With a new administration in D.C., large-scale rallies and protests have returned, but how “effective” are these?
At the Climate Action Campaign’s “Climate Can’t Wait” rally this January at Liberty Plaza in Atlanta, participants held a massive banner bearing the campaign’s name. GCV team members Brionté McCorkle—who also spoke at the event—along with Christian Dacus and Paul Glaze, were in attendance.
Have you noticed more people saying that rallies and marches “don’t matter?”
Most of the time, someone who cares about you says that to encourage you to do more than simply march in the rally. Like a vote, participation in a rally or a march is only a single exercise of your political power. It’s not worth very much on its own.
What’s wrong with a good, ol’ fashioned protest?
But every time that large groups of people take to the streets, other groups of people – usually with property, usually with some money or influence – find a lot of different reasons to question whether this is really what “we” should be doing.
On the Left, people say, “It’s performative. It’s all there to help white liberals feel better and replace actually helpful actions.” Let’s break that down a little.
Performance Art
Feelings can be powerful motivators. For someone who is coming to terms with the truth of the American enterprise, and all the barbarity and bravery inside of it, moments of catharsis and belonging – even those that are not disruptive – can be transformational. Mostly, we call the stuff that makes us feel things “art,” though, and we shouldn’t confuse art – on its own – for a principled political struggle for the freedom of humanity.
Which is what we need.
So the critique here is that protests and rallies are essentially performance art on a massive scale. All these groups come together to create an experience that lets guilt-ridden (mostly white) people throw our voices out yelling, cosplaying like we’re in the civil rights movement, and feeling as if we’ve really “stuck it to the man.” There will be older (white) men playing guitars and singing “This Land is Your Land,” and people will generally only know 2-3 of the chants. Then, we’ll all go home and order an upgrade on our iphone that required the slave labor of several Congolese children to produce the materials for and the virtual slave labor of Chinese and Taiwanese workers to produce.
Many rallies are nothing but photo-ops for electeds. Many politicians ride around the country hosting tens of thousands of people at rallies. After a week or two, all the attendees are left with is the pleasure of a donation request from the politician’s new organization or campaign.
But it strikes me that this critique isn’t always about the rally itself. After all, someone may be transformed by the catharsis they feel at a rally and spend years volunteering at their community food bank. They might go on an educational journey that finds them more radicalized and in deeper community with their neighbors. If that’s the result of the performance art, then…. Good, right?
What does it mean to be disruptive?
A protest, rally, or march should be disruptive. It should, somehow, interrupt the lives of people who are not attending the event. That’s how people come to learn about this issue they didn’t know about before. We drop banners from bridges because other people see them, not because we do.
However, many rallies are not disruptive and, therefore, are not directly contesting the power of the state or the opposition. That’s just a fact. To be opposed to something, you do actually have to take some action against that thing. Like, to hurt it somehow. Showing up in a big crowd in the “designated free speech zone” and yelling about it is fine for a single city council person you want to strong-arm, but let’s be realistic here. We’re talking about the major power structures holding up the most powerful country on Earth. If their bottom line wasn’t impacted, they won’t care. They’ll just turn the news off for the day and forget about your event.
It’s kind of like how some people talked about Trump as the second coming of Hitler, but then didn’t act as if that’s actually what he was, right? Politicians take the microphone and say, “This system is literally murdering us! You can fight it by voting for me and writing a clever pun on a yard sign.” Ummm, okay. Yeah. That’ll do it.
In respectable circles, protests and rallies are always “disruptive” or “the wrong tone” or inviting in too many “Radicals” who might, I don’t know, inspire somebody or something. As a rule of thumb, though, if it doesn’t scare you at least a little bit, and it doesn’t make people uncomfortable, you’re either doing it wrong or you need more people.
It also ignores a fundamental lesson from the civil rights movement – that it was a bloody and radical affair. We are talking about the same movement that convinced 1,000 children in Birmingham to walk into water hoses and get arrested without telling their parents, right? They risked the lives of children, and we’re supposed to cry over broken windows at Lenox Mall?
The truth is: the merits of a mass protest or rally are almost always about whether people stick around after the action. When you have the numbers and the motivation, the action might take over a space, disrupt, or occupy it – as seen in the South River Forest during Cop City, or the Mechanicsville Tent City. But it is also always about creating a space where people can find other people with whom to learn, form community, and hopefully organize. The critique matters and organizers should take it seriously and work to make these events as meaningful as possible politically (and they do!). At the same time, it’s sometimes less a critique of mass rallies and more a complaint about the privilege of individual people or organizations.
But that leads us to today. As the 50501 group pushes actions across the country and the Trump Administration pushes to send U.S. residents to El Salvadoran torture camps, we can’t afford to get too lost in the sauce on rallies and marches. So, what does the science say about the effectiveness of rallies, protests, or other forms of protest? Is it effective for “growing the tent?” Does it create a backlash? A new article from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications dives deep into that question with positive results.
Is it good for the movement?
The toplines are positive. Reviewing 50 studies on the impact of climate activism, the researchers concluded that rallies and marches are a net positive and rarely ever a bad thing.
Spreading the Word
Rallies and protests work to spread awareness to the general public. Whether in Google searches for climate change-related topics, or recognition of the issue, mass protests and rallies make people think and talk, especially about the groups who organize them. No one knew who 50501 was before these rallies. A lot could be said about that, but the effectiveness of the rallies in getting their name out there is obvious. Protests raise the profile of organizers and speakers. It’s kind of their thing.
Politicians are more likely to discuss climate change after climate rallies and protests. This doesn’t usually change their actual beliefs or votes, but they feel public pressure to be visible on the issue, and they move to correct their image problem.
Do protests or rallies impact elections?
