This paper analyzes the effect of anthem protests on viewership for National Football League (NFL) games controlling for measures of NFL market-specific political beliefs and other demand determinants. To capture the effect of the protests on viewership, we create two classes of protests (unambiguous and ambiguous protests) and support the classification based on the meaning of the protest, actions by NFL owners, and statements by Donald Trump. Using data from all early and late-afternoon Sunday games from the 2014 through 2017 regular NFL seasons, we show that: (1) unambiguous protests reduce viewership in the week following the protests by about 15% while ambiguous protests do not generally produce statistically significant reductions in viewership; (2) the negative effect of unambiguous protests on viewership is particularly strong in metro locations that voted more heavily for Donald Trump in 2016; and (3) following Donald Trump's statements in week 3 of the 2017 season, both ambiguous and unambiguous protests increased and the increase in ambiguous protests was particularly large.
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