The “No Kings” protests in every state may have been the biggest day of demonstrations in American history, a data analyst has suggested.
“Based on hundreds of crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don’t have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6m people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday,” independent data journalist G Elliott posted to X Sunday.
For reference, that’d mean Saturday’s demonstrations featured 1-2% of the total population of 340 million taking to the streets in more than 2,000 cities to voice their opposition to the increasingly authoritarian, far-right policies the president has pursued since assuming office for the second time.
The other day I was seeing 13.1 million people, now I’m seeing 4-6 million, these are some big gaps.
A ton of people either way, but anyone know why the discrepancies are so big?
I can’t even imagine how people are counted for things like this. The one I went to was in a town of about 100k total people so I’m sure it was on the smaller side of things, but if asked how many people were there I’d guess around 2000, but that would still just be a completely wild guess essentially. Is that how they count attendance for these things, wild guesswork?
I’m also confused because even the high estimates pale in comparison to the George Floyd protests, do those not count for some reason?
It’s tricky to estimate things. If you take footage from drones or helicopters, how many people will be hidden behind trees? There are ways to guess, but those come with assumptions that can give you very different numbers. Local organizers, police, and the media can all come to different numbers with perfectly reasonable differences in assumptions or techniques.
This should be kept in mind for any big outdoor event where there’s no specific entry points to count people going by. Affects Trump’s parade, too.
The 13M type numbers came out early and captured a lot of attention but didn’t have much legitimacy, but they anchored people’s expectations. The smaller numbers are coming out now and have much more legitimacy. They may be smaller but in the big picture this is all still impressive, the movement is big and growing
I saw 13.1 million come out from the alt national parks Facebook several days after seeing 5-11 million estimate. From that post it seems like they had people at each protest doing the work, whereas the others are back of the napkin estimates. So I’ll go ahead and accept the absolute minimum conservative estimate being 4 million, while probably actually 10+ million.
I dont know in the US, but in my country, in Europe, where we have a tradition of taking to the streets, the police have developed some pretty good methods for counting, based on helicopter photos, video, and physical references.
I imagine that with drones, lidar, machine learning, and other technologies, you can probably now tally attendance to ridiculous accuracy
After lawsuits from Trump and friends against government and media for “underestimating” his crowds, both tend to stay out of that game. Just another case of dysfunction in the US.