Do protests matter? Here’s the math neither side will like.

Last Saturday, protesters congregated outside Rep. Morgan Griffith’s office in Christiansburg to protest against the Trump administration’s government cuts and the way that Elon Musk is going about it.

On Monday, others — numbering in the hundreds — showed up outside Rep. Ben Cline’s office in Roanoke to do the same.

On Thursday, others are planning to do the same in Bedford and Rocky Mount, where a Griffith staffer will be holding regular office hours. Meanwhile, the Roanoke protesters say they’ll be outside Cline’s office every Monday until he holds a town meeting (they’re likely to have a long wait).

Similar protests have happened in other parts of the state, all targeting Republican members of Congress. That raises the natural question: Do these protests do any good?

My left-of-center readers may want to take a sedative right now; my right-of-center ones may want to go ahead and do the same, because I’m likely to spike blood pressures on both sides before this column is done.

The immediate answer to that question is “no.” These protests will do absolutely nothing to make Cline or Griffith or any other Republican member of Congress change their minds. That’s simply not how politics works.

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon — I’d prefer grizzled veteran — but did any of these demonstrators vote for Cline or Griffith? Probably not, I’d guess. So why would a protest by people who didn’t support them do anything to sway their minds? These members of Congress simply believe something different than what the demonstrators outside their offices do, and the number or volume of those protesting won’t do a thing to change their deeply held beliefs.

I saw one person on Facebook, who I know and trust, say he counted 275 people at the Roanoke event. The reality, though, is that you could have 27,500 people show up outside Cline’s office, and it wouldn’t make a difference. After all, he had 150,102 people vote against him last November — and he still won with 63% of the vote in the 6^th District.

Politics is often about math, and here’s the inconvenient math: Cline and Griffith won by landslide margins — Griffith took almost 72.5% of the vote in the 9^th District. Hearing from Democrats, however loudly, is not going to be persuasive. What might be persuasive would be if Republican voters started telling them that Trump is going too far, but there are no real indications that’s happened yet, at least not in any numbers that matter.

I saw one of the Roanoke demonstrators post on Facebook that he found the protest “exhilarating.” That may be, but it’s not going to cause Cline to have some Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus epiphany that he’s been wrong about Trump all along. Let’s imagine that Democrats win control of Congress and begin to enact some of their most cherished goals. Maybe they do it sloppily, or amateurishly, but they still do it — and conservative protesters start showing up outside their offices. Would that cause them to change their minds about what’s best for the country? Highly unlikely. Same here. Protests will not overcome principles, not when those protests come from people who didn’t vote for the member of Congress in the first place. If these protesters want their members of Congress to vote differently, then they really need different members of Congress. Let’s look at how likely that is.

On a practical basis, demonstrators need to do either of two things. First, they could persuade about 58,000 Republicans in the 6^th District to switch sides or about 91,000 in the 9^th District to switch sides — that’s what it would take to change the results of last year’s election. Or, if that seems too steep a challenge, they could use their energy to find 115,322 people who didn’t vote in the 6^th District last year who would come out and vote for the Democratic candidate — or 181,076 new Democratic voters in the 9^th District. That’s what it would take to win those districts. In the case of the 9^th District, that means more than doubling the Democratic turnout last year. Since voter turnout in the district was already north of 70% — 72.6% — that means registering people who aren’t presently on the rolls. However, if those people weren’t motivated to register by three successive Trump campaigns, will they ever be?

Now, before those protesters come after me for puncturing any illusions they have that they might make a difference, let’s revisit what I said earlier. I said the immediate answer to the question of whether these protests do any good is “no.” The key word there may not be “no,” it’s “immediate.”

None of these protests are going to change bright red districts into even the palest shade of blue. Cline and Griffith have nothing to worry about here, at least not until their own supporters start to complain that firings at the Veterans Administration hospital are diminishing medical care or that firings at the Internal Revenue Service mean their tax refunds are being held up. But do you know who needs to worry? Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the likely Republican candidate for governor.

Maybe all these protesters are regular voters, so while their emotions are cranked up, the voting machine doesn’t take that into account. An enthusiastic vote counts just the same as a lukewarm one. However, does the passion — the exhilaration — of these protesters translate into extra voters for Democrats this fall somehow? That’s the big question. If these protesters turn their energy into campaigning for Spanberger this fall, that’s where they could make a difference. That won’t change a thing in Washington but would in Richmond.

