\n<\/p>\n
Demonstrators take to the streets during a nationwide “No Kings” protest in Rock Springs, Wyoming.<\/span>Imago via ZUMA<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s been a week<\/span> since an estimated 7 million people across 50 US states and the District of Columbia\u2014and countless others all over the world<\/a>\u2014took part in the \u201cNo Kings\u201d protests to speak up against the Trump administration\u2019s policies and his leadership\u2019s <\/strong>slide into authoritarianism. From Washington, DC<\/a>, to Oakland<\/a>, California, protesters proudly waved<\/a> American flags and declared their love for the country. They spanned generations, and many were dressed in various inflatable costumes\u2014ducks, SpongeBob Squarepants, dinosaurs, and more\u2014borrowing from Portland\u2019s example<\/a> of defying the rhetoric from Republicans and the administration that vilified<\/a> anyone who demonstrated as violent, Leftist, \u201chaters<\/a>\u201d of America. <\/strong><\/p>\n The peaceful October 18 pro-democracy protests, which naturally drew the ire<\/a> of President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, marked<\/a> one of the largest single-day demonstrations in US history. Two million more people than the previous \u201cNo Kings\u201d gatherings from June showed up across 2,700 events in big Blue cities and, notably, in reliably Republican towns.<\/p>\n \u201cEven my small, conservative hometown of Brenham, Texas, held a \u2018No Kings\u2019 Rally with at least a hundred people in attendance,\u201d wrote the ACLU Justice Division leader Ellen Flenniken in a post<\/a> about the protests, \u201cand it was far from being the only small town to show up for our rights and for each other.\u201d In Pella, Iowa, \u201ca town where Trump reigns as king,\u201d as Slate\u2019s<\/em> Lyz Lenz writes<\/a>, somewhere between 150 and 200 people showed up to chant, \u201cNo kings! No crowns!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n While these may appear to be random anecdotes, in fact, they reflect a meaningful trend described in the findings of a new study<\/a> from Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School, published<\/a> just before October 18. Researchers responsible for the study, titled \u201cThe Resistance Reaches into Trump Country,\u201d concluded through data analysis that \u201cprotest events now occur across a wider range of US counties than we have observed since January 2017.\u201d<\/p>\n To conduct this analysis, the <\/strong>researchers matched protest participation data to county-level 2024 presidential election data and county population data from the US Census. What they found<\/a> is that, although there has been a steady climb in the \u201ccumulative number\u201d of counties hosting an event in recent years, 2025 likely has the \u201cmost geographically widespread\u201d protests in US history. The current surge has pushed the \u201ccumulative share of protest-hosting counties well above 60 percent,\u201d surpassing the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, when protests were recorded <\/strong>in almost 40 percent of counties across the country.<\/p>\n The recent protests appear to be expanding to parts of the country that had <\/strong>voted <\/strong>for Trump. Between April and August of this year, the researchers noted, \u201cthe median protest county in the US sent more votes to Trump in 2024 than [Kamala] Harris.\u201d As an example, the research cites the 2,000 people<\/a> who joined the June round of \u201cNo Kings\u201d protests in Kingsport, a city with a population of about 55,000 in Tennessee\u2019s Sullivan County, where Trump won almost 77 percent<\/a> of the vote. Last Saturday, Kingsport held a protest<\/a> once again. \u201cAmerica was founded because we didn\u2019t want a king,\u201d Kristina Runciman, an organizer with East Tennessee Voices, told<\/a> a local station, \u201cand we don\u2019t want a king now.\u201d<\/p>\n During the second Trump administration, researchers have found, the \u201cshare of counties hosting at least one anti-Trump protest has risen markedly\u2026surpassing the historic spikes observed during his first term. And the current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n