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How many people went to a No Kings rally last weekend? It’s impossible to know from reading news coverage. Some publications reported there were about 7 million Americans who turned up at the protests, although the provenance of that number appears to be the No Kings website, hardly an impartial source.
The Guardian reported between 4 and 6 million. The Atlantic, in its photo gallery, went with “millions." Statistician G. Elliott Morris, who runs the Substack “Strength in Numbers,” wrote, “Our median estimate is that 5.2 million people participated in a No Kings Day demonstration somewhere in the country on Saturday, with an upper bound of 8.2 million people.”
Seven million, Morris wrote, “may be a bit optimistic (but is not impossible).” He later updated his estimate to 5-6 million.
Four million, 7 million, 8 million — you might argue that the actual number doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that a lot of people showed up at No Kings events, particularly in large cities like New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
But the problem for the No Kings crowd is that they’ve been saying that a certain number does matter, and by that standard, the Oct. 18 rallies fell short.
The critical number is 3.5%, which is the percentage of people in a population that stands to effect change from a nonviolent uprising, according to some political analysts.
The “3.5% Rule,” according to Harvard Kennedy School professor Erica Chenoweth, “references the fact that historically it’s very rare for antiauthoritarian movements to fail after they achieve a high threshold of participation.”
While 3.5% of a population doesn’t sound like much of a tipping point, Chenoweth said that “even though there’s no guarantee going forward that this number is predictive, it’s a powerful indicator that a movement has successfully organized and attracted a very broad base of committed participants that have built significant power and momentum.”
The number has been promoted in an article on the website of the left-leaning think tank The Center for American Progress, which says when that 3.5% threshold is reached, “it becomes nearly impossible for the government to ignore the people’s demands for transformative change.”
While that may apply in smaller countries with larger problems — say, Sudan or Libya, some of the countries that Chenoweth studied — it’s harder to believe that if 3.5% of Americans — roughly 12 million of us — showed up at the next No Kings rally, the Trump administration would suddenly reverse course.
Especially since more than 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
And 12 million is about the population of Illinois.
Neither the White House, nor the rest of America, is going to take marching orders from a group the size of Illinois, nice as that state may be.
Morris, over at “Strength in Numbers,” gets the protests to 3.7% by combining every large protest since Trump first took office in 2017.
And Chenoweth argued in a 2020 paper that 3.5% is the starting point, saying “The historical record suggests that large-scale participation is usually the tip of the iceberg, and there is usually much broader public support for the movement than the people who are active in the streets.”
But Chenoweth also concedes that something else is necessary for these movements to be successful: defections from the other side. “Elites who don’t want to be left behind begin to shift their public loyalties, and this can lead to a cascade of defections as others follow.”
While there is, of course, a Trump resistance on the right, it largely exists within the online think-o-sphere. We’ve seen no groundswell of rank-and-file Trump supporters turn on the administration, even though many are unhappy with aggressive ICE enforcement and many more cringe at his social media posts. There are still a sizable number of Trump voters — dare we say “millions”? — saying, “This is what I voted for” and arguing that it’s his bull-in-a-china-shop approach that has gotten results at the border and in getting the Israeli hostages released.
To them, the No Kings protests amount to a temper tantrum by voters who didn’t get their way. As Batya Ungar-Sargon put it on News Nation over the weekend, " The left isn’t protesting a king but their fellow Americans. They aren’t standing up for democracy — they are protesting against it."
The Babylon Bee had a happier take. “Success!” the conservative humor site said. “After weekend of ‘No Kings’ protests, America will still not have any kings.”
Somewhere in all this was a missed opportunity for Burger King, but the fast-food chain, no Ben & Jerry’s, played it safe.
MAHA flies economy
A few months ago, separate and unaffiliated polls showed that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the most popular person in Trump’s cabinet.
His numbers are likely higher now because of a TikTok video that made the rounds on social media.
The video shows Kennedy and his wife, Cheryl Hines, sitting side-by-side in what appears to be economy class on a flight. Some people sharing the video contrasted their flight with the private jet that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took for at least one part of their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour earlier this year.
The fact-checking site Snopes.com confirmed the private jet, but said there were no commercial flights available that could have gotten AOC and Sanders to where they needed to be on time.
That nuance matters, but so does public opinion when you’re a politician. Flying economy could become the earned media of choice for the political class, given this reaction. But to really score points with the public, RFKJ could have given his wife the window seat.
Recommended reading
Who is a Christian? That’s the unexpected debate that took place in the wake of the shooting at a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in Michigan last month. My colleague Jacob Hess was paying attention to the conversation and has some thoughts.
“America’s tradition of religious pluralism generally discouraged attacks on religious conviction in the country’s history according to Terryl Givens, senior research fellow at BYU’s Maxwell Institute. But there were two exceptions, he tells Deseret News: anti-Catholic and anti-Latter-day Saint fervor among U.S. Protestants.”
Are you a ‘real Christian’? That depends on how you define Christianity
Naomi Schaefer Riley says she never encountered antisemitism growing up in New England, but after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, it’s something that she and other parents must address.
“Antisemitism is not simply intolerance or meanness. It’s not even just racism. It is the oldest hatred in history. As we repeat during the Passover seder — ‘in every generation they rise up to destroy us.’ The ones who seek to destroy us are not some fringe element who can be ignored."
What will we tell our children about the past 2 years?
The always interesting Jay Evensen came across a 1975 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News in which people were making predictions about 2025. Some of the predictions, as you might imagine, were way off the mark, others merely fanciful. But then there was the one prognosticator who was right on the money.
“It was fashionable in the mid-’70s to be a bit dark and pessimistic. People had just emerged from the Vietnam War and Watergate, after all, and gas prices were soaring to more than 50 cents a gallon. But in reality, we weren’t really so pessimistic.”
Think you can predict the future?
End notes
I suddenly have something in common with Fox News personality Jesse Watters: Our moms went to a No Kings protest.
Watters, appearing on the “The Five,” said that being obsessed with Donald Trump has been bad for the protestors’ health, and that many couldn’t even articulate why they were there. “I mean, some of them do; my mom knew. But if you stick a mic in front of their face, they have no clue. They’re just kind of walking around,” Watters said.
Watters has spoken before about the partisan divide in his family; last year he said that his mom didn’t invite him for Thanksgiving dinner after Trump won. He has read texts from her on his show and even put her on the air in 2023, when he took over Tucker Carlson’s old time slot.
“Sometimes I think I was adopted,” Watters joked this week, just before, in a moment of serendipity, he was seated next to Gayle King on a four-hour flight.
They did not appear to be flying economy.
But it’s a reminder that people can believe different things and still like, even love, each other.
And also that, frightfully, Thanksgiving Eve is a mere five weeks away. Don’t say or text anything this week that will get you uninvited to dinner.