Erica Chenoweth

And the movements that do those things well tend to succeed more often than the movements that struggle with one or more of those four factors.

I think getting defections is the hardest.

In a study that I did with Zoe Marks and Andrew Hawking, we did a sort of computational study that ran three different types of strategies.

The first is the mass mobilization strategy, just get as many people in the streets as possible as quickly as possible and hope for the best with regard to pillars defecting.

The second strategy was what we called a naive pillar strategy, which is protest in a way that's trying to

get those defections, but you don't know in advance which pillars are most likely to defect.

You just go to the nearest one and protest and hope for the best.

And then the third strategy is what we call an informed pillar strategy.

And that's where the activists have some advanced information about which of the pillars are already kind of on the fence, and they focus on those first.

And that then creates early defections in the movement that can create a cascade of defections.

And that third strategy is by far the most likely to succeed in the least amount of time.

And the first strategy, the mass mobilization strategy, is to get as many people into the streets as possible, as quickly as possible, and hope that the pillars defect is the least likely to succeed.

And so I think part of it is just...

It's actually very challenging, both to build a strategy that creates defections and to understand, you know, how to do that in a way that creates the cascade of defections, not just an occasional defection here or there because they happen to, you know, push the right button one day.

Yeah, so I mean, my sense is that the No Kings protests, and by this, let's just talk about the national days of protest, right?

Which is not all that it is, but the protests themselves.

I mean, we are seeing growth in numbers over time.

We're seeing a diverse range of people from all walks of life coming out and participating in those protests.

You know, you could argue it's building momentum in the sense that there are lots of protests that happen between those very large-scale days of action.

For example, my team at the Crowd County Consortium documented that June 2026 actually had the third most protest events in a month.