Notes on No Kings 3: We're Going to Need a Bigger, Broader Movement
Is the movement leveling off? Can it grow beyond its predominantly older, well-educated base?
Saturday, millions of Americans marched and rallied at more than 3,300 locations across the country to declare their opposition to Trump, ICE, the Iran War and a host of related concerns. According to the national No Kings coalition, the movement has grown substantially since the first No Kings protests of June 2025, with about 40% more events in non-urban locations than then. Also, two-thirds of the people who RSVPed for a specific local protest this time were from non-urban centers (indicating either better manners or less fear of giving their information out).
Local organizers are reporting that this massive turnout is injecting plenty of fresh faces into their groups. Bridget Powers of Central New Hampshire Indivisible told me that roughly 29,000 people, or 2% of the state’s population, turned out at one of more than three dozen protests. “Our own group, in a rural area, found approximately 100 new people who were new, increasing our total mailing list to about 435,” she shared. Jamie Carter of Salt Lake City Indivisible said that while just 2,500 people RSVPed in advance, more than 20,000 people showed up at their rally by the State Capitol. A coalition of twenty organizations partnered to put on the event, ranging from Indivisible, the ACLU, the NAACP, Mormons With Hope, the Sierra Club the League of Women Voters, and the state Democratic Party to DSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. She said, it was an “amazing experience to see groups from center to far left working together,” adding, “I know each org got at least 500 new signups.”
In Minneapolis, the epicenter of the strongest Defiance, a crowd of 200,000 came out to cheer Bruce Springsteen, Senator Bernie Sanders, Joan Baez, and a slate of state elected officials and movement organization leaders. But it wasn’t just a day for preaching to the choir. As Joan Walsh reported for The Nation, the event MC Lizz Winstead “did more than make jokes. She asked the crowd to text ‘Vote’ to the Minnesota Election Protection Network, which trains election observers and monitors voter suppression reports. The group got 14,000 texts in the next hours, a strong retort to critics who question the value of these protests.”
Indivisible National’s co-directors Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, who also spoke at the Minneapolis rally, used their time on stage to make news, announcing a major escalation in the movement’s tactics. Here’s how Levin put it:
“If you know anything about indivisible, we have a real bias towards action. So we’re going to give you some actions…There are millions of people watching now, and for the millions of people around the country, around the globe, we’ve got to work in concert with the Minnesotans when Trump tries to sabotage the midterms. We need to match the depth of the organizing that we’ve seen here in Minnesota with the breadth of the organizing we’re seeing all over the world for No Kings 3. So what? What does that mean? Let’s get specific.
I want everybody, everybody here to put this on your calendar. The next major national action of this movement is not just going to be another protest. It is a tactical escalation, an escalation. It is an economic show of force inspired by Minnesota’s own Day of Truth and Action. We all saw thousands of teachers and nurses, community leaders, faith leaders, showing up in subzero temperatures, showing this state that they were not going to put up with business as usual, while a secret police goon aquad was murdering Americans in the streets.
We need to do that nationally, y’all. We need to do that all over the country. So on May 1st on May Day across the country, we are saying no business as usual, no work, no school, no shopping, we’re going to show up and say we’re putting workers over billionaires and kings. Minnesota, we cannot thank you enough for the courage you’ve displayed, for the instruction you have given. We are going to build on that courage, on that sacrifice, on that dedication, on that organizing, we are going to demonstrate that regular people are the single greatest threat to fascism in this country.”
Can organizers and activists across America “match the depth of the organizing that we’ve seen here in Minnesota with the breadth of the organizing we’re seeing all over the world for No Kings 3”?
Perhaps. Keep in mind, roughly one in four Minnesota voters either joined in the January 23rd Day of Truth and Action social strike, or said they had a loved one who did. Nearly 40% of those stayed off the job that day, according to a Blue Rose Research survey. As my friend David Donnelly of the ProDemocracy Campaign writes, powerful organizing has been going on in Minnesota for well more than a decade. What happened there in January wasn’t the result of the best messaging via random-controlled trials or great TV ads that brought people together in solidarity, he notes. “By betting on organizing and leadership development over years, Minnesota-based organizations provided the scaffolding for this mobilization moment,” Donnelly writes. “They protected their neighbors, deployed ICE observers in every neighborhood, and shaped the story in every gut-wrenching, awful viral moment emerging from the occupation.”
