'No Kings' Was Biggest Protest in U.S. History: Data Analyst

[stillcool]

8. this one estimate is getting a lot of play

seems to be the only one

As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday. Organizers say 5m turned out, but don’t release public event-by-event numbers.

Of course, crowdsourcing data isn’t perfect; some local reports may be inflated, and others undercounted. And the formula we use to project attendance in places where we don’t have data assumes they are similar to the places where we do. That’s a necessary assumption, but an assumption nonetheless.

So this is by no means an official tally. But we do think it’s the most comprehensive tally currently available. Hundreds of data-gatherers have been compiling accounts of event attendance and checking them against available sources since Saturday morning. From a journalism perspective, this approach at least standardizes measurement and provides references to check our math, even if it doesn’t completely avoid the usual pitfalls of estimating crowd size (or the assumptions above). But in this case, we’re interested in speed and thoroughness, not perfection.