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 cannot find Ray’s past article(s) regarding LVs and RVs. Can someone help me?
Abramowitz should have his own blog or at least contribute regularly to Rising Donkey.
Great stuff.
Two new polls are out. Fox shows Bush up 47-43% in the thre way, with Kerry ahead in the battlegrounds, 46-44. Bush carries 94% of Republicans, Kerry 80% of Democrats. Kerry has a nonsignificant lead of 42-40 among independents. They report a “marginal” bounce for Bush, but an essential tie in the race, leading in with a 47-45% Bush lead in a two-way race. They use likely voters and don’t report registered voters.
In the CBS poll, Bush is given a 4 point bounce, with a 49-42 lead among registered voters. Bush gets 91% of Republicans, Kerry 81% of Democrats, and Bush has a lead of 48-39% among independents. Given the sample size of the subgroup, I don’t know if that lead among independents is statistically significant. The sample included 1058, 909 of them registered voters. 368 were Republicans, 336 Democrats, so they seem to have had a bias to finding Republicans. They weighted to have 340 Republicans and 354 Democrats.
Ruy will have a lot more interesting of a take on this. I’m amused that the Fox report has been one of the more negative ones. It’s not clear to me what else is up.
Clearly those 11% Bush lead reports were silly and mistaken, as has been argued long and hard. The Fox 4% among likely voters I find modestly encouraging, particularly given the battleground info. The CBS 7% among registered voters was a bit depressing as it stands in such contrast to the Gallup 1% among registered.
I’d seen a report from talkingpointsmemo that both parties reported about a 4% Bush lead. That seems a reasonable interpretation of the varied data to me, but what do I know?
Gallup didn’t seem to mention another Apple-Orange distinction between this poll and all prior ones. The recent poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of one candidate’s convention. This probably does more to invalidate the comparison than the RV-LV disparity.
I dunno, Ruy. Another way to look at the gap between RV’s and LV’s in Gallup’s sample is to examine closely those voters who they predict won’t vote, but are registered. In a presidential year, we’re only talking about 14-15% of registered voters who don’t show up. (It may be lower this year, but clearly Gallup is going by past performance.) If those voters, by virtue of not showing up, produce a 3 point swing in Bush’s favor, then a little math shows that they must favor Kerry by about 60-40. Thinking for a minute about who these people are — likely low income, poorly educated, heavily minority — I don’t think this is surprising or wrong at all. If Gallup’s sample had more R’s than D’s and this is still the result, I think we’re looking pretty good. Because, in fact, I expect the registered non-voter pool this year to be closer to 10%, AND I expect (as always) more D’s than R’s to show up.
Their LV screen is (as they themselves admit) just an educated guess that amounts to mathematical masturbation. It’s meaningless, as your peerless posts frequently remind us.
(And BTW, before anyone takes me on with numbers: I know the turnout rate is only 55%, but that’s 55% of all OVER-18 ADULTS, including non-registered people and non-citizens. The turnout rate of registered voters is around 85%. A lot of people misunderstand that.)
People are always interested in dirt.
These talking heads don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
If you can’t say something nice about someone, let’s hear it. That’s the reality.
This week, the story is Bush has skeletons in his closet, looky what we found here!
Meanwhile, back at the campaign: WRONG for AMERICA.
All I can say to fellow Democrats is VOTE!
won’t help BUSH
Vanya T,
You are correct. It’s 50-46 Kerry.
As you state, probably Bush’s high water mark.
This won’t help:
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“These documents represent strong evidence that Lieutenant Bush didn’t perform after April 1972, regardless of whether he received a paycheck,” said retired Brig. Gen. David L. McGinnis, who was a top aide to the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.
Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now a national security specialist at a liberal think tank, said after reviewing the CBS documents that if Killian and Lt. Col. William D. Harris Jr. had written a truthful evaluation report on Bush, “he would have been called to involuntary active duty.”
Added Korb: “For the commanding officer to suggest that his (Bush’s) evaluation be sugar-coated is a clear indication of the political influence Bush had. Korb said the alleged suggestion by Staudt was also a “violation of military ethics.”
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Well, looking at demographics, 35% of the population identifies as Republicans, 38-39% as Democrats, with the balance showing another (or no) affiliation.
Currently the unaffiliated voters are breaking 49%-46% for Senator Kerry.
Applying the math here:
Amongst the 35% who are Republicans, 90% support Mr. Bush, 7% support Sen. Kerry. Translating back to percentages: Bush 31.5%, Kerry 2.45%.
Amongst the 38% (using the low end of the range here) who are Democrats, the same is true. Those figures translate to 2.66% for Mr. Bush, 34.2% for Sen. Kerry.
The remaining 27% split 46% for Mr. Bush, 49% for Sen. Kerry- or 12.42% for Bush, 13.23% for Kerry.
Adding these up, we have Bush at 46.33% to 49.88% for Kerry, with the balance of 3.79 undecided.
So- the margin in the race (using web-available demographics, and the Gallup polling numbers) looks like it favours Sen. Kerry by about 3.5%. This means absolutely nothing on an electoral college basis, of course, but the numbers amongst voters who aren’t either Democratic or Republican core presently tilt somewhat against the incumbent- and conventional wisdom shows that undecideds tend to break against a sitting president anyway.
