My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has shared a big data update, covering all recorded US protests through Jan 2026. Some key takeaways 🧵: The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.
The two No Kings protests (6/14 & 10/18) were among the largest single day protests in history, but we are tallying protests all over the country every day in locally coordinated protests, too, particularly in opposition to ICE - an increasingly large share of the total #. Protest volume is escalating. Jan 2026 recorded the highest monthly total of protests during Trump’s second term so far (nearly 5900)—and the 3rd highest total of protests per month since 2017, behind only June 2020 (BLM) & March 2018 (Enough Walkouts + March for Our Lives). Overall, we have tallied 4x more protests through Jan 31, 2026 than we had through Jan 31, 2018
Participation is likewise robust. For counts for just 41% of our events, we tallied well over 10.3M participants across explicitly anti-Trump protests, < 111k across pro-Trump protests, and over 387k across other protests. The movement is extraordinarily disciplined, despite escalatory rhetoric, threats, & violence against the movement, immigrants, and observers. Over 99% of reported protests featured no arrests, 99.8% had no participant injuries or property damage, and 99.9% reported no injuries to law enforcement. These are tiny fractions for a movement of this historic size and geographic dispersion. This discipline is part of why clear instances of lawless brutality by govt authorities tend to backfire—a dynamic that @owasow.bsky.social recently described in the NYT: nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com
What are the protests about? The top three claims expressed during the protests are concerns about the presidency, democracy, and immigration. These themes dominate the protest landscape. The next common claims concern US foreign policy (primarily as it relates to Gaza, Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, & Greenland), the economy, & health care. Taken together, an overall look at protest patterns in 2026 reinforces the sense of a growing, durable, and disciplined pro-democracy movement increasingly mobilized at the grassroots. Two caveats: (a) our data collection has improved over time, but we don’t think that’s explaining most of the growth across years; (b) the political conditions under which we are collecting data are not identical across years; more on the latter point here: wagingnonviolence.org).
wagingnonviolence.org
More from our team soon. Meanwhile, the data are available here: dataverse.harvard.edu
dataverse.harvard.edu
And as always, if you think we’re missing a record, you can scroll down on this page and submit it here: ash.harvard.edu
ash.harvard.edu