Remember Join the Fight (here on Balloon Juice) in 2020? We collaborated with various organizations, and I want to share an update from our friends at Distill Social in Michigan.
In cities big and small, from Anchorage to Detroit, from NYC to Berlin, From Paris to Port Huron, everyday people took to the streets in the largest coordinated anti-Trump protests since his first inauguration. Over 1,300 Hands Off protests exploded across the U.S. and around the globe. The message? Loud and unmissable:
Hands off Head Start
Hands off Medicaid
Hands off Veterans’ Jobs
Hands off Social Security
Hands off Science & Public Research
Hands off our data
Hands Off Workers Rights
Hands. All the way. OFF.Let’s be clear: This wasn’t just a protest. This was a warning shot from the pro-democracy majority. Trump’s presidency is a disaster. MAGA is imploding under the weight of its own lies, grifts, and flaming wreckage of failed promises. They’re not strong—they’re desperate. They’re flailing. And they know it.
They had a great collection of signs!
Michigan Showed the Fuck Up!
2% of the Nation. That’s Not a Blip—It’s a WAVE.
Early estimates say nearly 2% of the U.S. population took part in the Hands Off protests. That’s over 6.5 million people—in one day. Let that sink in.
This wasn’t some fringe thing. This was the biggest mass mobilization of Trump’s second term—and one of the largest in American history. It spanned every single state, U.S. territories, and a dozen global cities. It was peaceful. It was massive. It was righteous. And it wasn’t just about Trump.
This was about the entire corrupt project he and Elon Musk are spearheading:
Slashing Medicaid. Dismantling Social Security. Spying on us. Gutting public education. Sabotaging cancer research. Stripping trans people of basic rights. Selling off our democracy one tax cut at a time.It’s a billionaire power grab. And on April 5, we began to grab back.
We’re Not Powerless. We’re the Majority.
If you’re wondering whether protests really matter, here’s your stat of the day:
When just 3.5% of a population engages in sustained, nonviolent resistance, change is not just likely—it’s inevitable.
(Source: Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth. And yes, we’re nerds for knowing that.)We just hit nearly 2%. So we’re not there yet—but we’re damn close.
That’s why we can’t let up. April 5 was not the finale—it was the spark.
Great job, Michigan! Great job Distll Social! (click the link above if you want to check out their substack.)
And great job to any of our BJ peeps who showed up yesterday! I have some images from BJ peeps that I’ll share in a post later today.
Open thread.
“Do You Really Want to Give Your Money to This Country Right Now?”
zhena gogolia
Thanks for the positivity.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Seconded.
Nelle
This morning, I ran into two people who said that they were at the same protest I was at. On FB, two more said that they were there. I know good people.
Burrowing Owl
WaterGirl, what’s the best way to share photos from the rally?
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: I am glad that they are here but where were all these people in November?
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Well, I was wondering about that this morning. I’m not sure that any of the people at these protests failed to vote. The numbers aren’t really commensurate. There were tons of people at Harris-Walz rallies too.
If I were magical, I’d conduct a survey of the voting-eligible people at these protests to see how many failed to vote in Nov. 2024. It would be interesting.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: That would be intersting to know.
cmorenc
For the protests to be ultimately effective, the GOP (especially incumbent Senators and House members) need to be convinced they represent loss of enough support from voters who otherwise would have voted for them (or at least stayed home) – and not just angry Harris voters. Although they are helpful if they push enough otherwise D leaning voters who stayed home in 24 to show up. But it’s essential the Rs see it as a sign of substantial erosion in their vote share.
cain
This is very encouraging! Yes, we need to keep growing and as the economy starts hitting rough seas I think it’s going to grow even larger. MOre than that we have a lot of disasters and with all these federal agencies closing down – it’s going to lead to a lot of chaos. It’s going to be very important that blue states show how to get things done when the feds and red states fail.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: We were voting for Harris, with enthusiasm.
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia: MEDIA: “We’ll get right on that just as soon as we’re done with these seven thousand articles about how Democrats are giving up.”
zhena gogolia
@different-church-lady: And interviews with Megyn Kelly and Curtis Yarvin (in NYT Sunday magazine).
