When it comes to attending protests, Seattle is surprisingly average

Protests are leading the news cycle, as the Israel-Hamas war has become a flashpoint on college and university campuses across the country.

For all the attention protests can receive, new data from market research giant Nielsen shows a fairly small share of the population participates. I thought Seattle might stand out in the data for attendance at protests, but that wasn’t the case.

In surveys conducted from June 2022 to October 2023, so before the most recent wave, a projected 113,000 adults in the Seattle metro area had attended an organized protest within the past 12 months, according to Nielsen. That represents 3.5% of the 3.2 million people ages 18 and older in the Seattle metro.

The Seattle metro area includes King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

Perhaps surprisingly, Seattle was only average for protest participation. Nationally, around 7.4 million adults living in metropolitan areas said they’d attended an organized protest in the past year, which also pencils out to 3.5% of the 18-and-older population.

And among the 15 largest metro areas in the U.S., Seattle only ranked 12th. Philadelphia was the top metro for protesters, at 4.8%, followed by Chicago at 4.4% and Boston at 4.3%. The lowest rate of protest attendance was in Detroit, at 2.9%.

Nielsen surveyed about 196,000 adults in more than 100 metro areas across the U.S. Nearly 3,000 people were surveyed in the Seattle metro area. Since Nielsen only surveys people 18 and older, the data doesn’t capture younger people who attended protests.

Because the question about protest participation is new to Nielsen, we can’t compare the most recent data to 2020, when there was a huge spike in protests around the Black Lives Matter movement.

Who is likely to attend a protest?

Younger adults were a little more likely to protest — the data shows nationally the average age of an adult who attended a protest was 42, around five years younger than the average age for the total adult population.

The data shows participation was nearly equal between men and women nationally.

In terms of employment, protesters were significantly more likely to work in a white-collar profession than the total population. The data shows 4.4% of white-collar workers attended a protest, compared with 3.1% of blue-collar workers.

Protesters also tended to have a higher level of education. Among those who graduated from a four-year college, 4.7% had attended a protest, compared with 2.2% of those who had a high-school diploma or less.

Adults who identify as LGBTQ+ were 26% more likely than the total population to have attended a protest.

There are, of course, protests for causes generally associated with the left, and others more associated with the right. But the data shows politically liberal adults were more likely than conservatives to attend a protest.

Four percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic attended a protest, compared with 3.4% of independents and 2.9% of Republicans and those who lean Republican.

I’ve heard it said that most people with busy lives don’t have time to go to protests, but the data doesn’t seem to support that. Folks who work full time were 19% more likely than average to have attended a protest. Parents of a child under 18 reported equal protest participation to those without a child.