January 23, 2017
DON'T TAKE IT POLITICALLY, IT'S ONLY PERSONAL:
The Long March Ahead For Democrats : What Saturday's Women's Marches tell us about the party's path back to power. (Nate Silver, 1/23/17, 538)
As FiveThirtyEight did for the tea party protests in April 2009 and for the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, we sought to collect credible estimates of crowd sizes at the Women's Marches based on local news accounts. We wanted to avoid estimates given by march participants or organizers, since these often exaggerate attendance compared with estimates by public officials such as local police and fire departments. In St. Louis, for example, police estimated the crowd at 13,000 participants, while a march organizer said 20,000 people had come. [...]Nonetheless, it's clear that the Women's Marches drew huge numbers of people. For most of the largest marches, we were able to identify a crowd-size estimate from public agencies, such as a police department or a mayor's office, or which was provided by nonpartisan experts who sought to estimate crowd sizes using photography or other techniques. Where we weren't able to find such sources, we discounted the reported march sizes by 40 percent if they were based on estimates given by organizers3 or by 20 percent if a news account's sourcing was ambiguous.Even with this relatively cautious approach, we estimated the aggregate crowd size at 3.2 million people among the roughly 300 U.S. march sites4 for which we were able to find data. Our estimate of 3.2 million marchers is lower than other estimates that take organizer-provided estimates at face value, but is nonetheless an impressive figure. By comparison, using a similar technique, we estimated the tea party rallies on April 15, 2009, drew around 310,000 participants among about 350 cities.
Why the Women's March on Washington drew bigger crowds than Trump's inauguration (Emily Crockett, Jan. 19th, 2017, Vox)
One of the poll's many striking findings is this: While it may not have lost Trump the election in the end, the leaked 2005 Access Hollywood tape that featured Trump bragging about his ability to sexually assault women -- specifically, that he could "grab [women] by the pussy," kiss them without consent, and do whatever he wanted to them because he's a star -- had a major impact on many Americans, and hasn't been forgotten.Most Americans surveyed, 83 percent, remembered hearing about the tape. Almost all of those surveyed (91 percent) said they found Trump's comments "unacceptable," and most (61 percent overall, 66 percent of women, and 55 percent of men) said they felt "upset" by the comments.And many of those who felt upset were actually motivated to do something about it.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2017 8:47 AM
