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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Alan Snipes: You are not grasping at straws. A few weeks ago, I checked some old poll figures on Gallup’s Web site and was surprised to see that Reagan did trail Carter for most of 1980. In fact, the race was very close until the end, when undecideds swung heavily toward Reagan, giving him his landslide victory. I’m not saying 2004 is 1980 all over again, but I believe Kerry is in very good shape if you look at it from a historical perspective.
In response to David de la Fuente, my recollection (without going back to check for sure) was that Ruy was arguing that without Green Party backing, Nader will have serious trouble getting his name on the ballot in any more than a couple states. Oregon (my home state) has historically given Nader a significant percentage of the vote, but last I heard he was nowhere close to getting enough signatures to make the ballot. Without his name listed, he’s reduced to a write-in candidate, which will result in a tiny fraction of whatever he’s polling. That said, you’re absolutely correct that he won’t be polling more than 2% by November.
In response to reignman, you may be right about people who aren’t comfortable with Bush voting for him anyway. By my thinking, though, a challenger needs two things to happen. 1) people need to be dissatisfied with the incumbent (or else nobody even thinks twice about replacing him), and 2) people need to prefer the challenger. My point was simply that cognitive dissonance might mean there’s a larger dissatisfaction with Bush than the polls sometimes indicate. Which means that if Kerry presents a favorable alternative, the polls will begin reflecting a significant movement of voters to the Kerry camp. Then again, it could just be my wishful thinking!
May I ask why it’s better to discount the Nader effect in those polls? Is it the assumption that his support will wane as time goes by and the election nears? Thanks.
Oops. Reignman, I am guessing, perhaps incorrectly, that the questions you posed to “rt” in the previous post in this thread are intended for Ruy, whose initials are the same as mine. When I first chose my handle for this site it did not occur to me that the choice of “rt” might generate confusion on this point. Not long after I began posting here I “introduced” myself to Ruy via email–we had met FTF a couple of months before. Part of his friendly reply was words to the effect of “Oh, so *you’re* rt.” I guess if I’d been more alert it might have occurred to me to change my handle then. But I wasn’t.
I apologize for any confusion this might have caused–and especially if anyone thinking “rt” was Ruy formed a lesser opinion about his work as a result of reading my (decidedly less data-driven!)posts. Beginning with my next post I will use the handle “bt” instead.
Again, my sincere apologies to you, Ruy, and any of you other good people who come to this site to get the benefit of Ruy’s terrific analyses who were confused as a result of my actions.
Probably. I’m not sure…rt?
In response to BKW, it sounds sound, but in the 1984 election, a lot of people voted for Reagan who didn’t really like him, but they assumed nobody else didn’t like him, and that they were weird, so they either stayed at home or DID vote for him, just as in the ’80 election where a considerable number of people who voted for Reagan didn’t agree w/ him, they just wanted Carter out, which may do wonders for Kerry. Right? Somebody help me out here….rt?
I may be speculating here but while Bush’s poll numbers have only dropped by a point or two while support for his Iraq Policy has dropped more considerably, the drop in support for his Iraq Policy may-just may, foreshadow a big drop ( maybe 5 points) in his head to head poll numbers against Kerry. I remember in 1980 that Carter was running ahead or even with Reagan most of the year when I believe failure after failure with the hostage drama finally caused the bottom to drop out of his support during the last week of the campaign. Am I grasping for straws or is this a reasonable take on current poll numders? Help me out here.
Never in our life time has this country had such a horrible president as bush. Every corner he has turned comes more harm to the citizens of this country and the world. We must do everything in our being to remove this person from office. Our country cannot survive as we know it if bush remains in office another 4 years.
Get active with everyone you know and get the word out and convince everyone that this must be done now. Ignore the nay sayers and march ahead with the message. It is up to all of us to save our country. Yes it is that serious.
The poles are just beginning to show what will turn into the largest victory for the democrats in the history of this country. Keep pounding and don’t give up. I have faith in my fellow Americans to do the right thing. Even republicans know that this man is bad and that he must go. A surprising number of them will overwhelmingly vote for Mr. Kerry in this election. Tell every republican you know that it’s OK to vote for Mr. Kerry and they are doing what is best for our country. bush has bertayed everyone. For every reason that a republican can give you for why they are going to vote for bush you can give them 10 reasons not to vote for him. Your reasons are based in facts theirs are based in lies and deceptions and false faith.
Lets just hope and pray that between now and election day bush doesn’t do something else that will not be reversible for our country and the world.
Don’t focus on the poles just get out there and do what it takes to turn every vote in for our next President, John Kerry.
On this question of why Bush’s approval ratings haven’t gotten as low as the public’s assessment of many of his actions might suggest…
Bush has gotten consistently among his highest marks for being a strong, decisive leader. A portion of the survey respondents appear willing to give credit to, and possibly stick by for a long time, a President who they think is making some bad decisions. Not sure how to interpret this. Is it a grudging sort of respect that, verbalized, might be expressed in something like the following?: “Sure, he’s made some decisions that haven’t worked out well. That’s true of anyone at the top. But at least he’s firm, he knows his own mind, and he seems determined to stick to his guns.”
(To my way of thinking if a President wants to lead us off a cliff I want him to be an ineffective leader although not a complete, ahem, idiot lest our adversaries exploit the situation. “Strong leader” and “making all the wrong decisions” just don’t square in my view of the world. But that’s just me. I’m not a Republican.)
