In political science, there’s something called the "3.5% Rule":
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
Yesterday Jean and I, and daughter Leila, joined the No Kings march in San Francisco. The march route, from 20th St. and Dolores (top of Dolores Park) to Civic Center is around 1.6 miles on foot. Being in the middle of a march is a terrible way to count the crowd, but I can report that, half an hour before the march started, it was already impossible to move around the milling crowd. And once we got moving, it was a solid sea of folks all along that 1.6-mile stretch — confirmed to me by one of our local organizers. SFGATE (the San Francisco Chronicle website) is still saying possibly even 100,000; my organizer friend tells me preliminary data suggests as many as 150,000. That is 15 to 20% of the population of San Francisco. (Even if was just 50,000, as some other places are saying, that is still 6% of the city.)
Now, San Francisco hates Trump, loves a parade, and had great weather yesterday. So lots and lots and lots of us will turn out for anything like this. But we’re also seeing reports like this one: Thousands march in "No Kings" rally in Colorado's conservative Douglas County. In all, there were over 2,000 protest marches in all 50 states.
Minimum estimates for the marches is approaching 5 million. But anecdotal reports suggest twice that, or more. If it gets close to 12 million, that’s 3.5% of the US population — which is one of the goals of NoKings.org:
We’re inspired by the 3.5% principle: it only takes 3.5% of the population engaging in sustained, strategic protest against authoritarianism to achieve significant political change. Everything we do from here on out is grounded in three core commitments: staying in the fight, taking concrete action today, and investing in the long-term.
We are getting there. Even more to the point, we are getting there all over the country, not just in blue states and the cities.
What happens next will depend to some extent on whether Republicans are more afraid of Trump or of the people. It will also depend on the 2026 Congressional elections (and for the moment I will refrain from pessimistic thoughts on them), because if we can sustain and build on this momentum — and it is building; compare yesterday to previous protests — we can not just reclaim the House but also the Senate.
Aim high.
