Were the No Kings protests the largest single-day demonstration in American history?

The scale of last weekend's 'No Kings' protests is now becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history.
Working out exactly where the protest ranks compared with similar recent events has been a project of G Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the Substack Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between 4 million and 6 million, which would be 1.2-1.8% of the US population. This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women's March to rally against Trump's misogynistic rhetoric.
Morris estimated the No Kings Day protest turnout in two steps. First, his team gathered data at events for as many locations as possible, defaulting to tallies published in local newspapers. Where that wasn't available, they relied on estimates from organizers and attenders themselves.
To come up with a rough approximation of nationwide numbers, he then estimated the attendance in each unreported protest would be equal to the median of the attendance in places where data did exist. 'That's a tough approximation, but at least an empirical one,' Morris wrote in an email. 'We use the median instead of the average to control for outliers, [such as the fact that] big cities pull the average up, but most events are not huge urban protests.'
Morris stressed that the Strength in Numbers tally remains unofficial, and he hopes that researchers will 'build' on his data when they conduct more studies. But his estimation is similar to that made by Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive non-profit that organized the event. He estimated that 5 million people across the globe took to the streets.
If 1.8% of the US adult population showed up to protest, it sends a signal to other people that you can stand up, too
Omar Wasow
Not everyone is ready to call it the biggest protest ever. Jeremy Pressman of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint Harvard University/University of Connecticut project that estimates political crowds, told USA Today it would take 'some time' to get an official tally.
Meanwhile Steven Cheung, Trump's director of communications, unsurprisingly called the protests 'a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance' on X. (No Kings took place on Donald Trump's birthday, which coincided with a parade the president threw in celebration of the US army's 250th anniversary.)
Omar Wasow, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's department of political science, told the Guardian that the demonstration was 'without question, among the largest single-day protests in history'.
Wasow compared protest movements to standing ovations given at a theater. 'We see a cascade effect: if one person stands after the curtain drops, then more follow,' he said. 'If 1.8% of the US adult population showed up to protest on Saturday, those are the people who stood up to clap first. It sends a signal to all these other people that you can stand up, too.'
The 1963 March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr made his famous 'I have a dream' speech was at the time one of the largest protests in history, with up to a half a million people in attendance. It was dwarfed in size by the first Earth Day protests in 1970, in which 20 million people helped spark the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. 'At the time this was about 10% of the US population, possibly the largest we will ever realistically see – unless the political environment deteriorates significantly, prompting more backlash,' Morris said.
In 1986 at the Hands Across America fundraiser, an estimated 5 million Americans formed a human chain to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness (each person was asked to donate $10, though many participants didn't end up paying and the politics of the Coca-Cola-sponsored event were murky). More than a million people took to the streets in 2006 for a boycott called 'A Day Without Immigrants' in protest of stricter immigration laws. Polls taken during the summer of 2020 found that between 15 and 26 million Americans protested against the murder of George Floyd during the month of June (though day-by-day numbers were smaller).
Gloria J Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of A Protest History of the United States, said that it was difficult to compare crowd sizes for various protests, especially ones that take place over the course of several days and span various locations. 'There are different processes that have been used over the years, from eyeballing things to actually counting the number of people per square mile,' she said.
Related: 'No Kings' protests stir US as Trump celebrates birthday with military parade – in pictures
In the days following No Kings, an idea put forth by the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan called the 3.5% rule spurred social media discussion. Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Stephan, a political scientist who covers nonviolent movements, studied 323 revolutionary campaigns around the world that took place from 1900 to 2006. They found that all nonviolent movements that had the support of at least 3.5% of a population always succeeded in triggering change. No Kings, with its massive turnout, could be seen as a turning point.
There are caveats to this rule, which was published in the team's 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works. 'The 3.5% rule is descriptive, not prescriptive – and has been revised significantly since being originally published to allow for exceptions,' Morris wrote. 'Chenoweth now is clear that hitting 3.5% does not guarantee success, especially in political regimes where change is harder, and that movements can accomplish their goals with much smaller mobilization, through things like media coverage and alliances with elites.'
Organizers and attenders of No Kings feel invigorated enough to continue the demonstrations, with another round of coordinated protests to fall on 17 July, the fifth anniversary of the death of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader.
But they admit there are limits to these events. 'We're not going to win if a lot of people show up at a protest one day,' Levin said. 'We need people actually taking democracy seriously, and that's not going to be done through a top-down action. It has to be done from the bottom-up. When pro-democracy movements succeed, it's because of a broad-based, ideological, diverse, geographically-dispersed, grassroots organizing – not just mobilizing.'
• This article was amended on 19 June 2025 to clarify that G Elliott Morris used the median, not the medium, to approximate nationwide protest numbers.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

