Saturday Might Be Largest Single-Day Protest in US History
Our Publisher participated in collaborative data reporting on "No Kings Day" protests. Here's what we learned.
Dear Reader,
This past Saturday, I did not attend any of the 2,100+ No Kings protests across the 50 states. (As a rule, I do not attend protests unless assigned to cover them as a journalist.) Instead, I worked with G Elliott Morris, formerly of FiveThirtyEight fame, to crowdsource attendance records using eyewitnesses, police records, and news reports.
I spent at least 12 hours the past Saturday Googling “[INSERT CITY] protest estimate” while receiving a flood of information from hundreds of engaged citizens and over 20 INN Network/ ANNO newsrooms through Bluesky, Signal, and email.
Cleaning up data is a pain in the ass (iykyk). Most of my time was spent:
rectifying typos (looking at you, wrong state abbreviations and missing commas),
formatting numbers: We decided on using “2001” and “301” as placeholders where there were reportedly “thousands” or “hundreds” of protestors. It is a rather conservative estimate, but the odd number at the end also meant we could easily spot the placeholders to periodically replace them (or preliminary eyewitness accounts) with updated estimates, and
double-checking whether multiple submissions in the same city were of the same event or separate protests, and determining at what point they merged to form a bigger protest.
Multiple times in the marathon, the spreadsheet broke because over 100 people were editing at the same time! This relegated me to screaming (making comments) from the digital void at a sad cursor parking lot.
We received data for over half the events as of Sunday evening, accounting for nearly 3.2 million attendees. According to Elliott's back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4.2 - 5.8 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.7% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country Saturday, which would place it on par with or above 2017's Women's March as the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
You can read Elliott's full analysis and cite his work in the Strength in Numbers blog.
When we say The Xylom is the only Asian American-run news outlet dedicated to science, climate, and environmental reporting, that includes pro-democracy data coverage. One of the Trump administration’s priorities is to remove federal databases related to science, environment, and climate change so they could leverage information asymmetry to reshape reality.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the budget to give myself overtime pay, so please help us sustain this unparalleled work for the price of a small coffee a month:
Yours sincerely,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor
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