Erica Chenoweth
Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment
Crowd Counting Consortium
A public interest and scholarly project to document protests and demonstrations in the United States.
Contact Info
Links & Downloads
Part of
The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, collects publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, strikes, demonstrations, riots, and other actions.
The CCC emerged from a collaborative effort by Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth to accurately estimate the number of people who participated in the Women’s March on Washington (and its affiliated Sister Marchers worldwide) on January 21, 2017. Upon recognizing the growing public interest in up-to-date information on crowds — and in response to requests to continue the effort beyond the Women’s March — they and their volunteer colleagues established the CCC.
For more details, see the “View + Download the Data” section below.
Meet the Team
Soha Hammam
Nonviolent Action Lab Research Associate
Jay Ulfelder
Program Director, Nonviolent Action Lab
View + Download the Data
Complete Dataset
Our repository on GitHub contains a compiled and augmented version of the CCC data from all of the monthly sheets since the project’s inception in January 2017. We update this version of the dataset weekly on Wednesdays, usually no later than 4pm ET and with occasional exceptions around holidays and ends of the month. Instructions on how to access the dataset and detailed descriptions of its contents can be found on the repository’s landing page.
2024 Monthly Data
2023 Monthly Data
2022 Monthly Data
2021 Monthly Data
December 2021 Crowd Data (view).
November 2021 Crowd Data (view).
October 2021 Crowd Data (view).
September 2021 Crowd Data (view).
August 2021 Crowd Data (view).
July 2021 Crowd Data (view).
June 2021 Crowd Data (view).
May 2021 Crowd Data (view).
April 2021 Crowd Data (view).
March 2021 Crowd Data (view).
February 2021 Crowd Data (view).
January 2021 Crowd Data (view).
2020 Monthly Data
December 2020 Crowd Data (view).
November 2020 Crowd Data (view).
October 2020 Crowd Data (view).
September 2020 Crowd Data (view).
August 2020 Crowd Data (view).
July 2020 Crowd Data (view).
June 2020 Crowd Data (view).
May 2020 Crowd Data (view).
April 2020 Crowd Data (view).
March 2020 Crowd Data (view).
February 2020 Crowd Data (view).
January 2020 Crowd Data (view).
2019 Monthly Data
December 2019 Crowd Data (view).
November 2019 Crowd Data (view).
October 2019 Crowd Data (view).
September 2019 Crowd Data (view).
August 2019 Crowd Data (view).
July 2019 Crowd Data (view).
June 2019 Crowd Data (view).
May 2019 Crowd Data (view).
April 2019 Crowd Data (view).
March 2019 Crowd Data (view).
February 2019 Crowd Data (view).
January 2019 Crowd Data (view).
2018 Monthly Data
December 2018 Crowd Data (view).
November 2018 Crowd Data (view).
October 2018 Crowd Data (view).
September 2018 Crowd Data (view).
August 2018 Crowd Data (view).
July 2018 Crowd Data (view).
June 2018 Crowd Data (view).
May 2018 Crowd Data (view).
April 2018 Crowd Data (view).
March 2018 Crowd Data (view).
February 2018 Crowd Data (view).
January 2018 Crowd Data (view).
2017 Monthly Data
December 2017 Crowd Data (view).
November 2017 Crowd Data (view).
October 2017 Crowd Data (view).
September 2017 Crowd Data (view)(XLS).
August 2017 Crowd Data (view)(download in XLS).
July 2017 Crowd Data (view) (download).
June 2017 Crowd Data (view).
May 2017 Crowd Data (view).
April 2017 Crowd Data (view).
March 2017 Crowd Data (view)(download in xls).
February 2017 Crowd Data (view).
January 20-31, 2017 Data not including Women’s March (view).
1/21/2017 Women’s March Data (view; download in xls).
Submit a Record
We only post records that we can confirm and verify through fact-checking. When you submit a record, be sure to provide a source that is publicly verifiable (e.g. a news report, a Facebook group, links to online photos with headcounts, etc) or describe the crowd-counting techniques used by onsite onlookers (e.g. sign-ins, counting through distributing flyers/handouts, counting from photos/videos, and/or other crowd density estimation techniques).
We will never post, release, or share identifying information that has not already been reported in the public domain.
Nevertheless, we urge you to avoid including personal identifying information in your submission.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of actions are you collecting?
We collect publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, demonstrations, riots, and other actions. We do not count crowds at meetings, teach-ins or academic workshops, panel discussions, fundraisers, or town halls.
