Overall, according to news reports, there were 28 states over the past week with gatherings of at least 100 people protesting stay-at-home orders and six with at least 1,000 people, out of a possible 42 states (plus Washington, D.C.) with shelter-in-place orders. When looking at what would predict whether a locked-down state would have a protest of at least 100 people, we broke down each state based on the share of the labor force that has filed advance claims since March 15; the state’s number of confirmed coronavirus cases;3 the number of days since the state enacted the lockdown; and the party affiliation of the governor. Here are the averages in each of those categories, depending on whether the state saw a protest:
None of the differences above are statistically significant, but they do show a few interesting trends about which states have protests — and why. On average, states with protests have 28 percent fewer confirmed coronavirus cases than states without protests, which might play into a mindset that places the economic fallout of the crisis ahead of the virus’s health implications. But states with protests have also seen smaller shares of their workforce file advance unemployment claims than their counterparts, which suggests that the protests are not purely economic in nature. (Although 15 percent of the labor force filing for unemployment in a five-week span is certainly not nothing.) Protest states have also been under lockdown for slightly fewer days, on average, than states without protests.
Perhaps most surprising in this breakdown is that a larger share of protest states had Republican governors than the states without protests, given the perception (from states like Michigan and California) that protesters — often organized by conservative interest groups — were trying to undermine Democratic governors’ stay-at-home orders. (Then again, maybe this simply speaks to a more right-leaning tendency for the populations of states that saw protests.)