It’s an article of faith in Virginia political circles that Virginia voters reacted badly to Trump the first time around — and that reaction helped Democrats a) win all three statewide offices in 2017, b) make big and unexpected gains in the House of Delegates that year, and c) eventually win a majority in the House in 2019. Perhaps just important is d) once Trump left office, Democrats promptly lost their House majority and all three statewide offices.

Naturally, we wonder what 2025 will be like. Will voters react just as harshly as before and punish Republicans? Or are voters now numb to Trump?

For a while, it seemed as if the answer was the latter, although two things now make me wonder about the former.

First, this week’s Roanoke College poll shows Democrat Abigail Spanberger with a lead of 15 percentage points over Republican Winsome Earle-Sears. (The poll was conducted before former Del. Dave LaRock let it be known he wants to run for the Republican nomination, too.) I don’t doubt the poll, but that lead seems entirely too large to be sustainable for the long term; it’s very early in a race that many voters haven’t focused on. Still, something has happened. In polling last year, the race was tied; basically those polls showed that each party started with about the same size base. So far this year, a series of polls has shown Spanberger with leads of 5, 10 and now 15 percentage points. All those polls also came as Trump was preparing to take office, and then actually doing so. Since nothing much has happened in the governor’s race, it seems fair to conclude that Trump is what has changed the numbers there — to Earle-Sears’ detriment. The same poll also showed that Trump begins his second term with noticeably higher disapproval rates in Virginia than he did his first term.

Second come these protests, which I discount as being particularly important, unless they signify an energized Democratic electorate that turns its energy to organizing for the governor’s race. In that case, they might be quite important — we just don’t know yet. Let’s look at why.

I always like to rely on numbers, so let’s look at some. I’ll start with Roanoke, because the population there hasn’t changed much over the past decade. Here’s how the vote there has changed over the past three gubernatorial elections:

Notice the big jump in Democratic voters from 2013 (when Barack Obama was president ) to 2017 (when Trump was): The Democratic vote went up by 3,214 while the Republican side went up by only 1,104. However, once Trump left office, the Democratic vote edged up by just 1,808 while Republicans surged by 3,134. It’s wrong to say that Terry McAuliffe didn’t inspire Democrats four years ago; he produced more Democratic votes for governor than ever before. What happened is that Youngkin simply inspired Republicans a lot more. How much of that was Youngkin and how much of that was relief at Trump being gone and Republican voters coming back into the fold is hard to say, but the main point is this: Before Trump, Democrats had a 3,928-vote margin in Roanoke. With Trump, they had a 6,119-vote margin. Once Trump was gone, the Democratic margin slid back to 4,793.

Just so we have another example, let’s look at Lynchburg, a more conservative city:

We see the same pattern: Once Trump was in office, the Democratic vote jumped, while the Republican vote barely budged. Once Trump was gone, it was the other way around. The key measures are always the margins: The Republican margin went from 2,709 to 912 to 2,668.

The last thing Republicans want is a Democratic electorate that’s riled up more than the Republican electorate is — and voter enthusiasm often goes down once their side has won. If these protests signal a more fired-up Democratic electorate, that’s bad news for Republicans. Otherwise, they are as Shakespeare wrote: Sound and fury signifying nothing.

* * *

There is one important thing going on this year that wasn’t going on the last time Trump was in office: The mass firing of government workers. As I’ve written in a previous column, that could have a big economic impact on Virginia, but we simply don’t know yet what the political impact of that will be.

For many Virginians, particularly those not in Northern Virginia, those firings are all very abstract — and not necessarily upsetting. Lots of people feel that the federal government is bloated and, while Trump’s approach (or Musk’s, if you prefer) may not be particularly surgical, this is all something distant to many people unless they know someone who got the axe. I spoke recently with Ward Armstrong, the former Martinsville-Henry County legislator who led Virginia House Democrats in the early part of the 2000s. “I don’t know that the public is too torqued up over the loss of federal jobs,” he said, “but wait until they cut the farm subsidies or start these tariffs and GM sales go down.”

In other words: People need to see, and feel, some impact. That hasn’t happened yet. If it does, that potentially has the impact to move votes from the R column to the D column. Voters are ruthlessly nonideological when it comes to the economy. If they think things aren’t going well, they will punish the party in power, no matter which one it is.