The German directly translates to "Large and medium cities". Small ones are smaller, and yes in English at some point you'd use "town", German doesn't make that distinction. I think "over 20k people" makes it very clear what I was talking about, though. They're all individual municipalities, and if you look at large ones, e.g. Berlin: They have multiple protests about the same topic all the time. "Stadt", "city", doesn't even have legal meaning in German it originally refers to special privileges (trading etc) that some places had over others, and those places tended to grow bigger.

What you're listing is Metropolitan areas and no, that's not anywhere close to a city. I understand that it's often used that way in English, and there's some parallels in Germany e.g. the Bay Area can be in some way considered one city, and so can the Ruhr Area, but when you look at Berlin-Brandenburg it's literally the two states: Berlin and Brandenburg. That's like... imagine Chicago being its own, independent, state, and then considering it and the whole of Illinois to be "the same city", the smallest municipality (that's the actual legal term) with the title "Stadt" is Arnis. 300 people, down from a maximum of 1000. Quirk of history.

20k pop is large enough to be a medium centre, meaning that the municipality provides things such as hospitals, specialised doctors, secondary education etc. to the municipalities around it because it's the big kid on the block. About 7k pop would be a subordinate centre where you can get stuff like groceries and a hair cut, there's a primary school, a pharmacy, such things. Even smaller places may have some of those things but do it for themselves, they aren't set up to serve the surrounding area a complete package.

The organized protests are only happening in each state’s capital.

And that's stupid. People won't come because it's not something just about anyone can work into their schedule, and you won't be seen because only people living in the capital will randomly drop by. Differently put: Protests should be in commute distance, ideally on that very commute. Hence why I mentioned Walmart.

If we did that in Germany there'd be 16 protests, and population-wise btw the average German state is just about as large as the average US state: You have a few gigantic ones like California, and also some that are smaller than our smallest state, but mostly you simply have more states. And a lot more area.

Going by "A protest in every 20k pop place" Minnesota alone would have about 60, then add the county seats over 7k to that.

As said: Rookie numbers. That was my point. You're not doing a protest wave, you're doing rookie numbers.