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.
I am with Grok. For example, Zogby predicted Ryan over Blagojevich in Illinois by a wide margin in 2002.
If Sept. 11 never happened, Bush would probably be winning — we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq
Are you sure about that? Even Paul O’Neil would beg to differ.
It’s All Good. He barely won when no one knew who he was, now they do, and if the silence of my conservative friends means anything, it means they are ashamed.
When the GOP won a small number of seats in 2002 (+5 in the House, +2 in the Senate net gains), they won on the back of GWBush, whose approval ratings were 70 approve/26 disapprove (USA/Gallup). Bush now has an anemic 46 approve/51 disapprove (USA/Gallup)! 42% LV want a generic Democrat for Congress, only 37% LV want a Republican (rasmussenreports) and Democrats have been preferred for a solid month! Bush will not have as much time to focus on boosting his congressional colleagues as he HAD TO in 2002. He has his own record to (try to) defend! Many moderate Republican candidates already will have to distance themselves from Bush because he is so unpopular! Even in a conservative district like KY-6, Republicans face defeat if they run on Bush’s record! Winning a Democratic seat by twelve points in a district that went for Bush 55-42% in the 2000 elections, shows just how vulnerable Republicans are in Congress! (dnc website: democrats.org) Democrats are in good shape to pick up another seat for South Dakota’s Representative in a June 1st election! (dnc website: democrats.org, http://www.hersethforcongress.org) Republicans are clearly vulnerable up and down the ballot! Great turnout in November and abyssmal job approval of Republic policies and GWBush means democrats may just be taking back Congress AND the White House!
Why LV doesn’t track RV: One thing people often get wrong is the fact that the SAME sample of 1,000 voters or so produce both the RV and the LV numbers. The difference is, the LV calculation includes one more “weight” for each response. So if, in the pollster’s mostly subjective opinion, a certain percentage of registered R’s is likely to vote in November, and a certain percentage of men, and of older voters, and you are an older R man, your answers get “counted” more than, say, a young D woman. Problem is, this early in an election cycle, you can’t really rely on whether people SAY they’re going to vote, because who the heck knows? Most people aren’t paying attention yet. So you go with past elections as your model. Which is patently silly, since all elections are different (this one, I’m guessing, particularly so).
Just remember that when a poll produces both LV and RV numbers, all that’s happening is the pollster is subjectively multiplying the Kerry and Bush numbers from the RV poll with some factor he/she’s come up with based on whatever ideosyncratic technique she/he wants. We can do the same thing. I, for one, believe loads of Dems will show up this Fall who didn’t in 2000. So my LV poll will take a decent RV sample, say Gallup’s, and “increase” (via weighting by a factor of 1.1) the Dem sample by 10%. So my LV result, which basically has as much credibility as Gallup’s, will show Kerry with a 3-4 point lead among LV’s.
It’s all a game right now. As Ruy says, stick with the RV’s until, oh, about Labor Day.
The latest gallup poll also shows among that national adults (both registered voters and unregistered adults) Kerry is doing better and/or Bush is doing worse on most dates, granted by small margins. But these findings are repeated themselves and show that registering more voters, especially in swing states and in targeted urban/suburban/ideopolis areas is more likely to aid Kerry rather than Bush. This shows that increased effort into voter registration/mobilization efforts will likely pay large dividends for Democrats in 2004. To any and all encouraged by this prospect, I urge you to volunteer your time and energy (or even just donate) to the voter registration efforts like those by America Coming Together or your local Democratic Party or labor union or church congregation. We need all the help we can get and there is certainly good reason to believe that all this help will pay off up and down the ballot. Wouldn’t it be great to give President Kerry a like-minded Congress as well! Republicans are vulnerable! THis is the year we can take back our country!
While Iraq tragedies are taking away from Kerry being able to keep his face in the main stream press, I keep reading that Bush has taken away the economy and jobs as a campaign issue. Not so, I say. I have been skeptical of the last two months jobs numbers and now realize that I am not alone. John Crudele of the New York Post has an interesting article discussing this today. Too bad the rest of the United States electorate does not read this. If the information in this article were known by the public, coupled with the Bush failures in Iraq, plus the failures of his War on Terrorism, this elction would be (as George Tenet would say) a slam dunk.
So what CAN Kerry do about Iraq? Oh politically its all good, but substantively I’m depressed about it.
Zogby was the only one to accurately predict Gore’s 2000 victory, but he’s missed some biggies, too. He’s the Sammy Sosa of polling–when he hits it, he hits it square, but when he misses it’s brutal.
