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.
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.