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Jay Ulfelder Profile picture
Jay Ulfelder
@JayUlfelder
Program director at @NVActLab @HarvardAsh @Kennedy_School. Mostly @crowdcounting. He/him. Tweeting in my individual capacity. Likes may be bookmarks.
Aug 11, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Not clear what rally crowd size means, and lots of things can affect it, but: CCC has logged 36 rallies so far in 2024 at which Donald Trump appeared; we've got info on crowd size for 27 of them; and we conservatively estimate avg crowd size of those 27 at 5,700. Meanwhile, we've logged 6 rallies featuring Kamala Harris since Biden dropped out of the race in late July, and we have info on crowd size for all of those. Using same process as for Trump events, we estimate avg crowd size of those 6 at about 13,000.
Jun 24, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
For the past several years, I've spent hours daily watching videos and reading reports from protests across the U.S., and two of the most violent events I've seen since 2020 have been mass attacks on pro-Palestinian protesters in LA: UCLA on 4/30, now Pico Rivera yesterday. For details on yesterday's violence, see firsthand accounts from @Katerqburns for @LCRWnews, @ACatWithNews, @HuntedHorse, and @MrOlmos, among others. Looked like some two-way fights, but plenty of unprovoked attacks aimed at journos and folks not looking to scrap as well.
Apr 20, 2024 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
On April 18, students at Columbia University and Barnard College established the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, an occupation of shared campus space to call for divestment and Palestinian liberation. Here's a running list of solidarity actions on other U.S. campuses since Apr 18.🧵 At Yale, students demonstrated outside a Board of Trustees meeting and then lauched an occupation of their own.
Dec 3, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Lotta eyes on the fascist circus in Columbus, OH, this morning, so I'm going to spotlight a few other places where protests against drag shows or Drag Queen Story Hours got outnumbered and outclassed, failed to materialize, or otherwise flopped today. 1/ In Fort Lauderdale, more than 50 showed up to counter a group of what looks like 25-30 Proud Boys and other local chuds grousing about "radicalized sexual curriculums" in school and "gender ideology" and other right-wing night terrors of the moment.
Nov 20, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Breaking my self-imposed Twitter silence to offer some context for last night's mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Since early 2021, the right has increasingly mobilized against the queer community, with drag shows being a particular focal point. countingcrowds.org/2022/09/30/esc… Bar chart showing monthly c... Note, too, that the rhetoric used in this hate campaign has increasingly tilted toward violence.
Oct 30, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Two key data points I wish everyone would keep in mind when talking about what role police might play in slowing the rise of fascism in the U.S.:

1) @emayfarris and @prof_mirya's recent survey of sheriffs nationwide... themarshallproject.org/2022/10/18/we-… Image @emayfarris @prof_mirya ...and 2) Ba et al.'s recent analysis of demographic data on hundreds of thousands of officers in nearly 100 major police forces. scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/… Image
Oct 26, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Commercial media outlets, I am begging you: before you publish something describing violence at protests as "clashes" or "fighting" with no directionality, do some digging into the sequence of events and nature of the violence. Accuracy on this has real consequences. There's been a lot of talk about this problem around the protest at Penn State on Monday night, but it happened again last night at UC Davis. Same script, similar result.
Oct 24, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
After watching counter-protesters overwhelm and drown out numerous recent protests against drag shows and Drag Queen Story Hours, I think it's fair to say that this particular choice of right-wing target du jour is having significant unintended consequences. Specifically, I think it's re-energizing many anarchist and leftist groups that hadn't been in the streets so much since 2020 (although many of them have been busy doing other things), and it's helping renew or forge new alliances among activists resisting the right.
Oct 16, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One of the most unabashedly Christian fascist actions I've seen, outside a church hosting a drag bingo event yesterday in Rochester, MN: "the church will conquer the state" + "reject cultural marxism America first" + queerphobic slurs. kaaltv.com/uncategorized/… Anyone recognize the group involved? I can't make out the logos on those hats, and they may not be informative anyway. Thought I saw III% logos on the tactical gear worn by guys who appear to be security, but not entirely clear.
Oct 10, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
On Indigenous Peoples Day, I wondered what @crowdcounting would show about patterns in related protest activity. Here's a chart showing monthly counts of more than 1,500 protest events with claims tied to indigenous peoples' rights or concerns since January 2021. Bar chart showing monthly c... I know from making the data that many of these events are linked to environmental concerns. Indeed, as this version of the chart shows, the majority of these events (59%) also involved claims about environmental issues. Bar chart of monthly counts...