So let’s try to take stock, get serious and be honest with ourselves. The No Kings movement faces some hard challenges ahead if it’s going to get anywhere as deep, broad and powerful as its peers in Minnesota.
No Kings is Overwhelmingly Older and Highly Educated
Every Thursday at 3:00pm ET, Levin and Greenberg of Indivisible hold an hour-long mass Zoom called “What’s the Plan?” They start out by welcoming a smattering of new Indivisible groups (new ones keep forming at a steady pace), offer some remarks (Leah) and rants (Ezra) about their current strategy priorities, and then field questions that highest number of upvotes from the live audience. Usually, somewhere around five to six thousand people attend.
This past Thursday, I decided to post a simple demographic survey in the chat, doing so multiple times (until some commenters got annoyed with me). I asked people for their age and education level. The median age was 70; the average was 68.8. The youngest was 38.
More than three-quarters of my respondent group are also very well educated, with at least a bachelors degree from college. None reported having stopped at high school or not completing it.
Of course, this isn’t a sample of all Indivisible activists. People with the free time to attend a Zoom meeting in the middle of the workday are far more likely to be retired. But just scan through any random assortment of photos and video posted from around the country this weekend. The No Kings movement’s foot soldiers are predominantly seniors. And with 2736 groups in 431 of America’s 435 congressional districts, Indivisible is by far the biggest local vehicle for our movement.
Last Thursday morning, the No Kings coalition held a press call by Zoom. I posted a question and it got asked. “Many observers have noted that the majority of No Kings participants are over the age of 50. How many No Kings demonstrations are happening at college campuses?” The host directed it to Sarah Parker, the national director of 50501. She replied:
“As a 33-year-old leader in this movement, I take high offense to that. This is a wildly overblown statement that I’m hearing often. And I want to be clear, we have students in college campuses and universities participating in every state at 50501. The average organizer is in their 30s, and whether you’re 17 or 70 or 85 we are all sharing the same concern. We are pissed about our government. We are upset at the administration. We are upset our neighbors are being executed. We are upset we cannot afford groceries, and they are said that we’re spending billions of dollars on an illegal war, and we are pissed that ICE agents are infiltrating our community. We are trying to save our democracy. As a 33-year-old, when I said the Pledge of Allegiance, and I’ve said this multiple times, I was told about the American dream. So there are other 33-year-olds that are fighting for that American dream that was promised to us.”
Afterwards, I wrote the No Kings media account, politely asking if they could tell me how many No Kings demonstrations were scheduled on college campuses. They promised to follow up. Despite a reminder yesterday, I’ve still not gotten an answer. And this doesn’t require hard work—all the event data is in Indivisible’s Mobilize account. When I searched Friday for events with the word “college” or “university” in them, I found just seven out of 3,300: American University, George Washington University, Rutgers, Notre Dame, Clemson, UC Berkeley and Amherst. News reports and social media posts from these schools show little so far about actual turnout.
It’s important to remember that there were hundreds of organizations involved in putting together the No Kings protests, with the ACLU, American Federation of Teachers, Common Defense, 50501, Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible, League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn, National Nurses United, Public Citizen, SEIU, and United We Dream all out in front. Maybe 50501, the newest and most amorphous of all these entities, is the movement’s youth wing. On March 20, eight days prior to No Kings 3, they put on a livestream on Twitch, a platform very popular with young people. It got barely a thousand views. 50501’s spreadsheet of its hundreds of local affiliates turns up none with college or university in its name.
In a fair number of places, the local coalition that put together their No Kings event was age diverse. For example, in very blue Northampton, Massachusetts, nine groups partnered on an event that drew close to 7,000, including Indivisible, a high school group (Feminist Generation), a college group (Smith College Sunrise), Freedom Road Socialist Org., Veterans for Peace, Western MA Climate Action Now, Democratic Socialists of America, and some local groups.
But the god-honest truth is still that Minnesota is one of the few states in America where serious, structured, professionally-led base-building has been going on for years. By contrast, Indivisible has just a handful of state-focused organizers, and many of them are supposed to build and sustain relationships with dozens and dozens of local groups. Some of those groups are experienced and competent enough to manage the logistics of a mid-sized city rally, but many are tiny and do limited amounts of local organizing. Half of Indivisible’s 2736 local groups are barely a year old.