Westyny
@cmorenc: That’s what the numbers are about. Included in them is a demographic of regretful, low-info Republican voters from the last time around: the so-called “swing voters”. There have already been reports of conversations in the protests with just such creatures. This aligns with 1/3-1/3-1/3 meme describing the country’s existing division.
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia: What, Goebells wasn’t available?
prostratedragon
Rick Steves showed up at the rally in his home town, Edmonds, WA. Talk is about 20 minutes. Touches on the use of framing to denigrate (there’s that word again) neutral or good things, e.g. “deep state” for “institutions.”
Here’s his “Fascism in Europe” travelog, which I’m sure many of us have seen. Not a thing of the moment for him.
Jeffro
I think we saw some good results in that WI court election and the shift in those FL House special elections
dm
I am guessing that the 6 million estimate comes from the report that 600,000 signed up with organizers like Indivisible, and I think it’s an old rule of thumb that for everyone who signs up to something, there are ten participants.
RevRick
@schrodingers_cat: They voted. They are a large part of the Democratic base.
Our problem is with what Paul Campos over at LGM calls the Ariana Grande voters. What he means are voters who know as much about politics as I do about Ariana Grande. They are the checked out voters. They may be focused on paying this month’s bills or find politics boring and unintelligible. They may be more invested in dating or the fortunes of the local baseball team. They definitely are not as dialed in as us.
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: I speak of the people who were checked out and didn’t vote and are protesting now.
Steve LaBonne
@dm: There was theoretically a sign-up in my town, but I was damned if I was going to sign up to go downtown a less than five minute walk from my house.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: I think, based on the one I attended, there were a lot fewer of those than you imagine. Which is in a way a bad thing since we need converts.
WaterGirl
@Burrowing Owl: This simplest way for me is if you use the On the Road form that’s in the sidebar.
Submit Photos to On the Road
I’ll publish them as a regular post, not OTR, but using the form simplifies things all around.
Thanks for checking!
prostratedragon
@schrodingers_cat:
@Steve LaBonne:
Was going to say, with around 70 million Harris voters out there, it’s not clear that we must be seeing many of the newly, um, awake.
Steve LaBonne
@prostratedragon: I wish we were, but I really doubt it.
LeftCoastYankee
I meant to comment below on the demographics of the attendees.
The rally in Trenton was pretty white and greying. Trenton is very black and Hispanic (80%+) and pretty poor city surrounded by wealthier white suburbs (the picture of Northern racism).
There was a good amount of car traffic on the road next to the rally where no one would need to go through on a weekend. Lots of black women, couples and families honking and slowing down to take pictures. Some looked surprised but more looked happy.
So step 1 was positive.
Baud
I’d imagine most people out yesterday were Harris voters. I can only speculate on the percentages. But we still need Harris voters engaged rather than sulking. So the good turnout is good.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: Agreed. I have serious doubts that there is a statistically significant amount of FFOTUS voters or non-voters who are now out there protesting. I’d love to be wrong.
I will admit that if I encounter anyone who depends on Social Security, who voted for FFOTUS, and is now protesting… I’m really going to have to employ all my very best self-control.
Jim Appleton
In Hood River, Oregon yesterday, an estimated 1,500 protested. The city is the hub for about 30,000 in OR and WA.
About 13% of us showed up.
Burrowing Owl
@WaterGirl: Done, thank you!
RevRick
@cmorenc: Midterms turn out fewer voters. Voters who didn’t show up in 24 will not show up in 26 (except first time voters). What happens is the out party usually has a smaller falloff while the in party sees their voters stay home.
Kosh III
Turnout in Nashville was about 2000 due to days of flash flooding in areas, plus rain and tornadoes in the region.
Encouraging is that a woman(old hippie) from our church(Episcopal) went to one in Winchester, TN population 10,000. She expected a few dozen and was thrilled that it was hundreds. It drew from neighboring counties/towns but this is a deep red area.
dm
@Steve LaBonne: Yes. I didn’t sign up, either (not that it’s likely to make much difference in the amount of email I receive).
That 3.5% number, and the story behind it, is pretty interesting:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
And it’s pretty encouraging.
I’ve been thinking that the big AOC and Bernie rallies have been because people were hungry for something to do to show how they felt about the regime. I think April 5 was similar.
I also think the sign-ups are going to be followed by next steps, from Run For Something, Indivisible, and Move-On, as well as other organizations.