CNBC

20 minutes ago

• CNBC

The Israel-Iran conflict and the other big thing that drove the stock market this week

It's been a tense and dynamic week for the world at large. The market action on Wall Street over the past four sessions was been anything but that. For the week, the S & P 500 lost 0.15%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq ticked up 0.21%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was basically flat, up a mere 0.02%. Beneath the surface, though, there was plenty of news for investors to digest. Here's a closer look at the biggest market themes during the holiday-shortened trading week. 1. Geopolitics: The major news story was — and still is — the intensifying war between Israel and Iran. The big question on everyone's mind is whether the U.S. will get involved. As of Friday, reports indicate that while President Donald Trump is actively reviewing options to attack Iran, nothing has been authorized. The White House has said Trump he will make a decision in the "next two weeks". As a result of the Israel-Iran conflict, investors spent the week keeping an extra close eye on the movement in safe-haven assets like gold and the dollar, as well as risk assets such as oil. Gold prices pulled back this week after their initial spike last Friday, which is when Israel's first attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure jolted markets. The U.S. dollar index , meanwhile, strengthened this week but still remains near multiyear lows. Oil rose again for the week, with international benchmark Brent crude climbing nearly 4%. For those looking to gauge what the market thinks will happen with Iran, look to oil. The commodity is currently acting as something of proxy on the odds of the conflict intensifying and America directly entering the fray. 2. Fed updates: The other big theme of the week centered on the health of the U.S. economy in the lead up to Wednesday afternoon, when we got the Federal Reserve's latest interest rate decision and revised economic projections. Ultimately, the Fed kept its benchmark lending rate unchanged on Wednesday following its two-day policy meeting. The decision followed lackluster updates on the state of the consumer and the housing market , along with lower-than-expected inflation readings the week prior. As we outlined earlier this week , the Fed is in a tough spot when it comes to abiding by its dual mandate of ensuring price stability and low unemployment. The state of play requires nuance. On the one hand, there is evidence in support of rate cuts, namely some cracks in the consumer — even if the consumer has remained largely and impressively resilient — and the Fed's own updated outlook for lower real GDP growth and higher unemployment this year. On the other hand, the Fed is now expecting higher inflation this year than it did in March, which would support the need for higher interest rates. Given these dueling dynamics and the uncertainty around tariff impacts, the central bank's decision to keep interest rates steady makes sense. While the Fed certainly doesn't want to wait too long and make the same mistake we saw coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, we must acknowledge that the causes of a potential rebound in inflation are different this time around. Tariffs will likely push up prices, but that may be a one-time increase, as opposed to the sustained inflation we saw exiting the pandemic, which was driven by massive supply chain disruptions and shifts in consumer behavior. As a result, we believe the apparent bias to be more worried about the job market and overall economic growth — and therefore cut rates later this year — makes sense, too. Indeed, the Fed's updated projections still pencil in two rate cuts in 2025, the same as in March despite the aforementioned revisions to its inflation and growth outlook. Fed Governor Christopher Waller made the case Friday that the cuts should start as early as July, arguing that the inflation risk posed by tariffs is not significant and ensuring resiliency in the labor market should be a higher priority. Waller's argument is basically that it's better to move now than wait for a jump in unemployment. Our biggest focus at the Club is staying nimble, given the highly volatile nature of geopolitics at the moment. No doubt, rate decisions are important to think about, but they're only one small part of the investing puzzle to navigate each day. For this reason, we continue to focus more on individual company fundamentals and industry trends rather than higher-level dynamics, important as they are to shaping our worldview. Cybersecurity stocks are one example that we highlighted this week. Another example would be the news we got from Club names Meta Platforms and Amazon this week on their artificial intelligence efforts. We think the implications that AI will have on the cost structures, revenue opportunities and efficiency gains should weigh far more heavily in the minds' of long-term investors than whether the Fed will cut in July or September. (Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long META, AMZN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.