What do you intend to do with these data?
Our goal is to make the aggregate data on crowd numbers publicly available for each event. We are collecting this data in the public interest and to further scholarly research.
Have your Human Research Subject boards approved this data collection?
This is a public-interest project. The University of Denver’s Office of Research Integrity and Education determined that the project does not qualify as human subjects research and therefore does not require further review or oversight by its Institutional Review Board. The University of Connecticut made a similar determination.
Where can I get the data?
Please see the links above. Explore the GitHub here.
How should I cite these data?
Please include a citation to the Crowd Counting Consortium such as: Crowd Counting Consortium, crowdcounting.org, accessed September 17, 2021.
Where does your funding come from?
Funding is made possible in part by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, Alan R. Bennett and the UConn POLS Honors Bennett RA program, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Previously, we received support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and the Humility & Conviction in Public Life initiative, a project of the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute.
We have collaborated with countlove.org, a volunteer group that developed a webcrawler to identify protests and demonstrations on a daily basis.
Article
Protests in the United States on Palestine and Israel, 2023–2024
From 7 October 2023 to 7 June 2024, the Crowd Counting Consortium recorded nearly 12,400 pro-Palestine protests and over 2,000 pro-Israel protests in the United States.
Commentary
The Student Palestine Solidarity Movement Resumes
Crowd Counting Consortium data show a resurgence of pro-Palestinian activism at U.S. colleges and universities as students have returned to school and started probing the limits of new restrictions on campus protests.
Commentary
Overview of Protest Activity Around the 2024 Democratic National Convention
Commentary
The Real Numbers: Tracking Crowd Sizes at Presidential Rallies
This post uses the Crowd Counting Consortium’s data on U.S. protest activity since 2017 to estimate and compare the average size of the crowds at political rallies featuring Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and, since late July 2024, Kamala Harris.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: An Empirical Overview of Recent Pro-Palestine Protests at U.S. Schools
Crowd Counting Consortium data show more than 3,700 days with pro-Palestinian protest activity at over 500 U.S. schools since October 7, 2023, including encampments at more than 130 of them.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Three Things the Pro-Palestine Movement Is Not
New Crowd Counting Consortium analysis from Nonviolent Action Lab Program Director Jay Ulfelder sets the record straight on arrests numbers and claims of violence stemming from protests sparked by the war in Gaza.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: U.S. Protest Rhetoric Tracks Looming Famine in Gaza
The imminent famine in Gaza shows up in Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) data as a sharp increase in references to hunger and starvation in protesters’ chants and signs.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Israel/Palestine Protest Data Dashboards
To make it easier to find up-to-date information on pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protest activity in the United States since October 7, 2023, the Crowd Counting Consotium recently created a pair of interactive data dashboards separately covering the two.
Video
Crowd Counting Consortium – Data on Pro-Israeli and Pro-Palestinian Protests in the U.S.
On Tuesday, December 5th, 2023, experts from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a network of researchers tracking political demonstrations across the U.S., shared their most recent data on the multitude of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protests held nationwide since October 7.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Update on Israel/Palestine Protests
Since October 7, the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has recorded nearly 2,300 U.S. protests, rallies, marches, caravans, demonstrations, vigils, banner drops, and direct actions in support of Palestine or Israel, with hundreds of thousands of total participants on different sides of this mass mobilization.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Pro-Palestine Wave Persists and Grows
Over the past few weeks, the burst of pro-Palestine protests, rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and direct actions in the U.S. that followed Hamas’ October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response to them has swelled into a sustained wave that is almost certainly broader and larger than any previous pro-Palestine protest wave in U.S. history.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Pro-Palestine Wave Accelerates
Over the past 10 days, the wave of U.S. street activism supporting Palestine has accelerated. Since October 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants launched attacks on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, CCC has logged 420 pro-Palestine rallies, protests, demonstrations, and vigils in more than 180 different cities and towns across 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Recent U.S. Protest Activity in Support of Israel and Palestine
Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, the U.S. has seen hundreds of vigils, rallies, demonstrations, and protests in response to those attacks and the political and military reactions to them.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Tracking the Growth of Active Clubs
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Love Won
After a year that saw historic levels of anti-LGBTQ+ protest activity, legislative action, and online jawboning, millions of people turned out in May and June 2023 for hundreds of LGBTQ+ pride celebrations across all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.