How Many Votes Did The 'No Kings' Rallies Mobilize For Democrats?

The practical reality of rally politics

Seattle. Asked for an example of a literal Nazi, this sign-carrier identified Stephen Miller. “Would you kill Stephen Miller?” asked the reporter. “Yeah, if I had the chance”, was his reply. Democrats called for this, endorsed this, own this

Being an old hand at progressive protest events, I could tell right away that something was different about Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ protests. Prominent anti-Trump social media accounts were quickly called out for using old video from 2017 to make the crowd in Boston appear far larger than it really was. A media-savvy X app noticed the deceptive framing of crowd shots. It was astroturf, the artificial cultivation of mass movements.

Studying the media establishment in my home state, I noted the crowd size in Birmingham was not unusually large, especially given that the site of the gathering was a few blocks north of Five Points, the Haight-Ashbury of Alabama, with the Alabama School of Fine Arts within walking distance further north. I have personally streamed larger progressive events in the Heart of Dixie. Persons quoted in stories were from the whitest, richest neighborhood in the metro area.

All organizers want their rallies to be seen as successful, and crowd size is naturally something they all exaggerate. ‘No Kings’ organizers appear to have drawn millions of Americans out in good fall weather on a Saturday: no mean feat, to be sure, but how many millions is up for debate. At the time of this writing, organizers want the number to be seven million. I say the real number is less than half that. What ought to be impressive enough is instead being inflated.

What I mean to measure here is the exaggeration level, or bullshit quotient, of the No Kings protests. In my opinion, organizers were a little less than half as effective at getting out the protesters as they want us to think. My very next question for Democrats is what secondary effects they expect their achievements on Saturday to produce on Election Day, 4 November. I suspect the impact will be less than half as large as they imagine.