Yes. The power of large movements to shape the discussion directly impacts the outcomes of elections. This research mainly focuses on European elections, but here’s what it says.
“In the electoral realm, the two most often studied outcome variables are the impact of climate collective action on voters and elected officials. Valentim (2023), studying the Fridays for Future protest movement in Germany, finds that areas that were exposed to protests had a higher share of the vote (+2-2.5 percentage points) go to the Green party, and that repeated exposure increased this effect.”
Crucially, it was also a deradicalizing force. “Fabel and colleagues (2022) replicated these findings, while also finding that protests shift votes from the far-right AFD party to the Center-Right Christian Democrats, a more climate-friendly right-wing party.” These results might be specific to the German context, so further examples – particularly in Atlanta in 2025 – might be worth looking into.
Social and cultural power is power. People don’t want to think they’re racist, so if tens of thousands of their community members are saying, “Don’t vote for that guy, he’s racist,” they often do think about that in the voting booth. 2-2.5% isn’t huge. Still, it was enough to defeat Trump’s 2020 campaign.
But how does that play out at home?
In the United States
Polling by Hit Strategies in October 2020 showed that police brutality and the impacts of racism were top issues for Black voters one month out from Election Day. Later, an election post-mortem I attended with the same group would conclude that the voters activated by the George Floyd protests did contribute to a Biden victory. They point to voter turnout in places holding mass protests.
Or there’s the work of Honors Student Joyce Law at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. Shown below, she provides evidence that mass protests were the margin of victory for President Biden in 2020 in at least three swing states – not counting Georgia.
Or this study by author Diana C. Mutz, the Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at Penn, who was able to analyze the kinds of opinion changes that predicted vote choice over time. She found the same thing. The protests drove what people were thinking about and made our collective conversation more focused on racial justice, which helped candidates viewed as more likely to care about racial justice. In this case, that perception was for Joe Biden.
You’re telling me that Georgia flipped Blue because of the protests? Why didn’t I hear about this?
Picture water boiling on the stove. The water is simmering, but not yet at a full boil. Then a quick turn of the knob, the burner lights up, and within 30 seconds the pot’s boiling over.
Who gets credit for the pot boiling over? The masses who came together to turn the heat up for that last measure we needed? Or the people who kept the heat up and water simmering for long enough that the masses could do their thing? Both played a role.
For centuries, Black women have been leading critical resistance to the worst parts of the United States’ empire. In 2020-2022, there was a collective desire to ensure they got their flowers for once. More importantly, for the first time in living memory, white donors were willing to send real resources to Southern Black organizers without tons of handholding, and no one wanted to blow it or risk a distracting culture war over who gets how much credit when an entire demographic has never gotten the credit they deserve.
This isn’t about that narrative being wrong. It’s about how we’re all weaker when we don’t acknowledge the relationship between the radical protests that happened and the success of pro-democracy forces. Because donations to Black-led organizations in 2020 didn’t start in November. They started in May because of the protests. Fair Fight Action took in $50 million in 2020. I’m certain that plenty of that happened between October and the end of the year. Maybe even most of it. But the national trend was clear – Black-led organizations saw increased donations due to the protests.
This means that not only did protests shift the vote by significantly larger margins than Biden’s margin of victory, but the resources used to get that vote out came, in part, courtesy of those protests. Our failure to make a big enough deal about how essential big, rowdy protests are influences our strategy going forward and makes it that much easier for Congress to pretend they didn’t exist.
What about the “optics?” Can protests be used against us?
“Good” or “bad” protesting is a question for people who care more about how* we win than if* we win.
Yes, “the process is the purpose” is an under-appreciated truth about many things in life. Whether or not you can be illegally deported and left in a maximum security prison for no reason is not one of those things.
Yale found no drop in support for climate policies following protests which got more rowdy. “If anything, there was a small increase in people’s reported likelihood of participating in environmental activism.” It takes something big, loud, and disruptive to break through the noise and reach people, and most people it reaches either don’t care, care very little, or are inspired by it. Forget the first two and focus on bringing the third group into the fold.
So, forget the “optics.” Are rallies or protests effective at creating change?
From the study, “There is some evidence… that climate protest can influence policy outcomes at a more micro level. For example, Temper et al. (2020) find that a quarter of projects targeted by protests are delayed or canceled.”
One quarter?! As in, 1 out of 4? That’s amazing.
So, can they generate media attention? Yes. Is that sometimes helpful? Yes. Can they force elected officials to spend more time – albeit in shallow ways – on your issue? Yes. Can they increase one party’s vote share and reduce other parties’ vote shares? Also, yes.
But do they signal that larger wins are on the table? Also, yes.
But can they get the goods if we don’t think voting is a viable strategy to creating change?
On their own, probably not, but they increase your movement’s odds substantially when directed at specific projects or companies.
There’s a whole debate to be had over whether mass protests—and the institutional actors who tend to get involved as they become “mass”—blunt or sharpen a movement, but this much is clear: people in the streets are usually a good thing. How we meet them where they are and encourage them to go further is up to each group involved.
However, many of the very liberal, “vote your Oss-off” women and men who got involved in Georgia politics when I did in 2015 are now helping lead mass rallies. Some probably wouldn’t risk going to jail over a police training facility, but some have. Some have fought to support people who have. Their organizations are consistently willing to put in real time to contribute to an event where the speakers go much further to the left than their members. The Indivisibles of the world hold it down in a lot of spaces where lefties aren’t. Sunrise Movement goes hard sometimes. And maybe maintaining that connective tissue is good for everybody during pronounced political repression.
Movements are full of all kinds of people fighting for a better world. I’ve got to think some of those folks first met each other at big rallies.
So… should we all go to a protest?