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cvirtue) wrote2025-08-18 07:35 pm
cvirtue) wrote2025-08-18 07:35 pm
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No Kings Day protest evaluated by Ash Center for Democratic Governance & Innovation at Harvard
This org has been evaluating demonstrations for many years.
"The historic number of No Kings Day protesters and their expansive geographic spread are signs of a growing and durable pro-democracy movement."
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/08/new-data-shows-no-kings-was-one-of-the-largest-days-of-protest-in-us-history/
First part of article:
No Kings Day on June 14 was one of the largest single days of protest in United States history, and it was probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017. The number of participants and expansive geographic spread that day are both signs of the persistent popular opposition to the second Trump administration.
The Crowd Counting Consortium has been collecting data on protest events and participation since the first Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017. Last week, we published our most recent monthly update, with estimated figures for the month of June, including the nationwide No Kings protests on June 14. With 82 percent of anti-Trump events for which we tallied participation on June 14, our estimates suggest that between 2 and 4.8 million people participated in over 2,150 actions nationwide. (We could not confirm estimated protest figures at 18 percent of events; almost all of these missing figures were in small towns.) However, we estimate the turnout at No Kings to be substantially larger than the turnout at the Hands Off protests on April 5, which mobilized a significant number as well — between 919,000 and 1.5 million people.
No Kings in context
The Women’s March in 2017 — which involved between 3.2 and 5.3 million people — was, at the time, probably the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. No Kings in June 2025 had comparable aggregate turnout, albeit across far more locations. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March involved actions in over 650 locations, No Kings saw events in over three times as many locations, with events organized in big cities, small towns and places in between.
In that regard, No Kings was geographically more similar to some of the dispersed protests that began to dominate the U.S. protest landscape in 2018. For instance, on March 14, 2018, between 1.1 and 1.7 million students walked out of their classrooms on the one-month anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In an unprecedented demonstration, students in about 4,470 locations — from kindergartners to university students and even some homeschooled students — participated in what was then the largest number of recorded locations in a single day of coordinated protest in U.S. history. Ten days later, on March 24, 2018, the March for Our Lives drew an estimated 1.3 to 2.2 million participants in over 700 locations to demand safety from gun violence in schools. (The 2018 Women’s March, about two months earlier, had drawn an estimated 1.8 to 2.6 million people in 407 locations.) Protests throughout the month of June 2018 turned out several million protesters, largely accounted for by Pride marches and protests on behalf of LGBTQ+ rights — and over a thousand protests against the family separation policy implemented during the first Trump administration.
Sustained protest at geographically dispersed events in the U.S. reached its peak in the summer of 2020, during which millions of people mobilized at some 12,000 protest events in over 3,110 locations over eight months. This makes the wave of protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery the largest and broadest mass mobilization in U.S. history; notably, it built on years of intense organizing against police violence toward Black people and communities, including through the work of Black Lives Matter and other Black-led organizations, following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida in July 2013, and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.
Notable movement growth in 2025 --- see article for the rest of this
"The historic number of No Kings Day protesters and their expansive geographic spread are signs of a growing and durable pro-democracy movement."
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/08/new-data-shows-no-kings-was-one-of-the-largest-days-of-protest-in-us-history/
First part of article:
No Kings Day on June 14 was one of the largest single days of protest in United States history, and it was probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017. The number of participants and expansive geographic spread that day are both signs of the persistent popular opposition to the second Trump administration.
The Crowd Counting Consortium has been collecting data on protest events and participation since the first Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017. Last week, we published our most recent monthly update, with estimated figures for the month of June, including the nationwide No Kings protests on June 14. With 82 percent of anti-Trump events for which we tallied participation on June 14, our estimates suggest that between 2 and 4.8 million people participated in over 2,150 actions nationwide. (We could not confirm estimated protest figures at 18 percent of events; almost all of these missing figures were in small towns.) However, we estimate the turnout at No Kings to be substantially larger than the turnout at the Hands Off protests on April 5, which mobilized a significant number as well — between 919,000 and 1.5 million people.
No Kings in context
The Women’s March in 2017 — which involved between 3.2 and 5.3 million people — was, at the time, probably the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. No Kings in June 2025 had comparable aggregate turnout, albeit across far more locations. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March involved actions in over 650 locations, No Kings saw events in over three times as many locations, with events organized in big cities, small towns and places in between.
In that regard, No Kings was geographically more similar to some of the dispersed protests that began to dominate the U.S. protest landscape in 2018. For instance, on March 14, 2018, between 1.1 and 1.7 million students walked out of their classrooms on the one-month anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In an unprecedented demonstration, students in about 4,470 locations — from kindergartners to university students and even some homeschooled students — participated in what was then the largest number of recorded locations in a single day of coordinated protest in U.S. history. Ten days later, on March 24, 2018, the March for Our Lives drew an estimated 1.3 to 2.2 million participants in over 700 locations to demand safety from gun violence in schools. (The 2018 Women’s March, about two months earlier, had drawn an estimated 1.8 to 2.6 million people in 407 locations.) Protests throughout the month of June 2018 turned out several million protesters, largely accounted for by Pride marches and protests on behalf of LGBTQ+ rights — and over a thousand protests against the family separation policy implemented during the first Trump administration.
Sustained protest at geographically dispersed events in the U.S. reached its peak in the summer of 2020, during which millions of people mobilized at some 12,000 protest events in over 3,110 locations over eight months. This makes the wave of protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery the largest and broadest mass mobilization in U.S. history; notably, it built on years of intense organizing against police violence toward Black people and communities, including through the work of Black Lives Matter and other Black-led organizations, following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida in July 2013, and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.
Notable movement growth in 2025 --- see article for the rest of this