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.
how come a pollster has never called me? i believe that the younger(pro kerry) voter isn`t being counted because of cell phone use, so bush better have a 3-5 point lead on election day or i would expect a kerry surprise.
One big problem pollsters and consultants are having is cell phones. More and more people cannot be contacted by traditional means. This trend is increasing…. How does this affect things?
The formulas for determining LV are probably “proprietary;” like a trade secret, and therefore not for publication. That’s neither unusual nor sinister: a polling org wouldn’t want a rival polling org to use its formulas.
Probably about a month ago, I was looking at the book “Polling Matters” by Gallup’s Frank Newport. I just leafed through the book in a bookstore and did not buy it. My recollection, though, is that he listed what the likely voter screening items were.
A LV question that screed for prior presidential voting history could eliminate 18-22 year olds. A demographic that may not be likely to vote, but certainly vote in numbers high enough to swing elections.
Perhaps more significantly, undecided voters tend to break away from the encumbant. They generally have decided they don’t want to votew for him, but are not yet convinced his opponent is any better.
Walking the line between sitting things out, and voting for the challenger, these voters also might get filtered out by a LV system
Sorry, hit the wrong button.
It occurs to me that the majority of these RVs who aren’t LVs but plan to…V…will be the always-bad-at-voting 18-35 block. Since they trend Democratic, how many points does that translate to? Of course, not everyone who claims such a strong reaction – be it positive or negative – to this administration will, in fact, vote, but turnout will increase, and I believe there are few people who will disagree.
So the question becomes several-fold: How much will turnout increase? Where, specifically, will it increase (or, how effective are ACT and MoveOn’s GOTV efforts)? And what kind of margin will that increase mean for (presumably) the Democrats?
I’m curious to know what other people think. Let me know via email or via http://www.politicsnation.com.
-Reid
You make several really great points. The question is, in this election which is so polarized already, on which many more people plan to vote than normal, how are the polling companies and institutions factoring in those who fall in the RV column but not the LV column?
It occurs to me that
Where do they get their pool of people to poll ?
What is the possibility of having a ‘tainted’ pool of respondents (where the pool doesnt have proper minority representation or maybe tends to favor the more affluent, or the south or whatnot) ?
I’ve always wondered, because I usually note, but I have never been polled (although I have taken many surveys for product / market research type stuff)
I know Zogby lets you sign up to be polled (but I think thats only for their interactive polls or something) but isnt there something wrong with asking to be polled ??
It would seem that if their turnout prediciton of 55% is wrong , and the turnout is higher like 57-58% as others are predicting (though 55% is higher than the last election) than that would mean that their LV numbers should be closer to their RV numbers.
That could be better for us, but we would really have to know what and in what order the screens are and how the numbers were assigned in order to really know if it was our voters or their voters who are higher up in their screen.
Thanks for the analysis. Here in Iowa, the Democratic Party is pushing hard to get supporters to vote by absentee. People don’t need to know the address of the polling place if they are mailing in the ballot. Also, in my precinct the polling place has moved since 2000. A bunch of hard-core Democrats have asked me where we will be voting this year. Gallup would code these people as non-LVs, but they will certainly turn out in force. As the election approaches they will figure out where they need to go.
Interesting stuff. I could see how, if I’d been polled, Gallup might reject me as a “likely voter,” although I’ve voted in every primary and general election since I’ve been eligible. I had no idea, for example, where my local polling place was until I got my registration card in the mail yesterday, since I just moved a few months ago. My wife isn’t even registered at our new address yet, so she’s even less “likely” than I am, even though there’s no chance on earth that she won’t vote.
“LV data is useless.”
I’m not sure that was the conclusion. It seems to me, once everyone is paying attention it is useful to see which voters are motivated (and can find their neighborhood polling place)
> I might have to read this a couple of times
> to soak up the implications
I can sum it up for you:
LV data is useless.
I’m curious if you could explain why you don’t think the RVs suffer the same late tune-in bias? I understand your explanation that LVs early on are questionable, but what makes RVs any better?
And what of states like mine ( WI ) where you can register to vote at the polling place on election day?
Seems to me that Democratic turnout might be a bit higher this year than in prior years. I’m sure Gallup etc. are aware of this; the question is whether they are taking it into account, and to what extent.
Fingers are crossed that we will all be surprised (including the pollsters) when record Dem turnout shows polls to be pretty inaccurate this year.
like giving up the secret KFC formula.
Thank you so much. I might have to read this a couple of times to soak up the implications but I appreciate your effort (particularly your acknowlegement that this is _your_ take on the accuracy of the process.
At what point do personally begin to focus on the LV numbers? We are still lagging in those and I’d still like to hang my hopes on the RV polls.
I assume there have been studies that track the accuracy of LV models. Could you refer us to some you think are helpful. I understand it must be incredibly complex to judge whether it’s the poll taken six months before the election that was inaccurate or if it was the intervening events.