Regional Overview
United States & Canada
September 2024
Posted: 4 October 2024
Demonstration trends
This section provides key figures on demonstration events, which includes incidents categorized as 'Protests,' and 'Violent demonstrations' as recorded by ACLED. For more information on event and sub-event types, see the ACLED Codebook. This month's trend figures reflect comparisons between 1 to 27 August and 1 to 27 September, rather than the whole calendar month. Data for 28 to 30 September will be available with the next data release.
United States
693 demonstration events
14% increase
compared to last month
Canada
151 demonstration events
32% increase
compared to last month
United States: Anti-Trump demonstrations rise following the presidential debate
The presidential debate on 10 September in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania marked the first time — and possibly the last — that Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump debated before the US presidential election on 5 November. Following the debate, anti-Trump demonstrations in the US moderately increased, reaching their highest single-month levels since January 2021, following the riot at the US Capitol. More than a third of these demonstrations involved Haitian-led groups, as members of these groups demonstrated against Trump’s claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the pets of the people who live there.”1Henry J. Gomez et al., ‘How a fringe online claim about immigrants eating pets made its way to the debate stage,’ NBC News, 13 September 2024 Many of these anti-Trump demonstrations also showed support for Harris, leading pro-Harris demonstrations to reach their highest recorded levels since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in late July.
Just five days after the debate, on 15 September, 58-year-old Ryan Routh, armed with a rifle, hid in the bushes near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course, taking aim at the hole where the former president would soon be arriving. Before Trump came into view, Routh was spotted by a Secret Service agent who fired on him, causing him to flee. He was soon arrested in a police stop on a nearby highway and was charged with the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate. This incident marks the second attempted assassination attempt on former President Trump. Following the July attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, pro-Trump sympathy demonstrations briefly surged. However, despite an increased number of pro-Trump demonstrations in the whole of September compared to August, these demonstrations did not see a notable uptick in the days following the assassination attempt. Indeed, July saw nearly three times as many pro-Trump demonstrations as September.
Despite these opposing trends, the numbers of pro- and anti-Trump demonstrations in September were roughly equal, reflecting the extremely close nature of the presidential race.2Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing, ‘Harris, Trump virtually tied in battleground polls,’ Politico, 29 September 2024
Radical group trends
This section provides key figures on far-right and white nationalist groups.
Far-right groups:
ACLED uses this term to refer to a variety of actors, from 'traditional' militias to militant street movements. Though they are also analyzed separately, this figure also accounts for white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups.
White nationalists:
ACLED uses this term to refer to groups that openly describe themselves as white nationalist, white supremacist, or neo-Nazi.
This month's trend figures reflect data for 1 to 27 September, rather than the whole calendar month. Data for 28 to 30 September will be available with the next data release.
54
events, of which 42 involve white nationalist groups
13
radical groups active, of which 7 are white nationalist
Radical groups were most active in Arizona and Ohio
White nationalist groups were most active in Alabama and Ohio
Extremist Group Spotlight: The Proud Boys’ support for Trump
On 14 September, Columbus Proud Boys affiliates demonstrated in Springfield, Ohio, to show support for Trump and his anti-immigration rhetoric, as well as opposition to Vice President Harris. The Springfield event is only the 14th involving Proud Boys, whose activity has been steadily declining since 2021, as recorded by ACLED this year. This represents a 75% decline in Proud Boys activity compared to the same period in 2023 (for more on declining extremist activity in the United States, see the September US Crisis Monitor report). Shortly after this demonstration, a social media profile run by the national leadership of the Proud Boys disavowed the Columbus Proud Boys for “jumping on the bandwagon” in response to former President Trump’s anti-immigrant comments.3Observed by the author through monitoring the social media channels of extremist groups. ACLED monitors the online presence of numerous extremist groups as sources of information on their activity and receives information from local partners who specialize in tracking extremist activity (for more, see the US methodology articles on the ACLED Knowledge Base).
The Proud Boys have not taken to the streets this year as they did in the past — their strength, as well as their relationship with the former president, has diminished substantially since they were mentioned by name in the 2020 presidential debates.4Kathleen Ronayne and Michael Kunzelman, ‘Trump to far-right extremists: ‘Stand back and stand by,’’ Associated Press, 30 September 2020 However, anti-immigrant demonstrations involving extremist groups have been on the rise in 2024, already reaching the highest single-year levels of such demonstrations since ACLED began collecting US data in 2020.
See More
See the Codebook and the User Guide for an overview of ACLED’s core methodology. For additional documentation, check the Knowledge Base. Region-specific methodology briefs can be accessed below.
Links:
For additional resources and in-depth coverage of demonstration and political violence trends across the US, check our dedicated US Crisis Monitor.
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