Geminid
@Westyny: I think high- and low- information Republicans vote Republican. It’s a portion of Independents who are the “Swing Voters”
Some swing from election to election, as in swinging from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024. They may have made the difference in some battleground states.
Some swing within an election. I think that’s how Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin elected Democratic Senators even as Trump carried them.
And, how North Carolina elected Democratic governors three times in a row despite voting Republican at the top of the ticket. I think that in 2020 Biden lost Norrh Carolina by 80,000 votes while Roy Cooper won by ~210,000. That could be a swing of almost 300,000 votes, but it was probably less because some voters only vote for president. Still, it’s a lot even if there were 5 million votes cast.
Self-described and/or registered Independents constitute about a third of the electorate. That varies from state to state, and their numbers seem to be increasing. They seem to be a disparate group ideologically, probably more so than Democrats or Republicans. At least, that’s how I see it.
dm
Demographically, my quick scan of the crowd in Boston was predominately white and grey. In contrast, the speakers and organizers were much more diverse: black, Latino, a Native American speaker, Asian-Pacific. In addition we had someone from the unions, as well as local politicians like Congressmember Ayanna Presley, Mayor Michelle Wu, and Senator Ed Markey.
A lot of support on stage and in the crowd for Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University student kidnapped by the ICEtapo.
Westyny
@Geminid: We’re basically agreeing. The needle doesn’t need to move much to have a different result.
Melancholy Jaques
@schrodingers_cat:
We could generously assume they all voted, but their numbers are fewer than the others who either didn’t vote or voted for Trump.
frosty
@Jim Appleton: About 0.15% of my county showed up. Now that I’ve crunched the numbers it’s not as good as I thought it was yesterday.
Melancholy Jaques
@zhena gogolia:
Would they admit not voting?
Soprano2
@RevRick: When prices keep going up rather than down, as FFOTUS promised them they would, they’ll definitely notice, and they’ll blame it on FFOTUS.
I figure for every person who showed up, there are several who didn’t or couldn’t, like me.
WaterGirl
@Jim Appleton: 13% is awesome!
WaterGirl
@Burrowing Owl:
LOVE LOVE LOVE your giant sign!
I will put up the post tomorrow, thank you. I hope others who attended will also submit pics and stores using the OTR form.
No One You Know
Hey, I see familiar signs in the photo gallery!
I cheated myself– left the phone home because that was Best Protest Advice, wrote the legal aid number on my arm in Sharpie, and then went off to the waterfront with my handpainted Social Security sign. Soooo much energy in the street, and friendly, polite, and passionate. No incidents that I heard of. Lots of “instafriends.”
Geminid
@Westyny: Yeah, the neddle doesn’t need to move much. These last three presidential cycles have been like shuffling a deck of cards and dealing them three times, and coming up with almost the same hands each time. Looking at the Electoral College outcomes, I think those three elections together were decided by less that half a million vote. That’s out of well over 300 million votes cast.
Steve in the ATL
@Kosh III: I’ve been to your Walmart!
Matt McIrvin
I suspect that nearly everyone who showed up at these protests voted for Harris. BUT… many of them had not been activists in any sense. And instead of the reality of a destructive, around-the-bend Trump, all they had to work with last November was the fear of a potential destructive, around-the-bend Trump.
I personally felt like I couldn’t make the case to voters dissatisfied about the economy that Biden’s economy had actually been very strong. It was, in a lot of conventional senses. But there’s that problem that only Democrats seem to ever get blamed for long-term structural inequities that persist under rule by both parties (maybe because core Republican voters don’t see a problem with them). They’re held to a higher standard.
Matt McIrvin
@No One You Know: The violent crackdowns may well be coming. As someone said in Boston, Trump issued an early executive order asking for a report on the legality of invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military against protesters, and the stated timeframe for that report elapses in a few weeks, around Easter. I’ve seen a bunch of protest veterans arguing that people need to get into these habits so that when things get hairier we know what to do.
That said, I suspect the Grandma- and Grandpa-heavy protest demographic alters a lot of probabilities.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick:
And on top of that, whichever party has the higher-voting-propensity people gets a relative boost. Until 2016, that used to be the Republican Party. Now it’s apparently the Democratic Party.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: One good thing about the older, white demographic protest profile is that it will help keep the Black Bloc types away. No self-respecting anarchist wants to associate with such a cringe bunch.