Aug 21, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
One thing I wish I'd known and considered before I got a PhD in a social science a million years ago was how the non-academic jobs I could pursue with that credential would almost all involve working for, or taking funding from, organizations antithetical to leftist politics. I got my PhD in political science in 1997. Academic jobs were hard to come by then, and I gather they're much scarcer now. So, realistically, getting a PhD in these fields means probably pursuing a non-academic career.
Jun 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
As American fascism fires on all cylinders, I am desperately seeking sources of hope. Here's one: over the past week, I've seen unusually large protests for abortion rights in normally-quiet towns in "red" states where organizing could reshape upcoming legislative fights. Places like Jonesboro, AR... kait8.com/2022/06/30/abo…
May 25, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Despair. We are getting buried under a mountain of interconnected catastrophes—gun violence, climate collapse, rising fascism, COVID, poverty, on and on—and our government sits frozen. The system is broken, but by design it's also virtually impossible to reform. So, what now? If your answer to this question is "Get Manchin and Sinema to change course so Dems can enact reforms now!", please tell me why all the efforts to do just that over the past 18 months have failed, and what you would do differently that would finally succeed.
Dec 7, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Democracy dies, period.

One of the most important facts to emerge from comparative analysis of all attempts at democracy worldwide so far is that the vast majority eventually revert to authoritarian rule, at least for a time. Optimism of 1990s notwithstanding, there's no reason to believe that democracies in rich countries are intrinsically immune from this pattern. As we see in the U.S. today, many political actors would rather protect their narrow interests than tolerate alternation in power.
May 21, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
One thing complicating the collection of protest event data nowadays is a shift in how protesters--and some journalists covering them--think about media attention. /thread I've been collecting protest event data off and on for ~30 years now. Most of the projects I know from the 1980s-2000s relied wholly on print media sources, and they made an implicit assumption that protesters sought media attention for their events to advance their causes.
Feb 3, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The compiled version of the @crowdcounting dataset now runs through the end of January. Measured by the count of U.S. protest events we found and coded, it was the busiest January of the past four years. The biggest story of the month was, of course, the J6 insurrection at the Capitol. Looking at counts of events by issue, tho, the big story is COVID-19. Despite continuing election-related & anti-racism protests, COVID was the leading issue in U.S. protest activity in January.
Jan 10, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Picking up on @henryfarrell's comments here, one implication of my work on democratic breakdown is that the US should harshly punish GOP leaders who attempted to keep Trump in power despite losing the election and fomented insurrection to advance that effort. 1/n I wrote a book a decade ago that used game theory to explore the ways democracies die and what that tells us about how and why they sometimes survive. 2/n rienner.com/title/Dilemmas…
Jan 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
In addition to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Wednesday saw scores of pro-Trump rallies across the country. Yesterday, the script flipped, and the dominant themes of protest activity in the U.S. were defenses of democracy and calls for GOP officials to resign. The biggest one I've seen so far happened in Brooklyn, were thousands marched from Barclays Center to Sen. Shumer's residence to demand Trump's removal from office. nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/…
Nov 29, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Most comprehensive piece I've seen so far on Trump's efforts to usurp the presidency back from Biden. The main thing missing is a clear sense of how devastating a "win" would have been for American democracy. washingtonpost.com/politics/trump… To be clear, the U.S. didn't really become a democracy until the 20th century, with the federal guarantee of women's suffrage, and the quality of that democracy has varied significantly since that time, especially with the passage and then diminution of the Voting Rights Act.
Nov 10, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
IMO the politics of the language around this stuff matters a lot more than the academic definitions right now. That said, I do think Trump and the GOP's ongoing actions constitute an attempted consolidation of incumbent advantage, a.k.a. autogolpe. Outcome TBD. Since the early 1990s, consolidation of incumbent advantage has been the dominant mode of democratic breakdown worldwide, so there are plenty of relevant examples. Coups involving the direct use or threat of force have become comparatively rare.
Nov 9, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
BLM Plaza in DC on Saturday was a microcosm of anti-Trump America. A couple of demonstrations were planned for the afternoon, but people really started thronging there around midday, after major media outlets called the presidential race for Biden/Harris. That impromptu rally lasted into the night, and it sounds like the main themes were celebration and relief. Lots of booze was consumed, and fireworks got shot off.