Denverite informs us Colorado has posted the third-highest cumulative attendance rate at political protests thus far during the Trump presidency. Only Vermont (really?) and the District of Columbia (naturally) rank higher.

By hard numbers: Colorado has had about 33 demonstrators per 1,000 residents. Vermont had 40 and D.C. 1,324 (again, no surprise there).

Denverite’s Megan Arellano credits the data to Count Love, which, according to its website, tracks, “Demonstrations and protests for respect, love, and the earth.”

By its very nature, attempting to systematically account for, quantify and rank something as nebulous as political rallies and demonstrations might meet with harrumphs of skepticism among hardboiled statisticians. Nevertheless, Count Love seems to approach its subject seriously enough. The two guys behind it are accomplished geeks – one’s a Ph.D. engineer via MIT and the other is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Boston University. So, they are smarter than (most of) us.

Here’s their methodology:

We crawl local newspaper and television sites on a daily basis, and most of our event data come from these crawls. Our initial data for the Women’s Marches came from the Crowd Counting Consortium, and our initial leads for the travel ban rallies came from an article at ThinkProgress entitled, “Here’s your list of all the protests happening against the Muslim Ban”. For our visualizations, we draw maps using OpenStreetMap data, CARTO tiles and Leaflet.

They do indeed have some cool maps and other diagrams charting protests around the country. Check ’em out.

So, why does Colorado rank near the top of the chart in its protest performance? What is it about the Centennial State? Pols, pundits and political scientists across the spectrum probably could debate that one endlessly. And would. But that might be boring.

How about some more ordinary (and realistic) factors, like how we’re a destination state? Everyone wants to come here anyway for all the reasons that make Colorado what it is – sunshine, winter sports, craft beers, general hipness; you know the drill – so they might as well march for a cause they believe in, too.

Which for us raises another question: How many out-of-staters were among those who have participated in the many marches and rallies at downtown Denver’s Civic Center Park and nearby Capitol grounds since January? There’s probably no data out there on that, yet (maybe Count Love could tweak its app to collect it).

The question arises because there is said to be a growing trade in cannabis tourism to Colorado, so perhaps our state is worthy of at least a cottage industry in political tourism, as well.

Maybe it’s not just The Donald who’s driving it all, either. We’d wager that even after the Trump administration has faded into the pages of Wikipedia, people still will want to travel here to hoist a protest placard in one hand so long as they can nurse an IPA (or a joint) in the other.