The following article by Kanisha Bond, Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman was posted on the Washington Post website August 1, 2018:
This is the 16th installment in a series reporting on political crowds in the United States. Each month, the Crowd Counting Consortium will post updates about trends and patterns from the previous month or months. For our counting methods, please see our first post in the series. You can find the rest of the posts here.
For April, we tallied 3,773 protests, demonstrations, strikes, marches, sit-ins, rallies and walkouts in the United States, with at least one in every state and the District. For May, we tallied 1,030 such events. Our conservative guess is that between 342,319 and 353,403 people showed up at political gatherings in April, and between 97,738 and 102,188 showed up in May, although it is likely there were more participants in both months.
By 2018’s standards, in April and May we found a modest number of participants. Because mainstream media often neglect to report nonviolent actions — especially small ones — it is probable that we did not record every event that took place. This is especially true because we lacked estimates for crowd sizes for 70 percent of the events we listed in April and 43.4 percent of the events in May. That’s an unusually high proportion, in large part because there were so many walkouts on school and university campuses with no publicly reported crowd sizes.