No Kings protesters are firing up a movement built to win

Six things the DC No Kings survey data—and the pivot to May Day—tell us about a resistance that keeps stepping up.

Nice. We did it again. Bigger.

Upwards of eight million Americans took to the streets Saturday for the third massive No Kings protest, organizers report. More than 3,300 rallies across all 50 states — bigger than No Kings 1 (5 million), bigger than No Kings 2 (7 million), potentially the largest day of domestic political protest in U.S. history. The cornerstone was Minnesota, where Bruce Springsteen performed at the state Capitol in honor of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, whose murders became the movement’s moral center.

Those are the numbers everybody reported. But here is where we can go deeper.

Dana Fisher and Arman Azedi from American University were in DC with clipboards, surveying participants in the No Kings 3 march across the Frederick Douglass Bridge. They have done this at every major resistance rally since the Women’s March in 2017. The data they have accumulated is the closest thing we have to a lab readout on what is happening inside this movement. And what is happening is not just a protest. It is what a winning political coalition looks like when it is taking lift.

And it sets up what must come next.

1. Organization is replacing inspiration as the recruitment engine.

At the People’s March in January 2025, 10% of participants said they heard about the event through an organization. Yesterday, that number was 34%. Word-of-mouth from family and friends, historically the most common channel for protests, dropped from 48% to 38%. People are no longer being summoned by just outrage. They are being mobilized by infrastructure, which now likely includes their friends and family.

This is the difference between a movement that surges and a movement that can win. The proof of compounding is what happened the morning of No Kings.

Indivisible, one of the key organizers of the No Kings protests, immediately pivoted its massive lists and organizer networks toward May Day Strong, a coalition calling for “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on May 1st.

“Coming off the heels of the massive energy from the No Kings mobilizations, people are ready to take action and keep fighting,” said Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg.

The AFT, AAUP, NEA, Starbucks Workers United, and the Chicago Teachers Union have already signed on. The Minnesota General Strike in January — which drew 100,000 marchers in negative-20-degree temperatures and shut down over 700 businesses — is now being held up as the blueprint.

2. Nearly half of DC participants were members of an organizing group.

47% of DC marchers reported being members of a group, including groups that organized the event. 27% were members of FreeDC, the local organizer. 10% were Indivisible.

Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth and Steven Levitsky — leading scholars of civil resistance to democratic backsliding — argued this week in their latest session of The Breakdown at Harvard’s Ash Center that authoritarianism cannot fully consolidate when there are open and visible signs of opposition. Mass protest, Chenoweth said, “demonstrates that the consolidation is contested and incomplete” — and sends that signal both to the pro-democracy population and to the aspiring authoritarians.

What the Fisher/Azedi data shows is that the movement is building the organizational sinew to make that signal strong enough to succeed.

3. People are getting louder between protests.

The survey tracks civic engagement across several measures. The trend line runs in one direction. In the past year: 52% contacted an elected official (up from 40% at the People’s March in January 2025). 38% attended a town hall (up from 31%). 32% participated in direct action (up from 22%). 80% boycotted or deliberately purchased products for political reasons — up 16 points in 14 months.

What you are watching is the conversion of protest attendance into activism. The people who showed up on Saturday were not taking a day off from normal life to register their feelings. They were the most civically active slice of the electorate, and they are getting more active.

Levitsky described the three domains in which democracy is defended or lost: the ballot box, the courts, and the streets. His point was that no single one is sufficient — and that the streets, far from being the weakest, are the foundation the other two rest on.

“If there’s no protest movement, it’s very hard to imagine that elections turn out well for pro-democracy candidates,” Chenoweth said.

The Fisher/Azedi civic engagement data is evidence that those three domains are now feeding each other.

4. The movement is staying nonviolent after the hardest possible test.

This is the finding that should get more attention than it will. At No Kings 1, in June 2025, 40% of DC participants agreed that Americans may have to resort to violence to save the country. That was before federal agents killed Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter. Before the Iran War. Before the full architecture of NSPM-7 came into view. After all of that — yesterday — the number was 25%. The movement’s commitment to nonviolent strategy is not softening in the face of state violence.

Chenoweth’s foundational research established that governments rarely maintain their grip when 3.5% of a population participates in sustained nonviolent action. She noted this week that large-scale protests also correlate with downstream electoral gains: more opposition voters turning out, more pro-democracy candidates running, more legislative seats flipping.

And the May Day pivot adds a dimension Chenoweth has emphasized for years: beyond protest — which she calls a method of symbolic persuasion — the tools that actually extract concessions are noncooperation. Consumer boycotts. Walkouts. Strikes. “No Work, No School, No Shopping” turns that methodology into a slogan.