This should be the Bush high-water mark, barring an October Surprise- without something drastic, it’s hard to picture Bush’s numbers rising significantly, especially with the mounting Iraq death toll, no significant developments in the pursuit of al Qaeda, and a still-sluggish economy and job market.
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I want to plant a seed here. Monday a new issue emerges. Monday, the assault weapon ban enacted 10 years ago will expire, thanks to the Republican controlled Congress.
Lead sentence from the NYT:
“Despite widespread popular support, the federal law banning the sale of 19 kinds of semiautomatic assault weapons is almost certain to expire on Monday, the result of intense lobbying by the National Rifle Association and the complicated election-year politics of Washington.”
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Discussion points for this issue:
*Mothers, fathers, is this what you want?
*Does this does make you safer?
*Columbine
*Bowling for Columbine
*John Muhammed sniper
*Stories about purchases on local TV
*We respect the 2nd Amendment, but we don’t need Sadr-like militias here
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Every eledtion is about getting our voters identified, motivated, registered, and to the polls.
This time we have numbers in our favor across the board. We are registering in record numbers, we are motivated, and we are going to vote in records numbers Nov. 2nd.
I agree, though, turnout is the nuts of every election.
This election is all about turnout.
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These two comments bear repeating from the original topic:
“The smallest gap was in 1992 (1 point), the election with the highest overall turnout. Assuming that 2004 will be another relatively high turnout election, we should probably expect a relatively small turnout gap, similar to 1992.”
“If you apply Gallup’s trial heat results among Democrats, independents, and Republicans to the VNS 2000 electorate, Kerry comes out with with a four point lead: 50.3 percent to Bush’s 46.4 percent.”
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Gallup has missed the last four presidential elections by 3-4 million per election, on average, never getting closer than 2 million.
They aren’t paid because they’re right, because they aren’t. They’re hired because they have a NAME with a rep that has long since passed justification.
Gallup hasn’t been close to right since 1984.
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Nate,
I don’t think you’re misunderstanding anything. The TV media just passes these poll results along with no underlying analysis of the fundamentals behind them. It’s all surface news and headlines. Reading this and several other websites regarding polls/politics is a literal godsend in terms of actually learning what’s behind the numbers.
By the way, kudos to Jeff for pointing out the same issue at 4:54 this afternoon (in the previous item) and for publishing the same restated poll numbers as Professor Abramowitz. Something certainly does seem a bit off in these polls with the population that is being sampled and with the likely voter screens.
BTW, some of the shills in the corporate media are doing it again in terms of the Bush AWOL scandal. Mathews tonight was basically shrugging his shoulders and asking what the big deal was about Bush’s service. What’s the point: “One guy went, one guy didn’t.”
Perhaps the point is the lying and deceiving by Bush and his minions about whether he fulfilled his actual service 30 years ago. (The document written “for the record” at the time, 1973, by Bush’s immediate supervisor is pretty damning.) Perhaps the point is that the little episode about how strings were pulled for Bush to get him into the TANG and how he avoided accountability for his absences are metaphors for all that’s wrong with this administration, its policies, its coziness with the rich and powerful in this country.
For somebody who crowed about the power of the second half of the F-911 movie in terms of how the working and lower classes are fighting this war in Iraq, Mathews can be pretty dense at times.
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Ruy, the analyses you and the good professor have done are absolutely essential to our side.
1. It sets the record straight.
2. It reassures the troops and arms them.
3. It impacts the dialogue and momentum.
When I hear the question “why are they doing this?” I am reminded of something an old lawyer screamed at me when I was a baby lawyer. I had some case I’d found and was convinced I knew why the judge had ruled against us.
He stopped me in mid-sentence.
“The reason he ruled against us isn’t in any law book. He ruled against us because he wanted the other side to win.”
Wow. There went my Judd for the Defense, Owen Marshall, Perry Mason cherry.
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Let’s assume that Gallup has kept the same methodology over the past few months (namely, 89% of Bush supporters and 79% of Kerry supporters will actually vote, and that the sample of voters is weighted more towards Republicans than the VNS 2000 electorate.
How does it change the results of the previous polls? E.g., does Kerry get a bounce after the Dem. convention? etc.
If I had the numbers handy, I’d do the arithmetic, but….
Question.
In the Democratic primaries, it was pounded into our heads that Dean was absolutely ahead of Kerry. By margins of over 10% in most polls. Then Kerry wins the first primary by a landslide.
Does the wrong polling analysis that happened during the Democratic primaries apply here in this election?
This post seems to help understand how a 7 point lead with skewed voter affiliation will become a four point victory on election day for Kerry.
PS: I know it ain’t over and there is a long way to go and anything can happen etc. etc. etc.
My question to Ruy Teixeira (and other knowledgable readers) is why it would be that Gallup would adopt a methodology which would be biased towards the Republicans?
Is is simply a mistake? Is there some alterior motive?
My impression until now had been that the professional pollsters were exactly that –professional– but that the press often is not so professional/critical in how they report the results of polls. Now I am beginning to wonder. Or am I simply misunderstanding the significance of Prof. Abramowitz’s comments?
The pollsters themselves say Bush is up 3 or 4 points.
That’s a lot better than double digits, but it’s still 3 or 4 points.