Spin Control: Size of ‘Hands Off’ protest was impressive compared to some past events

The extensive “Hands Off” protests last weekend against President Donald Trump and many of his recent actions were impressive. Some of the pushback, which ranged from mocking to dismissive from those who support Trump’s policies, was predictable but may turn out to be something critics regret.

I say that as something of an expert on protests.

In more than 50 years as a reporter, I’ve probably covered more than 100 protests, demonstrations or rallies, and that doesn’t include gatherings for various candidates. I lost count long ago.

The number is probably low, as it works out to less than two a year. It doesn’t include time in high school and college when I participated in some anti-war protests and covered others.

In nearly three decades in Spokane before coming to Olympia, I covered anti-nuclear demonstrations during the Reagan military buildup, anti-abortion protests outside local medical facilities, rallies seeking more help for Gulf War veterans, anti-tax rallies, protests against the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, counterprotests against skinheads and Neo-Nazis, and demonstrations for and against same-sex marriage.

In Olympia, there are protests at least weekly during legislative sessions, and sometimes two a day. There can be dueling demonstrations – committed, passionate and generally loud people on both sides of an issue, gathering at the same time. They were usually relegated to different parts of the Capitol campus, sometimes separated by driveways and open space.

Some protests you could set your calendar by. Abortion opponents and abortion-rights advocates always protested in mid-January, on or near the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision being handed down. The opponents usually mustered crowds estimated at between 2,000 and 4,500 in the decade of the teens, somewhat dependent on weather. Advocates usually were a bit smaller, but still a good crowd on the steps leading to the north entrance to the domed Legislative Building.

Crowd estimates are tricky. I use numbers from official sources like police, Washington State Patrol or the Department of Enterprise Services, which manages the Capitol Campus. Estimates from organizers are usually twice as high and half as believable.

Olympia is often a focal point for people from around the state. Gun-rights and gun-control advocates can generate between 1,000 and 2,000 people whenever lawmakers considered bills they care about. The agency that oversees the Capitol campus would send out an advisory a day or two in advance so that regular denizens wouldn’t call the state patrol at the first sign of people with guns wandering around the grounds. It is a quirk of legislative rules that one can carry a protest sign into the building but not if it’s on a stick; one can, however, open-carry a firearm in. So a sign on an AR-15 is presumably OK.

About 2,000 gathered when the state was debating a law on transgender bathroom access in 2020; most were against it, but those in favor matched them in decibels. Franklin Graham drew a crowd estimated at 4,300 in 2016. In 1992, an estimated 5,000 people, including a caravan of about a dozen well-packed vehicles from Spokane, came to the capital to see Ross Perot. The tea party’s tax-day protest in 2009 drew an estimated 5,000. Government workers and people who rely on state services numbered an estimated 7,000 when the Legislature was considering an all-cuts budget in 2011.

An estimated 10,000 people came for the Women’s March in January 2017, which may be the recent record.

I list those examples only to prove my bona fides when saying the “Hands Off” protest on April 5 was one of the largest I’ve seen in Olympia or Spokane. It filled the Capitol steps, the Supreme Court steps, the flag circle between them and the road around the circle. It was estimated only at “over 5,000” by the department, but seemed larger than even the Women’s March, possibly because for the march, some portion of the demonstrators were always marching from the Capitol to downtown and back, so there wasn’t a time when everyone was in one place listening to speakers.

The “Hands Off” protest was also impressive considering similar numbers were showing up in Seattle and Spokane, with other gatherings around the state. The Olympia crowd was a mix of ages, although the average probably tended to over 50. Some looked like they may have been part of those Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and early ’70s, having traded their huarache sandals and tie-dyed shirts for orthopedic-soled walking shoes and fleece vests.

Many who held up signs demanding protections for Social Security and Medicare obviously had skin in that game. Others were veterans protesting the double whammy of cutbacks at the VA hospitals and the firing of federal workers who are also veterans. There were signs demanding hands off immigrants, tariffs, reproductive rights, gay rights, transgender rights, Medicaid, national parks – and in one case, “porn stars” although it seems like being a porn star is inherently a hands-on kind of occupation.

There were also young families and some teenagers, who often had the most creative and artistic signs. Sign originality has improved over the decades, in part because participants get a bit more advance notice than “rally in the quad in an hour.”

While the true impact of these protests won’t be known for a while, it would be a mistake to minimize or belittle them. One podcaster suggested that these are just “children of the ’70s reliving their glory days.” Another blogger described the crowd as “about 1,000,” which suggests he’s either bad at estimating or didn’t bother to find an official source who could.

Critics discount protesters at their peril. Political cartoonists usually depicted Vietnam War protestors as unkempt and uneducated, but in the end, they helped sway the public and the government to end the war. People made fun of Perot, and while his supporters didn’t get him elected, they helped get George H.W. Bush unelected. Two years later, they helped flip control of Congress to the Republicans when they didn’t like what Bill Clinton was doing.

Liberal commentators scoffed at the tea party rallies, but they helped shift control of Congress back to Republicans in the 2010s. The Occupy movement presaged Bernie Sanders’ surprising presidential campaign.

Sometimes protests are unexpected harbingers of the future. When 1,000 or so people showed up to protest an end to certain exemptions for measles vaccines in March 2019, no one would have guessed that vaccine resistance would become widespread two years later during the COVID-19 pandemic or that the featured speaker, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would be Health and Human Services secretary six years later.

The best thing to do about protests is to join them if you agree or join a counterprotest if you disagree. But don’t knock people who care enough to “peaceably assemble for redress of grievances.” The Framers of the Constitution thought they were pretty important.