Turning Point US blames liberal plot for small crowd at JD Vance event

Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet suggested liberals were to blame after Vice President JD Vance was mocked for a small crowd at a Tuesday TPUSA event.

Speaking on the Wednesday Charlie Kirk Show, Kolvet explained that the venue at the University of Georgia could hold around 10,000 people, while only 2,000 students showed up to hear Vance. The Associated Press noted that the arena was "mostly empty."

"So 2,000 at any college event is massive," Kolvet insisted. "A couple things happened in advance of this. And this is one of the pieces of evidence that we made when we were determining [Erika Kirk's] participation in the event is that there was just so much counter-protest energy. That was apparently all the talk of the school."

"And you combine that with the death threats and the doxing of the travel and the itineraries, all of these things," he continued. "But so a couple things happened. So we ended up having to open doors and close doors earlier than was previously scheduled. Okay. So that was something."

However, according to Kolvet, it was the so-called "left-wing groups" that undermined the event by refusing to use their tickets.

"And then there were a bunch of left-wing groups that tried, and they do this at a number of events. We have this pretty much down to a science, where if we have in this event, in which case we had about 10,000 tickets reserved for the event. and the venue holds about 4,000 when you consider the stage," he said. "So we had over 2,000 people there, massive, massive energy, great, great enthusiasm from the attendees. But the, and this happens, the left wing groups swarm the ticketing, and they try and book up all the tickets, and then they don't show."

"And that's one of their forms of protest," Kolvet added. "Normally, we're pretty good at sniffing it out, but they use some new means and activities. Right. And so we're working with our ticketing systems to adjust for that moving forward. But yeah, it was an eventful night."