At intersections in Chicago, Skokie and elsewhere, the protesters held up signs exhorting passersby to vote early, and drivers honked in response.
It was a muted Saturday for the No Kings movement, which previously drew larger crowds to nationwide rallies against President Donald Trump. This time, for its fourth rendition, organizers took a less overtly partisan tack by focusing on getting people to vote and eschewing the mass demonstrations of the past.
There was no central rally in Chicago, and at the ones that did take place, fewer people attended.
At the rally in Evanston, a few hundred people showed up, compared with the few thousand who attended the event there in March. After the rally, organizers directed the crowd to walk over to Skokie and form a “visibility brigade” along the street.
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Visibility to the public, they said, was the point this time, especially with the message behind Saturday’s “No Kings: Vote Early” events.
“We want to spread the word to vote early,” said Susan Sidell, a co-leader of Indivisible Evanston, the group that organized Saturday’s rally. “If all we have is the limited number of people who are at this rally getting that message, we’re not going to get the message far and wide enough.”
Though groups like Indivisible Evanston often collaborate with local Democratic groups, Saturday’s rallies had a nominally nonpartisan agenda.
Organizers at the Evanston rally did not allow political candidates to speak to the crowd. It was a pivot from the March event, where Mayor Daniel Biss, who’s running to succeed U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, addressed the demonstrators.
Still, many protesters held signs lampooning Trump, and the organizers acknowledged the elected officials who watched from the crowd. One of them was Schakowsky, who sees the get-out-the-vote messaging as imperative.
“We start getting people out right away, get the numbers going up and up and up,” Schakowsky told the Tribune. “And encouraging people. Noticing who has not done it so far, and make sure that we get them out. We’re gonna do it.”
Earlier on Saturday, a similar message played out at the mouth of DuSable Lake Shore Drive in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, where about 30 people lined up and held signs urging early voting. The honks kept coming.
At west suburban La Grange’s Tower Green, the No Kings event was also less of a protest and more of an educational fair. Brightly decorated folding tables sat in a row along the small green space’s sidewalks.
Attendees could sign up to volunteer for Indivisible West Suburban Chicago initiatives and get information on how to vote early. A group of women called “Singing Resistance” filled Tower Green with patriotic songs.
“We know that the midterm election is one of the most important non-presidential elections in our lifetime, if not the most,” said Mike Waters, an organizer with Indivisible West Suburban Chicago and a former Daily Southtown editor. “So we really want to get people out to the polls, and we really want to get people to the polls early.”
It is more productive “for the moment” to educate people on early voting than to hold a traditional protest, he said, with a focus on the Nov. 3 midterm election.
Susan French, of Indian Head Park, was one of the few people who had a protest sign at the afternoon La Grange event. She hopes the Democrats will take back the House and Senate, which she believes will bring more accountability to the Trump administration.
“We have to come together as a huge movement and change this now,” French said. “If we don’t change things now, kids are going to be asking, ‘Why did no one do anything about this?’”
In Washington, where Trump’s fellow Republicans could lose both houses of Congress, the White House seemed unfazed by the new round of No Kings demonstrations.
“The fact that the ‘No Kings’ organizers are talking about voting in the upcoming election proves they should change their name,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis wrote in a statement to the Tribune. “This November, Americans have a clear choice between President Trump and Republicans’ commonsense policies or the extreme Democrats’ radical socialist, open-border policies.”
And while the rallies had a duller political edge, at both the Edgewater and Evanston events, a different kind of political activity took place. People with clipboards walked up to protesters and asked for their signatures to get prospective mayoral candidates on the ballot.
Rallies throughout other suburbs Saturday also focused on encouraging people to vote.Katie Salyer, one of the leaders of Indivisible Northeast Lake County, said with the election 18 days away and early voting expanding Monday from one location in downtown Waukegan to 18 across the county, the gathering in Gurnee was designed as a call to action.
“By voting early, you can avoid potential barriers on election day and make sure your vote is counted,” Salyer said.
Salyer was one of nearly 2,000 estimated people protesting policies of the Trump administration and encouraging people to vote ahead of the Nov. 3 general election at rallies Saturday in Gurnee, Highland Park, Buffalo Grove and Deerfield.
Nearly 200 people packed Washington Street in downtown Naperville Saturday morning, urging people to vote.
In Valparaiso, about three dozen people had gathered on each of the north corners of the courthouse square by the start of the rally at 11 a.m., with many carrying signs that read “Vote” in blue letters on a white background.
Over in Broadview, the group of protesters at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility was small but experienced. Many of them had gathered there before, including Lindsay Wolfe, 41, during Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” or in the year since.
Though the protesters still came with megaphones and homemade posterboard signs in hand, the No Kings event in Broadview felt more like a reunion between friends who stood shoulder to shoulder last fall.
Wolfe, of Chicago’s North Park neighborhood, attended the No Kings protest at Broadview with her mom. They’d thought more people would attend.
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“In the past weeks and months, ICE has changed their tactics, and they have not been active on Saturdays,” Wolfe said. “I think that even though there was word that there would be a large turnout today at this location, we wanted to make sure that this area was not forgotten. We are still representing.”
Reporters Steve Sadin, Shelley Jones and Carolyn Stein contributed.