Last weekend, I attended the RedState Gathering in Atlanta, Georgia. Here’s a bit of what I saw:

A few quick points:

•  I brought a decibel meter with me and took some unscientific (maybe pseudoscientific?) measurements of the crowd noise during various speeches (you can see hints of it in the video). I missed Mike Huckabee’s speech, but I did use it for the rest of the 2016 contenders.
  • [mc_name name=’Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’C001098′ ] had the loudest response from the RedState crowd, hitting the upper 90 decibel range consistently and for long durations.
  • Others with high levels of crowd applause were Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina, and [mc_name name=’Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’R000595′ ]. All reached into the mid-90s multiple times.
  • Jeb Bush received a warm welcome, avoiding boos and heckling and disruptions some of us felt might be coming, but he generally stayed in the upper-80s and low-90s on the decibel meter.
  • Chris Christie came in and held his own. His crowd reaction was muted but warm and polite. Mid-80s to upper-80s, mostly.
  • I was surprised that Scott Walker’s crowd reaction did not receive higher marks. It generally peaked in the upper-80s and low-90s as well.
  • Not exactly known for giving a bring-down-the-house stemwinder, Bobby Jindal did have a few peaks into the low-90s.
• Obviously, there were plenty of non-2016 POTUS candidates in the lineup, as well. I didn’t include too many of them in the video, but U.S. Senator from South Carolina [mc_name name=’Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’S001184′ ] was probably the crowd favorite among the non-2016 White House hopefuls. Generally, if you’re speaking at RedState, you’ve likely beaten a less conservative candidate (often an incumbent) in the primary, you’ve done something pretty remarkable, or you’re very young and on your way up. It’s always such a cool conference due to that access to up-and-coming political figures, often with minimal staff and handlers and so forth.
• Originally, I was going to do a more scientific-ish version of the decibel monitoring, with the decibel meter and camera mounted in precisely the same place for each speech, with a whole elaborate data analysis and so forth, with charts and graphs, but that probably would’ve mostly just stressed me out and made the whole conference more of a chore than just a fun thing to attend. Not to mention the work afterward crunching numbers, graphing data, etc. That being said, I fully intend on doing that project somewhere, sometime.
• Many thanks to the entire RedState team for putting on yet another fantastic gathering! Hope to see all of you again soon.