As Chenoweth explains, “Researchers used to say that no government could survive if five percent of its population mobilized against it.” But she saw that the threshold was not even that high. Reviewing the data, Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.”
This is a very surprising number. The population of the US is about 321 million people, so 3.5 percent is11,235,000. Population of Washington state is 7.21 million, so 3.5 percent of that is only252,350.