So what? (You might be thinking.) Eight million Americans were in motion on Saturday, an increase from seven million last October, and nearly triple the number that came out for the first mass protests against Trump, the Hands Off rallies of April 2025. It’s true that this looks like growth, and at least there’s hard data showing that these anti-Trump protests are spreading to more places.
But just to be rigorous for a second, let’s remember that as of today, no one has published any basis for the claim that eight million people turned out—and that was a number Indivisible announced even before protests were done on the West Coast! Back in October, independent journalist G. Elliot Morris heroically managed to crowd-source reports from around the country and offered a median estimate of 5 million, with “an upper bound of 6.5 million.” That upper bound got transmogrified into seven million by the No Kings coalition organizers, or simply referred to as “the single largest day of nonviolent protest in American history.”™ I get why political organizers need to spin things, especially when most of the media underplays protest movements (except when they’re led by conservative rural people). Having claimed seven million in October, of course we must claim a bigger number now. Please don’t look at news reports like this one from the San Jose Mercury News, which found that 136,000 protestors took to roughly 50 Bay Area protests on Saturday, down from 220,000 in October.
For argument’s sake, let’s stipulate that indeed eight million people marched Saturday. Let’s be generous and assume that 25% of them were under the age of 50, meaning six million were older than that. In 2024, 75 million Americans over the age of 50 voted, with a little more than half going for Trump. So, if 36 million of those voters pulled for Harris, the No Kings movement has already mobilized a whopping one-in-six of its most available base. Sure, there’s still room for growth – but I hope you agree that if the broad stop-fascism movement is going to grow to the scale suggested by the Minnesota uprising against ICE, it’s got to a lot more growing in the demographics currently underrepresented in its ranks. We may well be leveling off on how many more old people will turn out next time. And sadly, despite their great service to us, they won’t be here forever.
So, Are the Kids Alright?
Where are young people in the movement against rising authoritarianism? One answer came in January and February, when – as I noted here – students at hundreds if not thousands of high schools staged midday walkouts to protest ICE. As of now, those leading these walkouts have no common identity or political home. To some extent the Sunrise Movement, which was built from its very start to be a vehicle led by and for young people, has taken on the role of tending to these new shoots by hosting trainings and reaching out. But its new platform of “End ICE, End Billionaires,” while politically timely, clashes with Sunrise’s brand as the youth organization fighting for a green economy and green jobs.
I asked some current youth organizers as well as veterans of campus organizing what they thought explained the relative absence of young people in the No Kings movement. One reason, they all said, was obvious. No one likes being invited to a dinner party after the first course has been served. No Kings has a dominant demographic and vibe. A twenty-something walking into a room of gray hairs may be welcomed, but they’re also going to wonder why they should invest time with a bunch of people twice or three times their age. (Never underestimate the importance of dating opportunities to movement scenes.) And older progressives sometimes exude an off-putting superiority. As a twenty-something woman who came to my Indivisible group’s meeting in February said when asked about the challenge of getting more of her peers involved, “A lot of younger people feel that older generations are telling them that their problems don’t matter.”
Another barrier to anti-Trump activism on campus is more visceral. Many student radicals are both burned out and terrified, having gone through the last few years of pro-Palestine protests and seeing many of their peers severely punished. One youth organizer told me they saw a big gap between juniors and seniors, who might typically be leading campus political groups at this stage in their academic lives but are instead holding back, while frosh and sophomores are much more open to action and wondering why no one was leading anything. At its best, healthy campus organizing is a pipeline, where strong organizations keep themselves going over time by cultivating incoming students and grooming to become leaders by their later years – but that pipeline has been badly damaged with the crackdown since October 7.
Last but certainly not least, young people who have grown up with Trump as the dominant political figure of our time and turmoil as a constant are not feeling hopeful or grounded. “They feel overwhelming insecurity,” said one longtime campus organizer who has been invited to speak at more than a half dozen colleges in recent months. “They worry about being saddled with debt for their lifetimes with worthless degrees. They doubt that they’ll ever own a house. They are petrified that they’ll be thrown out of school. They are all acutely aware of fellow students being deported.” On top of that, “They’re completely bitter about the Democratic party leadership. They feel like they’re old and out of touch and have lied to them consistently.”
