President Donald Trump's assertion that the protesters who began demonstrating shortly after his inauguration didn't vote is false, according to a report from The Washington Post.
Analysis from the American National Election Study of protesters from the past four years show the vast majority, 85 percent, voted in the 2012 election. Seventy-eight percent of non-protesters said the same.
In 2008, an even higher percentage of protesters, 89 percent, voted in the presidential election while 79 percent of non-protesters voted. Despite the unreliability, as only 57 percent of Americans actually voted in 2008 compared to the 79 percent who claimed to, demographic breakdowns of the protest crowds suggest they're regular voters.
Women tend to vote more often than men, and more women than men attended the recent protests, especially at the Women's March. Additionally, surveys from the Latin American Public Opinion Project show that young people who protest, who tend to make up a large portion or protest crowds, are more likely to vote than their non-protesting peers.
"Nearly 140 million Americans cared enough to vote on Nov. 8. Between 3 million and 5 million cared enough to protest on Jan. 21, and tens of thousands were angered enough by the refugee and immigrant bans to gather at airports the following weekend," write S. Erdem Aytaç, a political science professor at Koç University in Turkey; Susan Stokes, a professor of political science at Yale University; and Eli Rau, a political science PhD student at Yale, for the Post.
"There is little doubt that — Trump's tweet notwithstanding — most of the several million protesters in January had also been voters in November," they conclude. "And in fact because these protests, so early in Trump's administration, have been historically large, they may portend an uptick in voting in the usually quieter midterm congressional elections in 2018."
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