Baud
@Geminid:
Fixed.
cmorenc
@RevRick:
What we need is for a significant number of “in-party” GOP voters and R-leaning independents to stay home out of disgust with Trump, Musk and DOGE turning out to have such an unexpectedly malignant, damaging agenda over what they expected. In other words, the sort of folks who thought they were immune or excepted from being prey of face-eating leopards. Trump will find it vastly harder to gaslight or sell his snake-oil bullshit to voters who are watching their retirement assets evaporating and prices of everything rising in real-time.
Baud
Baud
No lie told
dm
@Geminid: There was a black flag at the Boston protest. I didn’t get close enough to see who was waving it.
sentient ai from the future
anyone want to put odds on whether musk or ackman fall out a window first?
https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3lm6gi4icrs2g
catclub
@schrodingers_cat:
 
These are all ones who voted. Like the numbers say 6.5M is a huge two percent of the population.
It IS huge participation for a public demonstration.
But, The people who could not be bothered to vote, or vote by mail, are not the target demographic for these demonstrations.
catclub
@cmorenc: Yes. This.
Matt McIrvin
@dm: I saw a dude with one of those LGBT/anarchist flags T-shirts in Haverhill, but, you know, those are the kind of anarchists I like.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: There hasn’t been a real presidential landslide since 1988. The modern electoral map as we know it basically started to emerge in 1992 and we’ve been fighting over marginal wins in a slowly shifting collection of marginal states ever since.
And it really feels like ever since Obama entered office in 2008, even Presidential approval has been so tightly constrained by party polarization that the boundaries of possibility are narrowly set.
(Midterms are another story–we get landslides in Congressional midterms, because of those low-turnout effects people have mentioned.)
RaflW
Tomorrow will probably be another rough one.
(Reuters 4/6/25 7:56p) -U.S. stock futures opened sharply lower late on Sunday, suggesting a continuation of the two-day selloff that wiped trillions from equity values after the Trump administration’s tariffs announcement last week.
Jay
@RaflW:
$28billion Euro’s of counter tariffs hit tomorrow.
RaflW
Trump went on camera this evening and insisted that our trade deficit must be zero with all the other nations. He’s the stupidest ‘business man’ imaginable. I am pretty sure that people like Sec. Bessent have tried as best they can to explain it all to him. But as we’ve seen with so many other things, he is epically, catastrophically unteachable.
Martin
@RevRick: Except that the Democratic wins after Dobbs were mostly attributed to non-voters in ’20 that turned out in these special elections. It didn’t hold to ’24, but losing Dobbs cause a large surge in voter registrations in states that were having special elections around the issue.
And this is the mistake I keep seeing repeated – the assumption that non-voters are unreachable, when it seems pretty clear that Dobbs turned them out in ’22, and Rogan et al turned them out in ’24. It gets real hard to internalize that voting doesn’t matter when the car you’re looking at has a $6,000 import tax attached to it, provided Democrats can do an adequate job of making it clear who put that tax there.
My thesis has been that Democrats fail to reach voters because they don’t do enough to help their day to day lives, and that helps Republicans because Democrats do enough to prevent Republicans from harming their day to day lives. Net result, politics don’t affect me. The tariffs are going to affect everyone – Democrats couldn’t stop the GOP from their worst impulses here. Now Democrats need to make the case what they will do to fix this. That’s why Biden got record turnout in ’20 – that case got made sufficiently well.
Jay
@RaflW:
I doubt that.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lm5p4tdc6a2c?
TS
@RaflW:
Australian market down 6% in morning trading.
Martin
@RaflW: It kind of sorta makes sense if you still think we’re on the gold standard. At that time, you had to pay for your trade deficit in gold and shit got real when you ran out of gold.
But that ended in 1971 and Trump doesn’t appear to have updated his thinking in the intervening 54 years.
Martin
@Jay: Yeah, nobody in this administration is going to tell the emperor they have no clothes.
Jay
@TS:
Dow Futures down -1,400 points as of Today.
Geminid
@Jay: Oil orices are crashing too. West Texas Intermediate dropped to $62/bbl Friday; now it’s below $60.
