On a warm June day, as crowds of thousands gathered in Detroit and Grand Rapids to protest the policies of President Donald Trump, a lone woman marched up and down the few blocks that make up her city’s downtown.
Sign in hand, 70-year-old Cindy Hull was a one-woman No Kings Day protest in Croswell, a roughly 2,000-person city seated in the longtime, deeply red Sanilac County in the Thumb of a state that Trump won in 2024.
Half a year later, about 90 protesters gathered on a freezing day in Howell, a nearly 10,000-person city in the Republican stronghold of Livingston County.
Anti-Trump protests in a red county can be both subtly and distinctly different than those in liberal haunts, smaller in size but seemingly subject to more obvious — and, in at least one case, dangerous — objection.
Yet increasingly across the country, they appear to be taking place.
Researchers from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project by Harvard and the University of Connecticut that collects data on crowd sizes, have found a sustained reach into Trump country that wasn’t seen during his first term.
Protests, on average, were held in counties that went to Trump across the majority of months the consortium analyzed on the topic, confirmed consortium co-founder and University of Connecticut political science professor Jeremy Pressman.
“Nationally, there are more protests, they are more spread out, and more people are turning out,” he said.
For some protesters, demonstrating near home simply makes them feel safer.
For others, protesting in red areas feels more important than marching in bigger protests in more liberal areas.
“They need to hear it more than anybody,” Hull said of those in her red county.
A changing model for protests
Data shows there has been some movement away from a model of going to Washington, DC, or other big cities for protests, said Pressman of the Crowd Counting Consortium.
Since the Women’s March in 2017, the consortium has collected reports on crowd sizes from sources that include news groups and social media posts. They then make it available to the public, listing both the high and low estimates for a crowd’s size.
It’s not exact work. If sources use general terms, like “dozens” or “hundreds,” to describe a crowd, the team takes a conservative approach, translating that into “24” or “200” in their listing, Pressman said. They’ve also improved their method over time, meaning exact comparisons can’t always be made between earlier recordings and the present day.
But the consortium has deduced that protests have moved into previously unreached counties.
Hull’s protest wasn’t included in the 2025 data, but neither were any prior anti-Trump protests in her county. Trump won there by a margin of more than 45 percentage points in 2024.
And John Llewellyn, chair of the Newaygo County Republican Party and a former state representative, said he hasn’t seen such protests in his area since the end of the Vietnam War.
Newaygo County, another longtime Republican stronghold, also voted for Trump by a margin of more than 40 percentage points in 2024.
Still, Llewellyn wasn’t surprised to see the gatherings.
He said the participants are solid Democrats who everyone knows, an idea with which organizers for Indivisible Newaygo County disagreed.
Not just one-offs
Protests aren’t just reaching Trump country but sticking around, according to the data.
Hull hasn’t marched solo in Sanilac County again, opting to travel elsewhere because she had a ride, but the swath of land in front of the historic Livingston County Courthouse saw multiple protests in 2025, and Indivisible Newaygo also reported multiple demonstrations.
Trump’s first term saw protests reach deep into Trump country at select times, but the instances were one-offs instead of a holding trend, the consortium found. In 2025, that reach, indeed, became a trend.
Additionally, the size of the crowds increased.
As of August 2025, counties where Trump won by at least 5 percentage points in the 2024 election had seen more protesters come out as compared with 2017, according to data from the consortium.
The average grew from two to seven protesters per 10,000 residents.
Lonely in a red community
Hull was disturbed that immigration arrests in her area didn’t result in protests. She wants her neighbors to know there are people in the community who will stick up for them.
She carried a sign that day in June that read, “Hands Off,” with a list including immigrants, free speech, SNAP and LGBTQ+ individuals. A photo of her and the sign wound up in the Sanilac County News.
Organizing group Indivisible Newaygo County also held protests in their red county as opposed to heading to the bigger, bluer Grand Rapids, said Michelle Petz, part of the group’s planning team.
“We need to show up in this county, so people don’t feel alone,” she said. “For too long, it has felt like there is just one party here, and it is red, and that is not the case. And so, this is a bringing together of community and like-minded people that are very distressed about what is going on.”
Sara Lane, chair of the Alpena County Democratic Party, reported seeing about 300 people come out for their June and October 2025 gatherings in the county that went to Trump by a margin of 29. Some counterprotesters came out, too.
Lane doesn’t see her work as coaxing over Republicans, but if staunch Republicans want to see another side, her group is there.
