A professor of political science in Connecticut has aggregated the data from public reports of crowd sizes at the women's marches across America on Saturday and reached an astonishing conclusion: More than 1 in every 100 people in the U.S. turned out to march against Donald Trump and for women's rights on the second day of his presidency.
Drawing on reports of 526 different marches in towns as disparate as Wichita Falls, Texas - reported turnout: 150 people - and Washington, D.C. - reported turnout: more than 500,000 - University of Connecticut professor Jeremy Pressman, working with international relations professor Erica Chenoweth from the University of Denver, estimated that 3,341,823 to 4,611,782 people turned out to march across the nation.
The Census Bureau estimated that the U.S. population as of mid-2016 was 323,127,513.
"The overall number is bigger than I expected," Pressman told Yahoo News about his findings on the protest crowds. "With a low estimate it's a little bit above 1 percent, and with a higher estimate, it's probably closer to 1 1/2 percent."
The Associated Press had reported late Saturday that "more than 1 million people rallied at women's marches in the nation's capital and cities around the world."
On Sunday it became clear the global number had to be higher than that, as the low-end estimates from just four major American cities pushed the total marcher count to nearly 1 million.
In Washington, organizers released a crowd estimate of more than 500,000 early on Saturday morning that was confirmed by city officials on Sunday, and the local Metro authority told the New York Times Sunday that it had logged more than 1 million individual entries into the underground rail system over the course of the day - the second-highest number ever, after Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration day, which saw 1.12 million entries. Independent crowd scientists studied pictures from the scene for the Times and concluded turnout was at least 470,000 at 2 p.m. Saturday, or three times as many as had attended Trump's inauguration the day before.
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