Besides the tariffs, OPEC+ announced a bigger production increase for May than expected. Bad news for Russia among others including Texas. Sad!
TS
@Jay:
Back to 1000 at the minute – someone decided to buy. Immediately Oz drops bac k to 5%. Most world markets follow the US, they pretend they have their own reasons for up/down but certainly in Australia it is 95% what is happening in the US
My retirement income is not looking good – but if that is the price of getting rid of trump, I will somehow cope with it – we still have some safety nets in Australia, despite trump is trying to remove them (our subsidised cost for medical prescriptions upsets him)
Jay
@Geminid:
“Meats off the menu, boys”.
Ray Ingles
Just conservatively it was at least 5K in downtown Detroit, and could have been twice that. The march was over a mile and a half long and the sidewalks were packed.
We wondered, but the police presence was minimal. At least, the visible presence.
Seemed like a lot of new protesters were there. I hope we can hit 3.5% before the damage gets too bad.
Geminid
@Jay: This morning, people here were debating whether or not Trump is stupid. That Luttnick quote makes one thing clear: Trump makes other people stupid. That may be his superpower.
Martin
@Geminid: Russia is one of the countries supporting it. This is likely going to kneecap the US production and export since we import low quality oil and export high quality and they’re going to flood the market with what the US normally exports. Consumer prices should stay low, but a lot of US producers can’t pump at that price, and reciprocal tariffs make that uncompetitive.
Puts Trump in a tricky spot.
Martin
@Geminid: Josh Marshalls ‘Dignity Wraith’ theory, which I think is spot on.
Jay
@Geminid:
DJTdiot’s “Border Czar” Tom Holman went on Faux News so say that Taco Bell’s menu is offensive to ‘Mercans, because it has Mexican items on the menu.
The “average” American tests at a Grade 4 reading and comprehension level. The “average” American tests at 97 on the Standard IQ test which is “mentally impaired”.
So you are a Nepo baby, go to the best schools, have “Tiger Mom” get you through Grad School and interning with the best of the best of the best, Sir!”
So, you get on Faux, and what do you do, show you are an “elite” they despise, or do you go all shitkicker cornpone stupid?
Funny thing, there is an old saying, “stupid is, as stupid does”.
RevRick
The Japanese banking sector stocks are down 14%, reminiscent of the 2008 Financial Crisis. Futures on the Dow suggest a brutal decline tomorrow. MAGA commentators are whistling past the graveyard. Wall Street is probably hoping that the news will be so bad that whatever is left of the non insane part of the GOP will have their hair set on fire.
Martin
@Jay: Taco Bell has had that menu for 63 years.
Jay
@Martin:
Funny thing is. I don’t even know what the ‘Mercan word is for burrito, Churro or taco is.
Stupid is, as stupid does.
TS
@RevRick:
Australian market is climbing in line with the US futures (despite any claims to the contrary, most countries markets go up/down with the US). Still down 4% but was previously 6. Someone is cashing in.
Geminid
From Ankara-based Clash Report:
Germany’s RheinmetalAG dropped 26.88%.
Baud
The economic crash is worth it to deal with the super high unemployment that Biden left us.
Geminid
@Geminid: From reporting in industry news site Oil Price, OPEC+ announced last Thursday that it would roll three projected monthly increases into one for May. Some of this covers existing over-production by members like Iraq and Kazakhstan.
Some recent Oil Price stories about the US industry:
January production fell 305,000 barrels per day, to 13.15 million bpd. This was before the latest shocks. Also:
And:
Trump signed an order January 20 that declared a National Energy Emergency. US oil producers got one too, good and hard.
I feel a little bad for New Mexicans, though. Theirs is the fourth poorest state in the country, and their state government gets a substantial portion of its revenues directly and indirectly from the oil and gas industry. This crash will knock a big hole in its budget.
Geminid
@Geminid: A recent Oil Price story about Russia was titled, “Russian Oil and Gas Revenues Slump 17% In March.” That was before the latest economic developments. The Russians sre already selling their oil at a discount on account of sanctions, so it seems like this energy crash will hit them hard.
Chris T.
Didn’t Musk say it was just the same 25,000 paid protestors, and they were being bused around from site to site? All at the same time on the same day, you know, using Obama’s Time Machine.