John Kerry beat George Bush 44-41 percent of RV viewers of the 2nd presidential debate, with 13 percent undecided in an ABC News Poll. But Kerry beat Bush among self-identified independents 44-34 percent. (The respondents were self-identified 35 percent Democrats, 32 percent Republicans and 29 percent Independents.)
Kerry beat Bush 47-45 percent of RV debate-viewers in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. But Kerry beat Bush among self-identified independents 53-37 percent. (The respondents were self identified 38 percent Republicans, 32 percent Democrats and 30 percent Independents.)
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 19: Will Chaos of Chicago ’68 Return This Year?
A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:
When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.
Gaza isn’t Vietnam.
Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).
Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
Political conventions are different today.
One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.
By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.
Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.
Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.
Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.
The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
> Bush and Cheney are increasingly desperate. So their
> rhetoric will be increasingly shrill and over-the-top.
> They have painted themselves in a corner with their
> scare campaign.
I think the Kerry camp needs to be careful in the final debate. They’re saying the subject (domestic issues) should favor the Dems, but a *lot* of observers are saying “Shrub” actually fared better in debate#2 than when he had to defend his failed Iraq strategy.
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My fear is “Shrub” and the GOP will try to exploit the usual cultural wedge issues in the final debate, and Kerry will give some vague Dukakis-esque responses. Maybe they will accuse the Democrats of banning the bible and requiring men to marry other men… It’s what they do when their Iraq policy is in shambles, there are fewer jobs than four years ago and the federal government is drowning in red ink thanks to the tax cuts.
MARCU$
Mimikatz, you wrote:
I think that Bush really damaged himself with undecided women in the second debate. His demeanor in the first half was the sort of swaggering, cocksure braggart that most women detest. He was rude to many of the questioners, particularly the older man who asked about drug reimportation and the last woman, who asked about his mistakes. Women tend to be more attuned to social niceties. Third, the abortion question. Of course rabid pro-life women would go for Bush. But his refusal to understand any nuances to that issue, and his favoring the fetus at the expense of the mother’s health or even her life, had to make many women cringe. Expect to see Kerry rise a few points in the next polls because of this.
Posted by Mimikatz at October 9, 2004 05:22 PM
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I absolutely agree.
All the talking heads need to pull their HEADS out of their collective ass and look around. The ONLY voters who matter are those in the middle who are undecided or persuadeable. If oozing faux machismo would have won them, they wouldn’t be persuadeable now.
Many woman respond very negatively to men to exhibit the behaviors of Bush, mainly because most have been bullied by some similiar sounding male all too often. They know it instantly as the boyfriend or husband who was always going to have things his way, and wanted to shout down opposition. Or the boss, or the co-worker, or the husband of a friend.
Bush had to have lost all women who were anywhere near the fence.
I am predicting that Kerry will gain the lead from the second debate and not lose it again.
We should begin to see evidence of it tomorrow or Tuesday.
I think that Bush really damaged himself with undecided women in the second debate. His demeanor in the first half was the sort of swaggering, cocksure braggart that most women detest. He was rude to many of the questioners, particularly the older man who asked about drug reimportation and the last woman, who asked about his mistakes. Women tend to be more attuned to social niceties. Third, the abortion question. Of course rabid pro-life women would go for Bush. But his refusal to understand any nuances to that issue, and his favoring the fetus at the expense of the mother’s health or even her life, had to make many women cringe. Expect to see Kerry rise a few points in the next polls because of this.
RE: Angry Man
Between the blatant lies and the anger Bush’s public persona is morphing from “Someone you would like to have a beer with”* to Richard Nixon.
*I am only quoting the spin, I always thought that line was a load of nonsense
Two points.
1. Bush and Cheney are increasingly desperate. So their rhetoric will be increasingly shrill and over-the-top. They have painted themselves in a corner with their scare campaign.
2. In each debate there was an initial effort in the media to prop up Bush and Cheney’s performances. They quickly abandoned the effort in the first debate in the face of Bush’s obvious stumbling. With Cheney/Edwards and last night the effort is more resilient, but has weakened after time as the consensus pointed out reality. They are the incumbents defending a sorry record. They are defensive and angry. They insist they are right and their defense consists of outright lies or distortions or browbeating. All Kerry has to do is sound reasonable and truthful.
