The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) logged more than 29,500 rallies, demonstrations, marches, vigils, and other public protest events across the United States in 2023, up more than 6 percent from about 27,700 in 2022 (and excluding labor strikes, which we stopped covering in 2023). Those nearly 30,000 events occurred in about 2,900 different cities and towns, down a bit from more than 3,200 in 2022. While we only had information on crowd size for 35 percent of the events we recorded in 2023 — about the same share as in 2022 — the sum of our conservatively estimated crowd sizes in 2023 still ran to more than 9.1 million people, or about 2.5 times as many as we counted in 2022.
Here are some trends we saw in our data in 2023. If you want to learn more about what the dataset covers, how we collect and encode it, and how you can freely access it, please see the Nonviolent Action Lab’s CCC repository on GitHub (here).
Physical Violence at U.S. Protest Events Remains Extremely Rare
While some indicators of political violence have surged in recent years and some analysts are warning of escalating risks of political violence in 2024, our data show that nearly all U.S. protest events in 2023 remained free from physical violence.
We saw reports of injured protesters at just 78 of those roughly 29,500 events in 2023, or only about 0.3 percent. That’s almost identical to the 74 events with protester injuries we recorded in 2022 and still well below the recent peak of 472 we recorded in 2020. We also recorded three protester deaths in 2023, the same number as 2022: one at the hands of police (Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest in January), one shot and killed by another attendee at a Juneteenth festival in San Diego’s Liberty Station, and one counter-protester (Paul Kessler) who died after an altercation with a pro-Palestine demonstrator in Thousand Oaks, California, in November.
Police injuries remained even rarer. We saw reports of police injuries at just 18 protest events in 2023, or less than 0.1 percent. That 2023 total is up a bit from the 11 events with reported police injuries in 2022 but still well below the 244 recorded in 2020.
Finally, the number of protests causing property damage rose significantly in 2023 compared with 2022, but property damage still remained exceedingly rare. We saw reports of property damage — ranging from graffiti and broken windows to vandalized or burned construction equipment — at 200 events (0.7 percent) in 2023. That’s up a hefty chunk from the 116 (0.4 percent) instances we saw in 2022 but still well below the 586 we recorded in 2020.
Anti-LGBTQ Protest Wave Persists…and Then Finally Breaks?
In 2023, the historic surge of right-wing protests against LGBTQ+ rights, visibility, and even existence that began in 2022 persisted beyond that year’s midterm elections and even leapt to new heights (or lows, really) around Pride Month before finally ebbing late in the year.
As shown in the chart below, this anti-LGBTQ+ wave began gaining momentum in 2021 but really accelerated in June 2022 and then persisted at historically high levels until November and December. One notable feature of this wave was a focus on Drag Story Hour children’s reading events and other drag performances. These events were the targets of a substantial share of anti-LGBTQ+ protests for much of that wave, and they have continued to draw haters even as the wider wave has receded.
On this topic, it’s important to note the apparent dissipation of this protest wave does not mean that the flow of anti-LGBTQ+ bills through state legislatures has slowed, or that other forms of violence or terrorism targeting the LGBTQ+ community have gone away. It just means we’re not seeing those prejudices manifest as street protests so much any more, at least for the moment.
Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t also observe that gatherings in support of LGBTQ+ rights and visibility vastly outnumbered even this historically large wave of anti-LGBTQ+ protests over the past two years. As the chart below shows, pro-LGBTQ+ events — including but not limited to pride festivals, marches, and parades that are free to attend — vastly outnumbered the anti-LGBTQ+ ones in both number and scale. As the right ramped up its legislative and street attacks, the LGBTQ+ community and sympathetic activists and organizations responded with a much larger outpouring of activity, including many actions that were direct (and typically larger and joyful) counter-protests to anti-LGBTQ+ actions. Note the difference in scale across the two charts: the y-axis on the anti-LGBTQ+ chart maxes out at 175, while the y-axis on the pro-LGBTQ+ chart tops out at over 600. From spring 2022 to the end of 2023, pro-LGBTQ+ activism produced a dozen months with event counts that exceeded the peak monthly count of anti-LGBTQ+ actions during the same period, and often by scores or even hundreds of events.
Largest-Ever Pro-Palestine Movement
The October 7 attacks on Israel by Palestinian militants, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in response to them, spurred twin surges of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine activism in the U.S. in 2023. While the pro-Israel surge was relatively short lived, the burst of pro-Palestine protests grew into what’s almost certainly the largest and broadest campaign in support of Palestinian liberation in U.S. history, and that campaign was still going and growing at the start of 2024.
The chart below shows daily counts of pro-Israel protest events — a set that includes public vigils, rallies, and other demonstrations — from October 7 to the end of the year, and the total crowd sizes from the events for which we had information about that aspect. During that period, we saw 468 pro-Israel events across 275 different cities and towns in 45 states and DC. We had information about crowd size for 329 (70 percent) of those events, and the total conservatively estimated size of those crowds was roughly 300,000 people. Notably, more than half of all the pro-Israel events we saw happened within a week or so of the October 7 attacks, and there were just a scattering of events over the last five weeks of the year. Also notable, the single-largest event in this set, the March for Israel in Washington, DC, on November 14, accounted for roughly half of that estimated total crowd size.
