It’s been a week since an estimated 7 million people across 50 US states and the District of Columbia—and countless others all over the world—took part in the “No Kings” protests to speak up against the Trump administration’s policies and his leadership’s slide into authoritarianism. From Washington, DC, to Oakland, California, protesters proudly waved American flags and declared their love for the country. They spanned generations, and many were dressed in various inflatable costumes—ducks, SpongeBob Squarepants, dinosaurs, and more—borrowing from Portland’s example of defying the rhetoric from Republicans and the administration that vilified anyone who demonstrated as violent, Leftist, “haters” of America.
The peaceful October 18 pro-democracy protests, which naturally drew the ire of President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, marked one of the largest single-day demonstrations in US history. Two million more people than the previous “No Kings” gatherings from June showed up across 2,700 events in big Blue cities and, notably, in reliably Republican towns.
“Even my small, conservative hometown of Brenham, Texas, held a ‘No Kings’ Rally with at least a hundred people in attendance,” wrote the ACLU Justice Division leader Ellen Flenniken in a post about the protests, “and it was far from being the only small town to show up for our rights and for each other.” In Pella, Iowa, “a town where Trump reigns as king,” as Slate’s Lyz Lenz writes, somewhere between 150 and 200 people showed up to chant, “No kings! No crowns!”
“The current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.”
While these may appear to be random anecdotes, in fact, they reflect a meaningful trend described in the findings of a new study from Harvard’s Kennedy School, published just before October 18. Researchers responsible for the study, titled “The Resistance Reaches into Trump Country,” concluded through data analysis that “protest events now occur across a wider range of US counties than we have observed since January 2017.”
To conduct this analysis, the researchers matched protest participation data to county-level 2024 presidential election data and county population data from the US Census. What they found is that, although there has been a steady climb in the “cumulative number” of counties hosting an event in recent years, 2025 likely has the “most geographically widespread” protests in US history. The current surge has pushed the “cumulative share of protest-hosting counties well above 60 percent,” surpassing the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, when protests were recorded in almost 40 percent of counties across the country.
The recent protests appear to be expanding to parts of the country that had voted for Trump. Between April and August of this year, the researchers noted, “the median protest county in the US sent more votes to Trump in 2024 than [Kamala] Harris.” As an example, the research cites the 2,000 people who joined the June round of “No Kings” protests in Kingsport, a city with a population of about 55,000 in Tennessee’s Sullivan County, where Trump won almost 77 percent of the vote. Last Saturday, Kingsport held a protest once again. “America was founded because we didn’t want a king,” Kristina Runciman, an organizer with East Tennessee Voices, told a local station, “and we don’t want a king now.”
During the second Trump administration, researchers have found, the “share of counties hosting at least one anti-Trump protest has risen markedly…surpassing the historic spikes observed during his first term. And the current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.”