These are not great breeding grounds for activism, especially the kind that is calling for a big tent/popular front approach like No Kings, which in many places put Democratic party leaders on its rally stages and is, quite pragmatically, urging a big turnout for Democrats this fall.
Signs of Hope and Change
None of this is meant to suggest that the broad anti-authoritarian movement can’t evolve and grow past these challenges.
For one thing, there are some green shoots sprouting up. We the Students, for example, is a fledgling network of high school-based organizers who are making civic activism in defense of the Constitution and the rule of law their north star. It was started last year by students across a few dozen mostly elite high schools in New York City, and now has branches in California and Ohio with hopes to spread to more states including Texas, Oregon, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Here are some of them demonstrating last Saturday.
At a more strategic level, there are signs that the burgeoning resistance to ICE, which is generating a lot of hyper-local neighborhood-watch style organizing and which is often deeply rooted in immigrant communities, could supplant or deepen the No Kings/Indivisible model. And given what is shaping up to be a highly contested election, people who have built local neighborhood ICE watch groups could very easily turn themselves into polling place protection groups.
Four days before No Kings 3, Defend & Recruit, the organizing arm of Siembra NC, published an updated playbook for new and established groups taking on the immigrant defense fight. It’s full of practical guidance on everything from how to build a local ICE Watch group or Fourth Amendment Workplace, to how to work with faith communities, local sheriffs and DAs and elected officials when a federal ICE occupation comes to your town. I won’t try to summarize it all here.
But I do want to highlight a few things that Defend & Recruit says in its vision statement. They are after a full-blown cultural shift, one that makes Trumpian anti-immigrant appeals to voters toxic by 2028. How can we win this? They write that this change is possible if…:
“…every time the heartless policies of the MAGA alliance were felt by someone’s niece, their favorite restaurant, their cousin’s construction company, the transgender teenager at their church, or hit their wallet, local organizers were there to help them make meaning of the moment, and learn through practice a truth that TikTok influencers can’t undermine: “We look out for each other. El pueblo salva al pueblo.” Our economy and our politics are rigged, and rich guys aren’t the answer.
And instead of doubling down with the people we already know and trust, we spent countless hours listening to and building with people who sat out the 2024 election or voted for Trump. [Emphasis added]
Communities in every corner of the US created committees not just to protect each other but to recruit our primos, tías, parceros away from the false ideology of everything-bagel-populism, with a scapegoat and a reality-defying, magic-wand solution for every harm unleashed by rich-guy capitalism (and a federal government run by rich-guy capitalists). We broke the spell cast via social media and WhatsApp that we heard repeated back to us throughout 2024 – “he’ll stop inflation”, “we’ll make more money,” “rent will go down,” “he’ll only go after the criminals”.
The spell was broken by face-to-face organizing. It was broken by people showing up for each other. By meeting confusion and frustration with the status quo with compassion and curiosity – not with condescension or “I-told-you-so”. The spell was broken by organizing that could “show, not tell” the truth that rich people aren’t there to lend a hand in a moment of crisis – by community mutual aid projects, by offering 1:1 support for employers that wanted help thinking through how to protect their workers, and for school administrators that needed thought-partners in figuring out how to avoid breaking state laws while still getting parents crucial community defense information, for a local pickup basketball team that felt confused and angry after one of their members was detained.
We didn’t revive the anti-Trump playbook – which, let’s be honest, was written primarily to engage die-hard, anti-Trump middle class white people – Latinos wrote a new one, with a different sazón para cada rincón. But it was a sancocho of the same basic ingredients: earning trust in moments our gente were interested in new answers, new interpretations for why they felt the way they did and who was responsible – not when they had already made up their minds two months before an election. And with organizing that changed the material conditions for millions.
Learn more and get Defend & Recruit’s new playbook here.
And learn more about the plans for May Day here.
Give to power-building organizing here.
—Also, new from Protect Democracy: “Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it.”
One Thing to Read about AI
--Catherine Bracy: “The Critics are Right: The Left Risks Losing the Political Battle on AI.”
End Times
How long can Fox & Friends keep saying that going broke is patriotic?
good point about college students feeling skittish about protesting in light of the crackdown over Palestine
Thank you. People are getting out over their skis and forgetting that sporadic mobilization is not organizing and staying in movement. Younger folk who care already know what a POS Trump is. Quarterly mass grievance outpourings answer none of their anxieties.