Just 2 People Showed Up to Deval Patrick's Event Last Night

2020 candidate cancels Morehouse College event
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 21, 2019 2:40 PM CST
Just 2 People Showed Up to Deval Patrick's Event Last Night
Democratic presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick speaks to local residents during a stop at the Sykora Bakery, Monday, Nov. 18, 2019, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.   (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

As other Democratic presidential hopefuls prepared to debate in Atlanta Wednesday night, Deval Patrick showed up to the city's Morehouse College for a planned event—and found just two people in attendance. Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor who entered the 2020 presidential race after the cutoff for this month's debate, ended up canceling the event at the historically black college when he found out the size of the audience, CNN reports. (The site notes that no one was in the audience at all until five minutes before the event, and that the two people who did show up said they were just passing by when they were asked to come in by organizers.)

However, the president and founder of the college's New Deal Democrats says Patrick had only just been invited to appear the day before the planned event. "The campaign is telling us that they had to catch a flight," he told Boston.com after the event was canceled. "It was an honor and pleasure that he wanted to speak with student journalists and New Deal Democrats. We hope that we could do this again." Patrick was planning to meet with students as well as the editorial boards of local student newspapers during the event. Fox News notes that a photo of another nearly empty room at a Patrick event was tweeted by a New York Times reporter Sunday night. (More Deval Patrick stories.)

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