Because of my wife’s sudden, life-threatening medical emergency in early August 2025, we were forced to cancel grand plans to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Instead, after she began to recover we took off on smaller, more local jaunts. That’s how we found ourselves in Madison, Wisconsin, in mid-October; and because she wasn’t recovered quite enough, that’s how we found ourselves opting to drop in to the No Kings protest in Janesville, Wisconsin, instead of going all the way to Chicago. An estimated 250,000 attended there, just a few hundred in Janesville, of course. All together, though, the 2700 separate protests throughout the U.S. on October 18, 2025, drew an estimated 7,000,000, making it the largest single day of protest in U.S. history. Even the largest anti-war protests and Civil Rights protests don’t compare because they were single events, not a coordinated series of events on the same day.
Way too much information for a protest sign? Still, I guess I read it all anyway.
The energy at the Janesville protest was high and convivial. One woman attended with a “Trump 2024” sign. I was about to go up to her and say, “Thank you for being here. You’re welcomed,” but a young woman, painted in white-face, began heranguing her, shouting, “You’re not a woman! You know what that predator has done to women!?” Still, even that was short-lived and they soon stood on the same corner quietly. This post contains some of the signs of the day, and BELOW IS A 1:30-MINUTE VIDEO capturing some of the sights and sounds.
Studies have shown that peaceful protests tend to motivate people to vote as opposed to violent ones, which only makes sense, I suppose. And these No Kings protests have been remarkably peaceful—convivial, as I said—no matter how the current administration tries to spin it. Still, I couldn’t help but be thinking almost all the time how many of the people there would be turning out to vote. I thought this especially of the young woman in white face, as young people have been notoriously famous for not voting. On the streets of my home city, which is nearly 50% Hispanic, I heard cries like, “We will fight you!” hurled at ICE agents during their raids, and at the Trump administration either directly or indirectly. Yet fully one-third of Hispanics eligible to vote didn’t even bother to register, and of those that did vote, 45% voted for Trump. 45%! At the hospital where my wife works there was an ICE raid, and they took someone out, and a Hispanic nurse is caught on camera saying to ICE agents, “Thank you for doing the Lord’s work.”
Poll numbers have not been kind to the Trump administration of late, and it appears that Hispanic support may be plummeting. But polls are just polls, and in politics a year’s worth of change can happen in a week, and the elections—even the mid-terms—are still a year away. President Trump is fond of hyperbole. Everything is the greatest, largest, most powerful in U.S. history, and he claims credit for it all. But, in fact, his political comeback has been the greatest in U.S. history. It has been absolutely stunning. “For better or worse,” wrote the journalist and political commentator Clarence Page, “effective politics is often nothing more than an effective appeal to the resentments of those who vote in large numbers, directed against a target group that doesn’t.” It’s more fun to attend a nice, convivial—that word again—protest. How these historically large protests turn into votes is still a very, very open question. And it seems like you’re being so much more active to shout, “We will fight you!” to ICE agents, rather than to just get yourself to the ballot box.
Do Protests Lead to Votes?
Way too much information for a protest sign? Still, I guess I read it all anyway.
The energy at the Janesville protest was high and convivial. One woman attended with a “Trump 2024” sign. I was about to go up to her and say, “Thank you for being here. You’re welcomed,” but a young woman, painted in white-face, began heranguing her, shouting, “You’re not a woman! You know what that predator has done to women!?” Still, even that was short-lived and they soon stood on the same corner quietly. This post contains some of the signs of the day, and BELOW IS A 1:30-MINUTE VIDEO capturing some of the sights and sounds.
Studies have shown that peaceful protests tend to motivate people to vote as opposed to violent ones, which only makes sense, I suppose. And these No Kings protests have been remarkably peaceful—convivial, as I said—no matter how the current administration tries to spin it. Still, I couldn’t help but be thinking almost all the time how many of the people there would be turning out to vote. I thought this especially of the young woman in white face, as young people have been notoriously famous for not voting. On the streets of my home city, which is nearly 50% Hispanic, I heard cries like, “We will fight you!” hurled at ICE agents during their raids, and at the Trump administration either directly or indirectly. Yet fully one-third of Hispanics eligible to vote didn’t even bother to register, and of those that did vote, 45% voted for Trump. 45%! At the hospital where my wife works there was an ICE raid, and they took someone out, and a Hispanic nurse is caught on camera saying to ICE agents, “Thank you for doing the Lord’s work.”