Nine months ago, Lisa Erbes lingered outside the Minnesota Capitol, and she wasn’t sure the Twin Cities would hold its first No Kings march. Earlier that morning, a man had killed a ranking Minnesota House Democrat and her husband in what authorities called a politically motivated attack. The gunman was on the loose, and he’d left behind a hit list targeting 70 other Democrats. Law enforcement officials urged Erbes and other organizers to cancel the protest.
Erbes, a transplant from Georgia, had worked nearly a decade with the left-leaning Indivisible group, but for most of her tenure, few people had organized alongside her. The momentum had shifted since Donald Trump took office a second time, though. Minnesotans wanted to preserve the democracy they felt the president was dismantling. The rally had to happen, she decided.
By the end of the day, 100,000 Minnesotans had surrounded the capitol, organizers say. Nationwide, an estimated 5 million people marched in simultaneous demonstrations that June morning. Organizers of the first No Kings march call it one of the largest single-day protests in American history. Still, neither they nor Erbes knew if that crowd might translate to real change.
The success of mass protests can be notoriously hard to evaluate. Even groups with focused messages, such as the antiabortion March for Life, can go decades before they achieve a tangible win. But Erbes and other No Kings organizers across the country say they see the impact. Erbes’s calls for volunteers now yield hundreds of yeses. More Democrats are running for office in conservative strongholds.
And the No Kings march itself has grown. Last October’s protest drew an estimated 7 million people at 2,600 events, organizers said, 2 million more than were estimated to be at the inaugural march. And with 3,100 demonstrations on the books for this Saturday, leaders like Erbes say they believe the turnout will be even bigger.
Protesters will be marching in support of abortion access, gun control and voting rights, and while that diffuse message might make the ultimate success of the demonstration harder to chart, Erbes said the most pressing work is to “protect our democracy.”
“If we can’t curb this rising authoritarianism,” she said, “we’re never going to be able to fix those issues.”
Supporters of the president, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Lousiana), have criticized the No Kings marches as “hate America rallies.”
Historically, American protests have shortened the workday, established the Environmental Protection Agency and secured voting rights for women and Black people. But over the last decade, large demonstrations have had varying success, researchers say.
While the 2017 Women’s March inspired a record number of women to run for office, the effects of other recent mass protests have been harder to pin down. After the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations, liberal cities such as New York and Austin cut their police budgets, only to restore them a year later. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that most demonstrations held between 2017 and 2022 didn’t significantly alter voters’ views or their political actions.
But mass protests can work, experts say. In their decades-long study of civil resistance, Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth has found that mass demonstrations are most likely to succeed if they are nonviolent, include roughly 3.5 percent of the population (roughly 12 million people in the United States), and if they are bolstered by careful planning outside of the day itself.
Many No Kings marches meet at least some of those criteria, organizers say. After the first Minnesota Capitol march, Erbes said, thousands of people emailed to ask how they could become involved more regularly.
“These are people who said, ‘I want to do something. Give me a task,’” Erbes said.
The group has become so robust, Erbes said, her local Indivisible chapter now has an onboarding team to vet volunteers. The group has hundreds of people who write op-eds and letters about issues ranging from immigration to trans rights. They hold neighborhood trainings to teach people how to contact a lawmaker and what to say once they secure a meeting.
Another sign that a protest movement is likely to succeed, Chenoweth and other Harvard researchers have found, is if it reaches new, diverse groups of people. Indivisible organizers say the number of local chapters has grown by 150 percent nationwide since the beginning of Trump’s second term. There are now more than 2,700 Indivisible groups across the country.
Adrian Lopez, a 21-year-old who lives in a suburb of San Diego, said he’d felt “discouraged and depressed” at the beginning of Trump’s second term. But after he attended the San Diego march last June, Lopez and his mother, Jami, invited 40 neighbors to gather on their backyard patio to plan a march for their own suburb in La Mesa.
“We just hope that this will be as meaningful as our first rally was,” Lopez said, “and to bring more people who may have some reservations and have them know that it’s a safe, peaceful, community environment.”
La Mesa’s march is one of more than 300 planned across California this weekend. While nearly half of the rallies will take place near Los Angeles or the Bay Area, demonstrations are planned in almost every corner of the state, extending into its agricultural heartland, its desert communities and even an island off the coast.
While the No Kings movement has continued to grow in Democratic strongholds, researchers have also found that it and other protests reached deeper into conservative communities last year than at almost any point during the first Trump administration. In 2025, more than 60 percent of U.S. counties held a protest against Trump.
In Texas, where organizers will hold more than 80 marches this weekend in communities big and small, Democrats say they have seen a notable shift in the state’s voting tendencies. Democrats won more votes than Republicans did in this month’s statewide primaries, for instance.
Organizers in Virginia say they’ve seen similar gains. Fewer than 200 people signed up for the first No Kings march in the deep-red Culpeper County. Last fall, nearly 350 people registered in advance, and organizers say they expect hundreds more to register or attend this weekend. Those sign-ups help Democratic organizers expand their email lists and strengthen get-out-the-vote efforts.
“We’re not delusional. Through a No Kings rally, we’re not going to turn Culpeper County blue,” Joshua Pieper, chair of the Culpeper County Democratic Committee, said. “But we think the rallies have helped us meaningfully eat into Republican margins.”
In northeast Tennessee, the marches have grown so much the local Indivisible chapter recently filed to become a nonprofit. Allison Nulton, a 49-year-old hospital contract specialist who helped organize the Johnson City marches, said that growth has translated to an increase in Democrats running for local office. In Washington County, all but one of 15 county commissioners are now facing a Democratic challenger, and many of those are first-time candidates.
“It’s a place to let this administration know we’re not happy,” Nulton said of the marches. “But also it’s to let your neighbors know. When they see this amount of people coming up in red areas, it lets them know: ‘Hey, you’re not alone.’”
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