(1 of n) - Today is a day of big protests. I want to highlight this piece by @lara_putnam @EricaChenoweth and @djpressman on the protest movement more generally. washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/… . This is one of those occasions on which @monkeycageblog can provide unique insight.
Lara has been doing research on political organizing in Pennsylvania. Erica and Jeremy have been gathering an extraordinary large scale dataset on protests across the US. They combine these understandings in this piece to figure out how the Floyd protests are changing America.
Their findings. First - we have never seen protests as broad as these in US history. Likely the widest set of protests to this point were the Women's Marches, which took place in 650 places across the US. Even with highly preliminary data, clear that far more is happening now.
Second - that the protests are not only unusually widely spread but unusually frequent and intense. As they say, the US has big protests, or it has extended protests - it does not usually have protests that are both at once.
Third - that the protests are happening in unexpected places. Everyone focuses on the big metropolitan cities. But protests are taking place too in the cities that have suffered from the economic changes of the last few decades, building on years of#BlackLivesMatter organizing
Fourth - that they are spreading to smaller towns and suburbs in white conservative rural areas too, where smaller numbers of black students are working together with white teenage allies and supporters to put together protests and marches.
(the lesson is that the urban-rural divide is real but it is fractal - repeated not only in the big metropolis vs rural split that people are familiar with, but in the differences between small towns and their surrounding rural regions).
Fifth - that it both reflects and plausibly reinforces a growing pattern where young people in rural regions are becoming less conservative. In Pennsylvania, they voted for Trump by a big majority in 2016, and then went for Democratic congressional candidates by 8% margin in 2018
This is the kind of mixture of qualitative and quantitative evidence that social science can provide, both informing and being informed by more traditional journalism. We are both lucky and proud to have a platform that can publish pieces like this rapidly to inform public debate
