker notes, “It took them months to get there.”
Here’s a snippet of video where Beck mentions his use of Eventful, about two minutes in: