Politics

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.