Thinking About Protest Numbers
There have been more than 5000 protests in just over 100 days -- what will be the impact of this massive grassroots outpouring?
Welcome to Briefings, a newsletter on organizing and strategy by L.A. Kauffman. Here I'll offer insights on the current pro-democracy movement and how everyday people can take effective action amid rising authoritarianism. I'll also share organizing resources, updates on my work, and occasional materials from my archive. Please consider a paid subscription to support my work.
There were another 1000 protests against the Trump administration and its billionaire backers over this past week.
One thousand protests, in one week: At nearly any prior moment in U.S. history, this would be viewed as a staggering degree of unrest.
These 1000 Mayday demonstrations, moreover, followed more than 2000 separate protests in the month of April, plus well over 2000 more in the months of February and March. That adds up to more than 5000 protests in just over 100 days.
For context, that's significantly more protests than took place during the comparable period after Trump took office the first time around – a time we remember as one of widespread public discontent.
The only time in U.S. history when there have been more people protesting in the streets over an extended period of time was during the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020.
It sure doesn't feel that way, does it? The protests have finally broken through into national media coverage, but there’s hasn’t been any sense in the discourse that they're historic in size or character. But don't let yourself be gaslit by vibes-based conventional wisdom: Something meaningful and promising is happening with all these repeated protests.
I don’t want to overstate. It's early days, and it's definitely too soon to fully assess the protests or their impact. But a few observations:
The protests to date have been so organic and numerous that they've varied widely in type. There have been mass marches and small-town honk-and-waves, rallies and civil disobedience actions (not to mention all the non-protest forms of noncooperation we’ve been seeing — more on that in a future newsletter).
Some of the demonstrations have been strategically focused – like the regular protests outside Tesla dealerships – but most have been expressive: opportunities for a wide range of people to come together in public to vocalize and demonstrate their outrage at this smash-and-grab presidency.
Expressive protests aren't particularly strong as pressure tactics – that's one reason for the lazy conventional wisdom that “protests don't work” – but they can be very powerful in other ways.
For starters, they make dissent visible. The decision to have lots of local protests since Trump to office rather than stage one or two big D.C. demonstrations has been a savvy one in that regard. All those thousands of local actions translate into thousands of local media stories, even as the national media has largely downplayed protest coverage. In this time of misinformation and mistrust, there's special value in the credibility gained when the demonstrators that people read and hear about are locals and neighbors instead of far-off crowds.
The local protests have also, at their best, been serving as on-ramps for people to get involved in many other kinds of organizing work, much of it not protesting. At quite a few of the demonstrations, you’ll find tents set up by local organizations, where you can learn about upcoming meetings and trainings, sign up to volunteer, make a donation, or just get on the email list. In this way, the one-day protest also helps build other, ongoing efforts, such as Know Your Rights outreach, mutual aid for impacted community members, outreach to new constituencies, and more. (If you're a local organizer and haven't yet been doing this, it's one of the best ways to boost the long-term impact of your next demonstration.)
Now, as large as the Trump 2 protests have been to date, I do want to caution against some exaggeration and wishful thinking I have seen.
In the aftermath of the April 5 Hands Off protests, which were extraordinarily large, some organizers could not resist the urge to make them even larger. They shared the most optimistic and aspirational estimate for overall attendance, and claimed that 5 million people had attended. Protest numbers are famously hard to calculate, but that was almost certainly a gross overestimate; the most credible total was more like 3 million. We do ourselves no favors by inflating the data.
We do ourselves even less favors by setting up false expectations, as I saw some grassroots organizers do in the aftermath of April 5: “We just brought 5 million out in to the streets — next time we’ll have 10 million!”
Needless to say, no such thing happened. I haven't seen a solid overall estimate yet for the April 19 day of action, but turnout was at once significant and significantly smaller than April 5. It's no easy trick to have continuous growth in a mass mobilization. You can’t just snap your fingers and double turnout.
Also in the wishful thinking department is the repeated claim that if we can just mobilize 3.5% of the population, we'll win – drive Trump from office, maybe? frustrate all his plans? bring his whole administration to a grinding halt? The mechanic of victory is usually unclear in these dreams.
The 3.5% figure comes from the scholarship of Prof. Erica Chenoweth, a global expert on the nature, scale, and effects of protest. In analyzing past nonviolent movements, Chenoweth had found – to use their words – “that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”
A lot of people have interpreted this analysis to mean that you can count on overthrowing your government if you just mobilize 3.5% of your population. Chenoweth has cautioned strongly against this simplistic view – it's worth reading their nuanced 2020 paper on the topic, which is the source for the quotation above. Chenoweth emphasizes that this number is not to be understood as some magical target, and that many factors are at play in determining impact, including how movements are structured and the strategic skill of their leadership.
Another cautionary note, as we evaluate the scale and impact of the new resistance to Trump, is the sense that in an age of ever-more concentrated wealth and power, we may well need ever-larger levels of mobilization to have any meaningful impact at all.
If you graphed the overall numbers of protests and protesters in the United States, you'd see that by and large – with downward fluctuations during Biden's time in office, and a huge upsurge during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests – they've grown over the last decade or two.
To put this another way, the overall scale of protests in the United States has been steadily increasing alongside the scale of the authoritarian threats we face.
It's never been possible to evaluate the impact of protests by their size alone. Small actions have often changed the course of history, while some massive mobilizations have accomplished not much than giving people a place to vent their frustrations. But it's even trickier to evaluate protests by the numbers in this period of rising power grabs and rising popular response.
Two more national days of action are currently in the works: a June 6 Unite for Veterans mobilization, and a June 14 No Kings day of mass protest – to coincide with Trump's birthday and the military parade he may be staging in Washington D.C. that day.
A broad coalition of groups led by Public Citizen has been offering a series of trainings for grassroots organizers all this spring. Find the full list and links to register here.
A friend recently shared a photo that made my day: my 2017 book Direct Action included in a display of radical civics books at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Ask your library to order it!
Meanwhile, if you're interested in the history of mass mobilizations in the United States, my book How to Read a Protest is currently on sale from University of California Press for 40% off with the code MAY40.
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