In the year since Donald Trump retook office, the number of protests in the US outpaced those at the same point in his first administration, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, an open-source project collaboration between Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut.
There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. According to the data, an overwhelming majority of US counties – including 42% that voted for Trump – have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.
“It is a very historic time, in the sense that people are mobilizing where they live in ways that I don’t think I have seen before in my lifetime,” said Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium.
From protests for trans youth healthcare at the beginning of in 2025, to protests against US support of Israel in Gaza and “Tesla takedowns” against Elon' Musk’s efforts to dismantle the federal government in the spring, to anti-ICE protests as federal agents raided US cities over the summer and into the fall and winter, Americans took to the streets to show their resistance to the Trump administration’s policies. That meant more protests in general, as well as highly attended, coordinated, single-day protests such as the No Kings and Hands Off protests, Chenoweth said.
Typically, they said, flash points of protest have been localized to big cities or a march on Washington. “We’re not seeing that,” they said. “We’re seeing very diffused protest mobilization all around the country.”
The diversity of locations, especially in red and rural corners such as Cut Bank, Montana, and Sparta, North Carolina, shows that the movements defy stereotypes around where protest happens. “It definitely cuts against the narrative that protest is confined to major cities, to the coasts, and to predominantly liberal areas where it doesn’t change anybody’s mind,” said Chenoweth.
During Trump’s first term, there were a few major spikes in protest: the 2018 student walkouts following the Parkland high school shooting, the summer 2018 protests over immigrant family separations, and the 2020 uprisings over the killing of George Floyd – thought to be possibly the largest recorded protest movement in US history. Chenoweth said spikes last spring (pro-Palestine, anti-ICE and No Kings protests) and in October (No Kings) come close to those numbers.
That trend of broadly dispersed, nonviolent protesting has carried forward into 2026, as anti-ICE mobilizations continue in cities across the US. After Minneapolis protests broke out following the killing of Renee Good during an ICE interaction on 7 January, coalitions of groups rapidly planned and held a “weekend of action” with more than 1,000 participating protests.
“What’s really notable now is how much grassroots, improvised and then organized response there is to ICE operations,” said Chenoweth. “The defining feature of [the Minneapolis ICE] protests is absolutely focused on that issue and sense of outrage, and just finding unbearable and intolerable, the way the administration is approaching this.”
Over a decade ago, Chenoweth’s research, studying a data set of more than 300 nonviolent protest movements between 1900 and 2006, found that no government has ever overcome a nonviolent movement that involved at least 3.5% of its population. However, Chenoweth cautions that this is not a prescriptive rule.
When asked if the US is at a tipping point akin to that number, they replied, “I would think about it more as an inflection point,” noting that public opinion is shifting.
Most importantly, said Chenoweth, growing protest movements can give people hope and “a sense of agency” in a situation where they feel powerless: “That’s a very important thing for people to feel and internalize when the more dominant narrative is otherwise.”