The chart below shows daily event counts and crowd totals for pro-Palestine protest events from that same period. As the chart illustrates, while the size of the crowds at these actions has ebbed as the campaign has drawn on, the pace of events has not. That fact is remarkable on its own, but doubly so when you consider that protest activity is typically light at this time of year due to holidays and weather. By the end of the year, we had logged nearly 3,300 pro-Palestine actions since October 7 across 622 different cities and towns in all 50 U.S. states, DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. We had information about crowd size for only 1,561 (48 percent) of those events, and the sum of the conservatively estimated size of those crowds still ran to roughly 767,000 people. As we noted in an early December press briefing on this topic, we’re fairly confident at this point that this year’s pro-Palestine wave is the largest and broadest pro-Palestine mobilization in U.S. history. And, as the chart shows, this mobilization showed no signs of dissipating at the start of 2024.
Last on this subject, the near-absence of pro-Israel protest events in the last several weeks of the year did not mean that public activism in support of Israel had entirely disappeared in the U.S. As the following chart shows, supporters of Israel have continued to turn out to counter-protest pro-Palestine events, even when they’re not organizing rallies or vigils or demonstrations of their own. These counter-protests — typically, small groups of people waving Israeli flags who sometimes verbally confront pro-Palestine crowds about hostages still held by Hamas — were excluded from the tallies reported above. As the chart shows, though, over the last several weeks of the year they had become the dominant form of pro-Israel protest in the U.S., accounting for most or even all of the weekly activity we saw.
Environmental Protest Activity Held Steady
The global climate crisis accelerated in 2023, but U.S. protest activity related to environmental issues did not. In fact, monthly counts of U.S. protest events making calls for climate action or addressing other environmental concerns have held fairly steady for nearly three years now, since recovering from recent lows during the COVID pandemic’s initial peak in 2020.
Rather than any recent shifts, what the CCC data summarized in that chart show are a few distinct phases of environmental protest activity in the U.S. since 2017. The first covered much of the Trump administration and was dominated by the school strikes for climate, coordinated international days of action centered on walkouts and rallies led by students at schools across the country (and around the world). The next phase was the extended lull in 2020 and early 2021 associated with the COVID pandemic.
The current phase began in mid-2021 and persists into 2024. Youth activists have continued to play a central role in environmental activism during this phase, but instead of occasional bursts of climate strikes at schools, we are seeing a relatively steady pace of protests and demonstrations that generally target either a) projects with significant environmental consequences (e.g., the Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines in Minnesota, Atlanta’s so-called Cop City project, or the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the Appalachians) or b) banks, other corporations, or government officials considered complicit in the crisis. As the chart also shows, while protests, demonstrations, and rallies still vastly outnumber acts of civil disobedience or direct action, the latter have also regularly featured in the movement’s public activities over the past few years.
Housing Precarity Spurs Housing Protests
As we wrote back in May 2023 and as the chart below shows, the U.S.’s ongoing housing affordability crisis has spurred a wave of housing-related protest activity that picked up steam during the COVID pandemic, accelerated in 2022, and showed no signs of abating at the start of 2024. Over the past few years, the average monthly count of housing-related protests in our dataset has risen from 46 in 2020 to 72 in 2021, 93 in 2022, and 117 in 2023. December is always a busy month for housing-related events because it includes vigils held on the winter solstice to mark Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, but the data from the rest of the year also implies that this wave continues to roll.
Return to Recent Normal on Reproductive Rights
After surging in spring and summer 2022 in response to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, protests for abortion access and other reproductive rights receded to a more typical pace in 2023. The year saw modest peaks in protest activity on this theme as a result of a national Women’s March in late January, a court ruling that suspended FDA approval of the abortion medication mifepristone in April, and a modest wavelet of actions on the first anniversary of Roe’s reversal in June.
Importantly, though, the apparent ebb in 2023 in protest activity in support of reproductive rights did not result from a decline in the issue’s political salience or a change in attitudes on it. State ballot measures to protect or expand abortion access have won consistently since SCOTUS dropped the Dobbs decision; support for reproductive rights seemed to help tip numerous elections towards Democrats in November 2023; and survey data continue to show that most Americans believe abortion should be legal.
Proud Boys in Retreat
Consistent with reporting by VICE News, CCC data show a significant decline in public protest activity in 2023 by the Proud Boys, a national network of right-wing men’s clubs whom then-President Trump famously shouted out in a 2020 debate and who played a major role in the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We logged just 81 protest actions involving Proud Boys in 2023, down from 154 in 2022 and 210 in 2021. As shown in the map below, those 2023 appearances were concentrated in Southern and Central California, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina,Ohio, Wisconsin, and New York, with a handful of other actions scattered across the Rocky Mountain states, the Upper Midwest, DC, and New England.
Of course, the Proud Boys’ diminishing role should not be mistaken for a broader decline in far-right activism or the popularity of the racism, misogyny, and adoration of violence they represent. The past year also saw rapid growth in North America and Europe of so-called Active Clubs, a newer network of organizations with a loose ideology similar to the Proud Boys’. These groups only appeared at 37 events logged by CCC in 2023, but that’s partly because they seem to prioritize training sessions and other group activities over public protests, at least so far. Even more concerning, ideas that used to be considered far-right or fringe —including but not limited to Great Replacement Theory and beliefs about the propriety of political violence — have become increasingly mainstream.
Counting Crowds 