5. Opposing the war in Iran is now the movement’s second spine.

At No Kings 2 last October, 43% of DC participants cited Peace/Anti-War as a motivation for attending. Yesterday: 73%. That is the largest single-issue shift in the survey series. The Iran War, now in its first month, is generating controversy even inside the fringes of Trump’s own party — and the movement has absorbed it in real time, without losing any of its other causes. Immigration (76%), Trump (75%), and racial justice (64%) all held.

The coalition did not fragment when the bombs fell, and the Strait closed. It expanded.

Levitsky, this week, called the Iran War a war of choice, made possible by the erosion of democratic constraints on the executive, without congressional consultation or public deliberation. With no deference to diplomacy or expertise. A president accountable to no one, as Levitsky put it, can have reckless behavior, can have destructive behavior, and can simply make mistakes. Including what increasingly looks to be one of the biggest mistakes of the century. A mistake so foolish even George W. Bush wasn’t tricked into falling into this savage abyss.

The movement marching against the war yesterday is not separate from the movement defending democracy. It is the same argument, applied to a crisis that looks likely to spiral into hell. The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 documents what Levitsky confirmed: war, during a backsliding episode, accelerates it.

Executives use the emergency to expand authority and implement institutional changes that would have been impossible in peacetime — censorship, judicial purges, restrictions on civil liberties. The 73% is not a detour from the democracy argument. It is the democracy argument, applied to the most severe matters of life and death, multiplied by the power of tyranny.

6. The movement knows what it’s surviving, not just what it’s fighting.

At Degenerate Art, Andrea Pitzer drew on her years studying concentration camps and the regimes that built them to write about what lessons from Soviet-era dissidents might mean for Americans now on the eve of this No Kings.

She wrote about Georgian-born author Boris Akunin, who grew up in the Soviet Union and has watched Russia’s descent from exile. Akunin describes how ordinary people in a police state rationalize compliance: the story they tell themselves about why their silence is actually duty, or realism, or loyalty.

Akunin talked about the value of just not doing those things.

“Don’t take part in vile things. Support those who are worse off. Don’t let your convictions change. Not many people can be heroes… But this is the minimum.” — Boris Akunin, on rules passed down from Soviet times

The Fisher/Azedi data show that these protesters are doing more than just refraining from vile acts. 80% boycotted products. 52% who contacted an elected official. 32% who participated in direct action. They are acts of ethical self-preservation. They are what Akunin’s minimum looks like in practice, in a country where public dissent is still legal, and the muscles of resistance are still being built rather than broken.

The crucial distinction Andrea draws is that most U.S. citizens are still free to dissent publicly in ways that Soviet citizens rarely could — and Russians cannot today without tremendous risk.

That may not be true forever. History tells us that this window of opportunity is one that tyranny exists to close.

The V-Dem data on freedom of expression — now at its lowest level in the United States since World War II — is the clock on that window. The time to act grows more urgent every day, which is why May Day is the next step.

You may remember that V-Dem finds that roughly 70% of third-wave autocratization episodes get reversed. And the first electoral cycle is the decisive window. The 2026 midterms are that window. We know Trump is trying to steal these elections.

The only question is whether we will let him.

What the Fisher/Azedi data shows is a movement that has spent 14 months converting outrage into organization, and organization into the kind of sustained civic engagement that actually moves elections. What the May Day pivot shows is a movement that understands Chenoweth’s distinction between protest and noncooperation — and is prepared to take the risk and swing big where it hurts the regime and its backers most.

The DC survey has one persistent limitation on this growing movement worth meditating on: 86% white, 90% college-educated, and a median age of 48. The movement is geographically broader than it has ever been — almost half of yesterday’s protests took place in GOP strongholds; Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had over 100 events — but it is not yet demographically broad enough to win on its own. This is an advantage the regime has helped craft for itself by targeting people of color for deportation and harassment, and that was enabled even by parts of the left that allowed protesters opposing Israel’s war crimes in Gaza to be systematically shut down. Yet school walkouts and growing anti-regime protests across communities of color show that the potential for a multiracial opposition is real.

The rest of it, based on the data, is already in motion. So what will you do next as we prepare for May Day?

Here are some ideas that strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio suggests you consider, not just for the work they do but the messages they help spread from the latest episode of Next Comes What:

We’re all doing what we can. But this only works if we do more.

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By the way, this is where I was, outside the planned human warehouse in Romulus, Michigan.

@thelolgopNo concentration camp in Romulus. Not now. Not ever. #nokings

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