New York Times

20 minutes ago

• New York Times

B-2 bombers head across the Pacific and Trump is scheduled to return to the White House as he considers strike on Iran.

Multiple U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers appeared to be airborne and heading west from the United States across the Pacific, and President Trump is scheduled to return to the White House late on Saturday afternoon from New Jersey as he deliberates about whether to join Israel's efforts to destroy Iran's nuclear sites. Air traffic control communications indicated that several B-2 aircraft — the planes that could be equipped to carry the 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that Mr. Trump is considering deploying against Iran's underground nuclear facilities in Fordo — had taken off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Some flight trackers said on social media that the destination of the aircraft is Guam, the U.S. territory, which has several military installations, although that could not be independently confirmed. The bombers appeared to be accompanied by refueling tankers for portions of the journey, the flight tracking data showed. Moving planes does not mean a final decision has been made about whether to strike. It is not unusual to shift military assets into position to provide options to the president and military commanders even if they are not ultimately deployed. The White House schedule for the weekend said that Mr. Trump would return from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and would meet with his national security team at 6 p.m. on Saturday and again on Sunday. Mr. Trump typically spends both weekend days out of town at one of his properties. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Trump has made clear he is weighing whether to have the U.S. join Israel's effort to curtail Iran's ability to acquire a nuclear weapon, a line he has drawn repeatedly over the years. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The Hill

28 minutes ago

• The Hill

Why tariffs are already driving some healthcare premiums higher

Related video above: How patients and doctors can reduce healthcare costs (NEXSTAR) – Despite the focus on the price of cars, iPhones and other consumer goods, the Trump administration's tariffs are starting to drive up prices in an entirely different industry – healthcare. On Monday, Matt McGough, with nonprofit health policy organization KFF, wrote that several individual insurance companies have already notified state regulators that they will be raising premiums to offset the potential impact of tariffs on pharmaceuticals. Trump hasn't yet targeted pharmaceuticals with tariffs, but has repeatedly brought it up, including on Monday aboard Air Force One. 'We're going to be doing pharmaceuticals very soon,' Trump said, according to Reuters. 'That's going to bring all the companies back, into America.' In a May filing, the Independent Health Benefits Corporation (IHBC) said it was submitting a premium rate change of 38.4% for 2026, 'primarily due to increased costs due to inflation and tariffs, and changes in risk adjustment.' An IHBC spokesperson told Axios that roughly 3% of that increase was to directly account for the impact of tariffs, specifically on drug prices. McGough notes that there are other insurers who either haven't specifically mentioned the potential effect of tariffs or who declined to include an offsetting increase in 2026 premium rates. 'A large proportion of medical goods currently comes from international sources, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices and personal protective equipment, as well as other low-margin, high-use essentials like syringes, needles and blood pressure cuffs,' Tina Freese Decker, board chair of the American Hospital Association, wrote in a May post. 'Tariffs on these items could impact patient care by jeopardizing the availability of vital medications and essential health care devices. They also could raise costs for hospitals and heighten shortages and supply chain disruptions.' Meantime, millions of Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollees could see an over 75% average increase in premiums if Biden-era subsidies aren't extended by Congress before they expire at the end of the year, according to KFF estimates. How much tariffs are weighing on the calculations of insurers will become a bit more clear on Aug. 1, Axios notes, when proposed 2026 premium rates are posted.