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Wanted: 12 million protesters

www.headsupnews.org

Wanted: 12 million protesters

This [administration], no single day of protest has come anywhere close to that number. The biggest showing so far was on January 18, when the “People’s March” drew an estimated 50,000 people to Washington, D.C., with tens of thousands more at cities around the U.S.

Chenoweth, who is also co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard, has been keeping a tally of all the marches, protests, strikes, and demonstrations since Trump’s election. She wrote recently (along with coauthors Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam) that “resistance against Trump’s agenda in America is not only alive and well. It is savvy, diversifying and probably just getting started”:

Protests of Trump may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but research shows they are far more numerous and frequent…

In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally.

This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests.

Coordinated days of protest such as March Fourth for Democracy (March 4), Stand Up for Science (March 7), rallies in recognition of International Women’s Day (March 8), and protests demanding the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil suggest little likelihood of these actions slowing down.

I should note that the 3.5 percent rule is not ironclad. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, remains in power even after over six percent of his country’s population demonstrated against him in March 2023, and five percent in September 2024.

12 comments

  • 3.5% isn't just a random number, it's theorized to be the number you need to institute change.

    I do hope we reach that number, but I suspect the Trump administration would threaten that hypothesis...

    Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

    • Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

      I really wish this was in a proper paper, as I wonder how much selection bias is at play here. How is "achieving their goals" measured? What kind of governments are we talking about? What is "serious political change"? I have a lot of serious doubt that nonviolent protests do much against hostile governments. They are absolutely important, and true research has revealed they are much more effective at mobilizing people who agree with the protestors, but the research also shows that violent protests have a larger affect on folks who do not agree with the protestors because they cause actual harm and more forcibly bring people to the table to negotiate. But what exactly is considered violent is a difficult one to quantify and direct physical violence (injuring and killing others) is much less effective than non-human directed violence which is difficult to quantify and to define. Destruction of property, for example, is often considered a form of non-human directed violence which likely has a larger affect on change than human-directed physical violence because no one is directly injured and it creates a direct economic incentive for change to happen.

12 comments