Numbers speak more clearly than most journalists

I do enjoy it when people bother to measure things. Sure it is hard and there are all sorts of pitfalls but measured things yield so much more insight than unmeasured.

From Here’s who actually attended the March for Our Lives. (No, it wasn’t mostly young people.) by Dana R. Fisher.

As part of my research on the American Resistance, I have been working with a research team to survey protesters at all the large-scale protest events in Washington since President Trump’s inauguration. By snaking through the crowd and sampling every fifth person at designated increments within the staging area, we are able to gather a field approximation of a random sample. So far, the data set includes surveys collected from 1,745 protest participants.

So the dataset is very small and unlikely to be truly random, but they are making the effort and this is probably better than gut guessing.

During the March for Our Lives, my team sampled 256 people who were randomly selected. This gives us the chance to provide evidence about who attended the March for Our Lives and why.

What did the crowd look like? Some snippets.

The March for Our Lives was 70 percent women.

Participants were highly educated; 72 percent had a BA or higher.

Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18.

The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old.

About 27 percent of participants at the March for Our Lives had never protested before.

Only about a third of them had contacted an elected official in the past year.

In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue.

New protesters reported being motivated by the issues of peace (56 percent) and Trump (42 percent).

79 percent identified as “left-leaning.”

89 percent reported voting for Hillary Clinton.

What percentage of the population is older, college educated, women who voted for Hillary Clinton?

So the attributes of the crowd (13% within ten years of being 50 X 30% of the population with college degrees X 50% who are women X 28% of voting age who voted for Clinton) match about 0.5% of the population.

A crowd representing about 0.5% of the population (50 year old college educated women who voted for Clinton), 65% of whom are politically disengaged. Sounds more like organized political theater than a political movement. Numbers speak more clearly than journalists.