Racial, ethnic, and immigration protest during year one of the Trump presidency

Abstract

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 sparked a major upsurge in protest in the U.S. In the year after the historic Women’s March, activists held more than 6,500 protest events with two million participants across nearly 850 counties in all fifty states and Washington, DC. Activists focused on a broad set of issues including health care, abortion, the environment, science, and political corruption. Racial, ethnic, and immigration politics comprised central and durable themes. We take stock of this wave of protest with a protest focused on race, ethnicity, and immigration using protest event data. Our analysis has two main components. First, we present a descriptive profile tracking the prominence of racial, ethnic, and immigration events between the first and second women’s marches. Second, we examine local variation in racial and immigration mobilization motivated by central expectations in social movement theory. Our analyses focus on the role of partisan political dynamics, prior movement activity, and threat as major drivers of movement mobilization. We find that attendance at protests on racial and immigration issues was highest in cities with a prior history of activism; Democratic votes also predicted protests overall but did not predict racial or immigration protests after controlling for participation in the women’s march protests. The size of the immigrant population affects immigration protests.

Publication
Racial, ethnic, and immigration protest during year one of the Trump presidency