Tracking Activism and Resistance at the No Kings Day of Action
Over the past 6 months, protesters have flooded the streets across the country to voice their concerns about the Trump Administration and its policies. Multiple large-scale, coordinated days of action organized by groups such as Indivisible and more informal networks like 50501 movement have taken place. The most recent day of action was called No Kings Day and took place on June 14th.
The team at CECE continues to study this evolving cycle of contention with the aim of understanding who is organizing it, who is participating, and why. To this end, we undertook one of our most expansive survey efforts to date during the No Kings day of action, which by some estimates was the largest day of protest in US history. Our team conducted three surveys of different populations to reveal new insights about protesters and organizers in this current political moment.
Each survey contained questions about respondents’ motivations for participating in the protest, their previous civic engagement, their political beliefs, basic demographic questions, and much more. This work follows our previous efforts to survey crowds and study the growing Resistance to the second Trump Administration and its policies.
One of the surveys took place on-site at the No Kings flagship protest in Philadelphia, which turned out around 100,000 participants despite the drippy weather. Our research team of 4 attended the rally and march to survey a sample of participants at the event. Data were collected as people assembled at LOVE Park and after marching to the Art Museum. Researchers walked through the crowd surveying as participants assembled and listened to speeches. In total, our team collected a sample of nearly 200 protesters who were randomly sampled throughout the crowd using tablets and QR codes to collect survey data.
The second and third surveys were conducted online, the first of which captured a sample of 3,531 participants that had participated in No Kings protests nationwide, and the other of which sampled 214 “hosts” that had organized local protests across the country.
Together this dataset of 3,934 organizers and participants in the No Kings day of action allows for a rich, comprehensive exploration of the demographics and beliefs among those at the flagship march (Philadelphia), protests nationwide, and the hosts that organized them. While the data will be used to support several research projects at CECE, a few notable findings speak to the differences across the samples. For instance, 85% of the protest organizers were women, compared to 76% of the protest attendees nationwide and only 59% of the attendees in Philadelphia. Support for political violence was also remarkably high at the Philadelphia rally, with 41% agreeing that violence may be required to save democracy in America, but only about 20% of hosts and protesters nationally agreeing with this sentiment. Consistent with our findings at previous rallies, those that participated in No Kings were overwhelmingly white and highly educated, though the protest crowds were slightly more ethnically diverse than the organizers.