Expect them to now go back to the August formula – attack Kerry with lies and slander. But now people have seen and heard Kerry. That swiftboatliar won’t hunt.
It is disappointing that with such a strong performance by Kerry (better than the first debate, although the improvement in Bush was enormous), the polls wouldn’t show Kerry with a stronger win. The press will insist that it was a draw.
Kerry FINALLY introduced the point that the whole ‘wishy-washy’ (but he was talking about flipflops) issue was a mere spin. He needs to explain that more clearly.
The questions were also really favorable to Kerry. I really admired Kerry’s frankness with his “it’s not a matter of if but when” response to the question about another 9-11, but he should also have been more specific about the history (unsure when the 1993 attack and the following attack in E Africa he alluded to was? — chalk that up to tiredness). In my own mind, Kerry’s substantive forthrightness in answering that question contrasts with Bush’s “And he put a trial lawyer on the ticket” line. The irony of the latter is that trial lawyers are often resented as people who profit by demagogically appealing to juries in an emotional manipulative way — just like Bush was doing in his approach.
KERRY HAS GOT TO STOP USING THE WORD “PLAN” SO OFTEN. He needs to sharpen his attacks on Bush’s policies on health care as for the corporate interests.. He could have left Bush looking like an ogre in response to the environment question. He should take the opportunity as he lays into Bush in the last debate on either tax policy for the wealthy and/or pro-corporate health care policy to give a good NICE AND ACCURATELY HARSH picture of Bush the worst kind of stereotypical big business Republican and go into at least three or four specific environmental policies. Kyoto ISN’T winning him any points with the mainstream, although I support it. How he has made backroom deals with corporations that even the Republicans wouldn’t pass thru Congress and then name SEVERAL NEW ones: mercury policy should be specifically described, as well as one or two other horror stories like that.
On jobs, Bush keeps citing the 1.9 million figure. That is his BEST(and only) year of job growth, after massive declines, and it’s worse than the AVERAGE year of 8 years of Clinton. That punches Bush down at his main point on that issue.
It doesn’t even keep up with the growth of the potential job market.
He was a little confusing at the key point on how he had been consistent on the Patriot Act — the issue of being a flipflopper and explaining how he isn’t is probably more important than the issues of the Patriot Act as far as winning the elections. Kerry focuses on the issues — Bush on winning the election. But still, Kerry had a slightly better demeanor than Bush and was MUCH stronger on the substance. He answered the questions and devastated Bush’s arguments. The polls should (have) reflected that — though perhaps the talking heads (with the conservatives insisting it was a big win for Bush and the liberals taking a balanced approach of a narrow win for Kerry) have an impact.
Lookin’ good for K/E, but I’m still waiting for an Oct surprise(s). Read the Atlantic Monthly essay on Karl Rove if you don’t understand my anxieties.
Bush gave tired excuses for poor performances. He did not appear to have a real grasp of either Foreign Policy or Domestic issues.
Paul C. is right. Bush came off like a raving lunatic for the first 45 minutes. However, I thought Bush got the better of JK on the domestic issues, where his folksy, simple-minded stuff came across more succinctly than Kerry’s thoughtful, but long-winded responses.
Most people aren’t smart enough to follow along with complex lines of political reasoning, so I hope Kerry can sort of sharpen his domestic stuff before next Wed.
Thanks for the news on independents.
Bush did much better this time than last, but I still think that the main dynamic of the debates is to demolish the straw man that the Republicans have constructed. Kerry comes across as reasonable and presidential. Which he is. That completely undermines the Republican attacks. In contrast, there’s not a lot that Bush can do to undermine the Democratic attacks.
I am sure that Kerry beat Bush by 10 to 1 among people who only watched the first half hour of the debate. What did his people tell him –“George, if you say it loud enough, people will believe you.” My favorite line was Jeff Greenfield “Mr. Bush, two words — ‘anger management.’
way to go, kerry.
why won’t the main stream media report these internals?