On October 18th, a coalition of left-leaning political groups coordinated a second national day-of-action to declare that the US has No Kings. Almost 3,000 events took place across the US during this second NoKings Day, with early estimates predicting that over 5 million people had joined the day of action in the US (with many more participating outside the country).
My team was back out in the streets of Washington, DC surveying the crowd of about 200,000 people to understand who turned out, what motivated them to participate, and how turnout compared to previous protests during the current Trump Administration.
Our team of 10 collected data from 348 people who were randomly sampled from throughout the crowd (for details on the research methodology and papers based on it, see the project page). We are only just beginning to analyze the data, but here are some particularly notable findings.
Like previous days of action and protest during the second Trump Administration (as well as the first), participants at NoKings 2.0 in DC were predominantly female (57%), White (86%), and educated (88% reported holding a BA or more).
The crowd was quite civically engaged: 77% reported expressing their politics through their purchasing behaviors and almost a-third reported participated in direct action/civil disobedience in the past year.
Even though only 30% reported participating in civil disobedience, almost everyone (97%) reported supporting organizations engaged in non-violent civil disobedience (e.g sit-ins, blockades).
Participants at this day of action were much less supportive of the idea that political violence is needed to protect our democracy than at all of the previous protests where my team has collected data in 2025. Here is the table comparing across these events:
Although we are just digging into these data, I expect that the recent political assassinations and violence against protesters are likely to have played a role in this noteworthy change.
Dana R Fisher 