The information on polls given in above posts for ncpp.org and ayresmchenry.com are not available. There are no such web sites unless the wrong information was given. I tried accessing these sites twice and they do not exist nor is there a link at 2.004k.com.
If John Kerry loses this election I’m moving out of the country. If GWB is reelected after all the crap that’s come out in just the past year, I’ll give up all hope. The crazy thing is that there’s so much controversy about GWB’s administration that something like the leaking of Plume’s identity has taken a total backseat. In any other administration, I think this issue alone would’ve dominated the news cycle for a good long time. Forget about how the administration shifted $700mm to prepare for an invasion of Iraq.
It really is unbelievable how much this administration has TOTALLY SCREWED UP everything they’ve tried to do. But even with all the foul-ups, NOBODY has been fired or even resigned! Apparently accountability is only an issue for anyone who is not involved with the Bushies. I wish someone would replay the testimony of Wolfowitz when he testified that Shinseki’s opinion it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq as “irresponsible and way off base.”
This is kind of off topic, but this is a reeeeally good site:
http://home.comcast.net/~gerrydal/
it’s somebody’s allocation of electoral points, but it’s based on recent polls, etc. i am most interested in how competitive states like Maryland, Arkansas, and Georgia are.
Sept 11’s effect on Bush’s popularity is a little complicated.
If Sept. 11 never happened, Bush would probably be winning — we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, budget wouldn’t be such a mess, and most importantly the economy would be doing quite well.
Sept 11 gave Bush a huge boost and at first he deserved it for leadership against Al Qaeda — but the fact is he completely screwed up the War on Terror and created this fiasco in Iraq. This is becoming apparent to more people every day.
Which, by the way, ought to be the basic line of attack for Democrats — not that Bush is a liar or an evil person, but that he simply has made a mess of everything.
Here’s another poll, released today by Ayres, McHenry & Associates:
http://www.ayresmchenry.com/docs/AMA%20National%20Survey%20Packet.pdf
It has results broken down by Red, Blue and Purple states. Kerry seems to be doing better than Bush in the purple swing states.
( link found at http://2.004k.com/latest/ )
A report on the accuracy of various 2000 election-eve polls is available at:
http://www.ncpp.org/poll_perform.htm
Sept 11 was THE best thing that ever happened to gwb…While im dismiissive of the stories that he knew about it, I honestly dont believe he would take
it back if he could. The tragedy provided him with
political capital he otherwise never would have
The most striking thing about Bush’s poll numbers is the steady, almost linear downtrend ever since he took office. The fact that he was able to squander the huge overnight boost he received on 9/12/01 just shows he is a fundamentallly flawed politician. Where would his support be today if it weren’t for Osama and those 20 terrorists?
Why would his RV go up 6 points, at the exact same time as his LV went down 1 point?
My guess is, there’s a little statistical noise there. Probably, if there had been a bigger sample size, both categories would have been up 2 or 3 points.
I believe that the reason Zogby’s final poll
in 2000 was more accurate than the others was
simply that he kept polling on Monday, the day before
the election, while the others stopped on Sunday.
As you may recall, there was a shift toward Gore at
the end, and the other pollsters missed part of it
because of stopping polling on Sunday.
Does anyone besides me find it utterly appaling that these polls show there is a big segment of the voting public out there that is “for war” when it seems we are WINNING and “against war” when we seem to be LOSING?
In other words, this specimen doesn’t care what the purpose of the war is — just that we win. ” Go ahead and glass some towel heads and I’ll see you at Starbucks.” And I am sure when you ask them they think the war was justified — or not — on “principle.”
I need a drink.
Unlike some people I have no interest in an impeachment. The thugs proved in ’98 that impeachment is just a parlimentary strong-arm tactic. What I want is an electoral count of 538-0 come November.
thanks. zogby seemed like the best bet.
In 2000, almost all polls predicted GWB as the popular vote winner by 2 or 3 points. Zogby called it a dead heat, and also made the right call on every state but one. (Never can remember whether it was OR or NM.)
speaking as a horse-race obsessive: anybody have a recommendation of which poll presents the most accurate information?
I know . . . I know . . . polling is an art not a science. but still, it’d be helpful to have a sense of which poll is the best to watch. and obsess over.
woo hoo!!!!! goodbye george bush!!!!
not the most substantive response, but justified.
anyway, I’d agree w/ zogby that this election is kerry’s to lose.
fingers crossed.