“I can show you something different than you’ve been exposed to before,” she said. “If you go through all that and you stay through that and you stay where you are … that’s OK.”
Rebecca Hilla, 46, of Hartland, felt safer going to protests in Howell with her son than going elsewhere. It’s not that there’d be more danger in a big city given the political vitriol everywhere, but she felt comfort being surrounded by those already willing to put a target on their backs in a red community. Livingston County went to Trump with a margin of 24 percentage points.
“They’re out there to protect everybody’s kids,” Hilla said of the protesters there.
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Smaller, local rallies matter to residents, said Kate Naden, the organizer of an October 2025 No Kings Day rally in Macomb County’s Romeo.
A key swing county, Macomb gave Trump a win by a margin of 14 percentage points over Harris in 2024 and served as the venue when Trump marked his first 100 days in office.
There were still more than 300 people present as Naden’s October rally wound down, and elsewhere in the county, in Sterling Heights, thousands gathered the same day.
Through the eyes of Republicans
Speaking shortly after those Macomb County rallies in October — which saw two men on opposing sides seek out a possible friendship — the chair of the Macomb County GOP expressed a belief that protesters were bused into the area by the Democratic Party. He also raised concerns about protesters being paid.
“I don’t know that anybody is participating from our county,” Gus Ghanam said. “If they are, I’d be shocked; our county’s doing very well.”
No protesters reported to the Free Press getting payments or being bused in.
Llewellyn of the Newaygo County Republican Party said both that trying to rally people is what political parties do and that “people like to do trendy stuff.”
And while protests aren’t new to Howell, which saw both Ku Klux Klan rallies and pushback in the ‘90s, an acceleration in protests isn’t shocking, said longtime resident and Livingston County Republican Party Chair Deb Drick.
Trump is aggressive, and every action has an equal and opposite reaction, she said.
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She thinks protesters are aiming to convince swing voters and the independents in her county to join their cause, but she thinks their message isn’t helping them.
“Half those signs are just silly,” she said. “When you’re protesting a woman’s death, saying ‘(Expletive) Trump’ is not the way to do it. That’s not the message that you’re trying to get across. It could be ‘ICE needs training’ or ‘ICE needs to back off.’ … Every single time a Democrat loses their mind and flies off the handle, they send another independent or swing voter my way, so have at it, people.”
A change of heart?
Neither Drick, in Livingston County, nor Monroe County Republican Party Chairman Todd Gillman believes that the protests in their area are indicative of locals being swayed away from their support of the Republican Party or Trump.
Trump won Monroe handily in the last three elections, but Gillman said it used to be more purple than it is now.
“I don’t think it’s a representative of Monroe, I think it’s a representative of a small part of Monroe,” Gillman said of the anti-Trump protests.
It’s the beauty of being an American that people can peacefully protest whatever they want, he said. Good or bad, Trump elicits a lot of emotion.
Thy neighbor
Stepping back slightly from the curb shortly after a silver truck swerved toward the crowd of protesters in the median in Howell, Rachel Bennett, 31, apologized for being a bit distracted. She was still shaken up.
Bennett loves her city. She thinks it’s a beautiful place with a close-knit community.
“But Howell can be so nasty, I think it’s really important I’m here,” she said outside the historic Livingston County Courthouse that day in January.
She knows Republicans, knows that they are not evil and wants to try to reach those on the fence.
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Protesters in red counties shared similar mixed reviews of living there. Many said they loved their neighbors, but some said they disliked raising a family amid toxic politics. Several said they had friends who were Republican, but some also said they didn’t talk politics with those friends.
Hull was surprised to get so many thumbs up when she did her solo protest in Sanilac County. Of course, some “yahoos” sent black tailpipe smoke her way, and the husband of a fellow churchgoer got “blustery” over not needing a handout himself, she said.
In Howell, the level of friction wasn’t as obvious standing back near the 19th-century courthouse, but, from the median, drivers in about every third car could be seen flashing obscene gestures, giving a thumbs down or otherwise showing their displeasure. A man parked in front of the island and walked around filming the crowd; some protesters blocked his path and called him names.
A week later, Bennett was still shaken by the truck that swerved at her and was fighting feelings of defeat. The day it happened, however, she sought to give the driver the benefit of the doubt. She thought back to times she’d had to watch her language while protesting in her own community.
“It was probably heat of the moment,” she said. “I hope he’s regretting it.”
