Geographically, the marchers looked a lot like Clinton’s coalition

One of the odder sentiments we heard on Saturday was from journalists wondering aloud why all the enthusiasm they were seeing at the marches hadn’t translated into a win for Clinton. While 3 million (or so) marchers is a lot, almost 66 million Americans supported Clinton in defeating Trump in the popular vote last November. Like Clinton’s voters, however, the marchers were mostly concentrated in big cities in blue states.

Specifically, about 80 percent of march attendance came in states that Clinton won. By comparison, only slightly more than half of Clinton’s voters were in these states.

Only 11 percent of marchers, by contrast, were in a key group of swing states — those that Obama won in 2008 or 2012 but which Clinton lost in 2016. (These states are Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Indiana.) Some 25 percent of tea party protesters on April 15, 2009, were in these swing states, by contrast.

We should be careful not to lose the context here. While a higher share of tea party participants were in swing states, a higher raw number of Women’s March participants were, because Women’s March participation was much higher overall. Nonetheless, the largest rallies were generally not in swing states (with some exceptions: about 87,500 people in Madison, Wisconsin; 50,000 in Philadelphia; and 25,000 in Pittsburgh).