Another interpretation may result from surmise–and that’s all it is–that Republicans tend to stick up for, and stick with, someone they see as one of “their own” (maybe Bush I didn’t fall into that category) under more dire circumstances than a large share of Democrats do. Arguably this is consistent with B Clinton’s take that Democrats want to fall in love with their candidate while Republicans want to fall in line behind their candidate. Could it be that the Republican mindset is less questioning of authority and more tolerant of hierarchy and hierarchical thinking? I wonder if anyone has done a Ph.D. thesis on this subject? The old joke “I’m not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat” comes to mind in this context.
In response to frankly0’s comment about Bush’s approval ratings not budging much even when his other numbers seem to be steadily dropping, I wonder about the role of cognitive dissonance.
I’ve been noticing (along with Ruy and others) that the polls have been reporting general approval of the U.S. war in Iraq for some time now, with around 60% of the people responding that it was “the right thing to do” to invade Iraq. Meanwhile, the question, “are things going well for the U.S. in Iraq” has seen erosion of approval from around 60% down to around 40% now. Cognitive dissonace would explain this — people realize at one level that invading Iraq was a mistake, but to say so out loud implies that all the American blood that has been shed in Iraq was a waste. People aren’t comfortable admiting that, so they report to pollsters that they agree with the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, but also must accept that the invasion isn’t going very well.
I wonder if something similar isn’t happening with the president’s approval. People are beginning to recognize he’s not competent in the job (which shows up in the specific questions about his job performance), but people aren’t willing to admit they disapprove of the Commander in Chief during a time of war — because disapproval sounds too much like not supporting the troops or being unpatriotic or whatever the reason. Even if cognitive dissonance prevents them from answering a pollster by saying they disapprove of the president, it won’t take much to tip them to pulling the lever for Kerry in November either.
I’m pretty sure there’s never been a president re-elected during a recession, or when his approval ratings were below 50%. Economic indicators still look pretty mediocre.
frankly0, I presume you’re referring to Bush’s propensity for holding onto 48-49% approval in most polls (Zogby/Pew excluded) — a number which would suggest a narrow loss, at worst. I, too, have found this puzzling, given that 1) his internals in many areas are well below that — as are the right track-wrong track numbers — and 2) his share in trial match-ups with Kerry never go above 45-47.
I wonder if this continues to reflect a waning halo effect from September 11th. Bush got a huge jolt in approval from that, a jolt that has since faded steadily but quite slowly. It may be that we just have to be patient, that the internal and re-elect numbers are Bush’s true “approval”, but the main poll number still has a bit of fog attached to it that will burn off at its own pace.
Numbers are obviously helpful in determining electoral outcome, and we should be rigorous about viewing them realistically. However, if I can be permitted an emotional evaluation: I have over 30 years experience watching political races, and have found some presidential years clearly giving off a re-election vibe (’84 and ”96), and others (’80 and ’92) clearly not. This one isn’t quite in the latter category yet, but it’s miles away from the former — and, in fact, feels less favorable than ’76, when Ford lost by only a 3% margin.
I guess what I’m saying is, the way things feel out there, it’s hard to foresee re-election, and my bet would be on that approval rate dropping rather than rising.
Rasmussen uses “automated polling technology”. Is there any evidence that this produces a systematic bias of any sort? For example, I instantly hang up on any computerized voice I hear. Also, I never cooperate with market researchers. But I might answer questions from a live pollster who identifies themselves as being from a major polling or news organization and is interested in political opinions.
frankly0, I think you make some very good points. Bush is getting around 43 percent now in two-way matchups with Kerry, which is probably getting close to his core support. But I agree the Plame affair could drop him further and be a major blow. Does anyone know when indictments might be forthcoming?
One thing that’s remarkable to me is the stability of Bush’s approval numbers in the face of some very negative news, both on his handling of 9/11 beforehand, and the situation in Iraq. While it’s true that he got some counterbalancing good news on jobs, it WAS just one month’s numbers, and it certainly didn’t affect his numbers on handling the economy in any case (so far as I know).
It seems pretty obvious that the low hanging fruit in pulling down Bush’s numbers have already been picked, and that turning even another 5% away from Bush — enough likely to put the election completely out of his grasp — is going to be a major undertaking. On the other hand, it may also be that the final dip in Bush’s numbers is now being prepared, and it may take just one final episode of bad news to turn a substantial number of voters against him.
The Plame affair looks to me like it could be that event. Would it be wrong of me to pray to God that Bush might be so disgraced?
Excellent analysis of the wisdom of surveying RVs v. LVs this far from the election.
You might want to go back and examine Gallup’s surveys of LVs in the 2000 election for a casebook example of the foolishness of polling LVs months before the election.
Back in 2000 Gallup’s surveys of likely voters in September and October had huge swings from Gore to Bush and back to Gore. I believe these swings represented the different interest levels (one of the factors used to identify LVs) of Democrats and Republicans to events in the campaign — and not massive swings of voters from one candidate to the other.
Since the final weeks of the campaign will have a big effect on which likely voters become actual voters, polls of LVs at this point are bound to be less reliable than polls of RVs.
I’m no expert, but only six months ago new Iraq trouble would probably have gotten Bush a 15 point bounce, what with continuous “support the president” and “we must win” from the media. To get only this much (if even this) means that Bush has permanently lost a lot of people.
Thank you. You answered a lot of questions and sustained your robust credibility.