A group of researchers who originally tallied protests crowds for the Women's Marches in late January extended their work into a monthly series tracking who's protesting where, and why. Washington Post reports:
Each month the Crowd Counting Consortium will post updates about trends and patterns from the previous month as recorded by our volunteers. (For our counting methods, please see our first post in the series.)
For February 2017, we tallied 762 protests, demonstrations, marches, sit-ins and rallies in the United States, with at least one in every state and the District. Our conservative guess is that between 233,021 and 373,089 people showed up at these political gatherings, although it is likely there were far more participants.
With the caveat that participation in some reverse protests, such as February’s Day Without Immigrants, is impossible to accurately quantify, here's how the protests broke down: 85 percent of the protests were anti-Trump, while just 12 percent were pro-Trump, and 3 percent were directed at specific politicians on issues unrelated to Trump.
The issues that inspired the vast majority of the protests were related to Trump's Muslim ban (now indefinitely blocked); cabinet nominees for education and labor, Betsy DeVos and Andrew Puzder (Puzder ultimately bowed out); rallies accompanying a Day Without Immigrants strikes; the Dakota Access Pipeline and other pipeline protests, and opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood.
Pro-Trump rallies were mostly inspired by Trump speeches around the country and a nationwide day of protest on Feb. 11 by anti-abortion activists in support of defunding for Planned Parenthood.
Sidenote: this is nice idea ...
...between 200 and 500 people protested outside Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey’s Center City office in Philadelphia. The latter disruptions have become routine; there is a weekly protest site with its own Twitter account, @TuesdaysToomey, along with a Facebook page.
Raw data is available here.
And you too can stand up and be counted in the research:
We’ll release the data for March 2017 soon. In the meantime, we are still counting. Click here to be counted, and click here to volunteer to help us count.
Congress is on recess April 7-23. If you want to attend a resistance event, you can sign up here.