June 14: "NO KINGS" Nationwide Rally
The Results Are In
We The People Win!
Estimates of Attendance
"And the poll analyst G. Elliott Morris has worked with a number of independent journalists to produce rough estimates of how many people participated in the protests nationwide, and comes up with a number between 4 and 6 million. That’s a huge number. Remarkably, these massive protests were almost entirely peaceful.
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"Meanwhile, Donald Trump got the military parade he wanted for his birthday. And it was a box-office bust, probably attracting far fewer people than the 250,000 the White House claimed.
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"In fact, the optics were simply embarrassing."
Paul Krugman June 16, 2025, Substack
And from Matt Berg at Crooked Media in his "What A Day" newsletter:on June 16, 2025:
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"But Americans are hitting the streets in record numbers compared to Trump’s first term.
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"Trump’s team claimed that 250,000 people turned out for his parade, a number that (shockingly) was much more generous than other estimates. On the same day, around 5 million people took part in more than 2,000 “No Kings” protests against Trump’s authoritarian moves, organizers said. It may have been the largest single day of demonstrations in American history, according to a prominent data scientist.
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"It’s encouraging to look at this turnout in the context of the 3.5 percent rule. Research shows that nonviolent protests that engage at least 3.5 percent of the country’s population have never failed to bring change — and they’re twice as likely to succeed than armed conflict. (Twelve million is roughly that percentage of the U.S. population. Organizers brought out 5 million people in one day.)
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"“It's not exactly a magic number,” said Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who studies political violence, and who conducted the 3.5 percent rule research, in a podcast with Jon Favreau of Crooked Media [available on You Tube]. But it’s helpful with understanding how the rule works: When enough people are actively engaged in civil disobedience, it creates economic and cultural influence that causes people from the opponent’s camp to defect.
"Protests could become so large that Trump supporters begin to question their support for him.
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"Anti-Trump protestors are off to a very strong start. There have been three times as many people taking part in protests during the first four months of Trump’s term, compared to the same period in 2017, according to Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium. "
Turns out the resistance ain’t dead!
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“"We are in historical levels of mobilization,” Chenoweth said, “even if the muzzle velocity of the news coming out of Washington obscures the fact.”"