Kerry leads Michigan LV’s by 4% in FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (Sept. 21-22)
Kerry lags by 2% Nevada RV’s in CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll (Sept. 18-21)
Bush leads by 3% Ohio LV’s in FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (Sept. 21-22)
Kerry up 5% among Pennsylvania LV’s in FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (Sept. 21-22)
Bush ahead by 10% West Virginia RV’s in CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll (Sept. 17-20)
Bush up by 6% among Wisconsin RV’s in ABC News Poll (Sept. 16-19)
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.
The interesting thing about the ABC News poll is that it shows union household figures for Bush and Kerry, and something else I’ve not seen before: “Contact by the campaign” numbers.
The ABC News poll discusses the degree of partisanship in Wisconsin itself, as opposed to general arguments based on the 39D-35R numbers usually discussed on this site. The ABC News memo (see the section titled “Party” on p. 6) discusses how partisanship on election day has varied widely in Wisconsin — from +6 for Dems in 2000 to only +1 for Dems in 1996. Average it out (I wish ABC News had provided partisan numbers for 1992 and 1988 also, but oh well…) and that’s only +3.5% for the Dems.
Not much of a cushion. Look at the numbers: It makes Bush’s lead in the highly Republican Milwaukee suburbs +25, and Bush’s lead in the Northeast (Green Bay) +22. It’s heartening to see Kerry polling extremely strongy in the Southwest (Racine over to Walworth county). But it’s shocking to see Kerry polling LOWER in Milwaukee proper than Kerry is polling in the Southwest.
The ABC News poll says Kerry is up four points over Bush among union households. I’m hearing numbers that say that in south and west Milwaukee, as much as a quarter of all union households remain “undecided.” In some heavily union precincts, as many as 30%-35% of union households remained “undecided”! In an election with a virulently anti-union president (as Bush is), it is astonishing that union households would be anywhere this ambivalent about John Kerry as an alternative to George W. Bush.
Worse: Union turnout for Al Gore in 2000 proved decisive in pushing Wisconsin into the Democratic category. The ABC News poll points out that Gore won union voters by 16 points. John Kerry’s numbers are nowhere near that.
What makes me worried about Kerry’s campaign in Wisconsin is the following: “Registered voters are six points more apt to have been contacted by his campaign than by John Kerry’s, 25 to 19 percent. And six in 10 of those reached by Bush’s campaign support him, while Kerry’s supported by fewer than half of the Wisconsin voters his campaign has personally contacted.”
I don’t know what “personally contacted” means. Telephone? Face-to-face? In on Labor Day, many voters were saying that they had already burned out on telephone contacts, and had received almost no face-to-face contact (canvassing). Indeed, only progressive groups (League of Conservation votes, unions, etc.) had done face-to-face canvassing.
In one way, this result can be taken to mean that the Bush campaign is contacting random votes and finding massive support for Bush, while the Kerry campaign does the same and finds little support.
But, another interpretation could be that the Bush campaign is contacting its base. Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign is contacting its base but also attacking the Bush people. We’re given no analysis of whether the Kerry contacts are changing minds.
But the idea that the Bush campaign is more active in Wisconsin than Kerry’s makes me very nervous. (Will the Dems blame former Kerry campaign co-chair Matt Flynn for abandoning the Kerry ship for a Quixotic run at Congress, if Kerry loses?)
Smooth Jazz-
You do not give the source for that long article you posted. I gather it’s from someone on the right given (a) pointing out Democratic-related firms, but not Republican-related firms; and (b) various snarky comments about Democrats.
Makes me wonder about the validity of the analysis overall.
I will note one thing that stood out to me. There’s a 15% response rate for the NBC survey. I’d guess that’s fairly typical. If so, it really makes me wonder about these surveys. Some of the 85% non-response is doubtless because of random numbers that are not in fact residences. But with such a high non-response rate, small variations in people choosing not to respond would seem able to produce large variations in poll results.
I read some negative comment on RDD in an academic piece sometime in the last week or two, which also makes me wonder whether that is, in fact, a sufficient methodology for getting a random sample. It’s 9 pm here on a Friday night, so I don’t think I’m going to go searching right now. Perhaps over the weekend.
And who’s cherry-picking? I’d note that I used all the polls I could find about Wisconsin. It’s the sort of argumentation that you engage in that continually reminds me why I can’t vote Republican. And I came pretty close in ’00, when I thought about going for McCain, till Bush decided to trash him.
Loooking over the post above from Smooth Jazz:
Interesting that so many polls conducted with such similar methodologies should be coming up with such wildy different results. Although, I do note that a lot of the apparent discrepencies between polls that we have seen lately tend to be more in the “LV” subsamples than the unadulterated RV segments and the article really doesn’t get into LV screens to any meaningful extent.
So I would say this article tends to back up Mr. Tiexera’s assertion that we should give more credence to the RV data wherever available and poke the LV data with a long stick before going anywhere near it.
ABC and Gallup put Bush ahead in Wisconsin and West Virginia? That means it’s a dead heat.
Part of the problem in Wisconsin results from the poor governance by Democrats as Mayor of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County Executive, alienating goo-goos and giving suburban Republicans stories to frighten their children. We’re not seeing the movement toward Democrats in the Milwaukee suburbs that shows up very clearly in the Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City suburbs over the past 8 years.
I’ve lived in Madison for 27 years, and I would not be surprised to see Bush win here if the national election is very close. But if Kerry winds up winning nationally by 3 or 4 points, Wisconsin will very likely remain Democratic.
The last 2 times Zogby polled Wisconsin (Sep 17th and Sep 20th), they found Kerry ahead by 2.
Well Rick, if you assume that Gallup and ABC oversample Republicans in their state polls (as they did in their national polls) then these Bush leads are probably not as large as they seem, or even extant at all.
Penn and Wisconsin are two battleground states with among the worst-maintained lists of registered voters, with many erroneously purged, according to a recent study by Scripps Howard News Service.
Some other items pulled as well from Joshua Kurlantzick’s eye-popping piece, “2000, The Sequel”, in the current (Oct) issue of The American Prospect, on how the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress in 2002, may make things even worse than 2000:
(Link is: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8544)
*Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) introduced an amendment to HAVA in May ’03 that would require touchscreen machines to have a paper record. Bob Ney, Chair of the House Administration Committee, has not allowed Holt’s legislation out of committee. House and Senate Republicans have offered similar “smokescreen” legislation–that would take effect by the 2006 election.
*There has been major WH footdragging on getting up and running the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), authorized under HAVA to disburse money to states to upgrade voting systems, issue guidelines, and hold hearings to help make voting as fair as possible. EAC was supposed to be set up within 120 days of HAVA’s passage but did not even have office space until April of this year. Congress gave the EAC $2 million out of a proposed $10 million budget for ’04 and Bush asked for less than half of the $1 billion proposed in HAVA for overall election-reform efforts.
*Under HAVA all first-time voters have to have valid ID. NY PIRG says it is illegal for local election boards to tell poll workers not to accept a student ID as proof. U Wisc and Penn State Students for Kerry, do you copy? One study showed that in NY election officials in only 18 of 45 counties even understood voter-ID requirements.
*Some states simply do not count “provisional ballots”, intended to give those wrongly denied the opportunity to cast a vote on Election Day via the usual process the chance to have their votes tallied if their wrongful exclusion is established. HAVA offers no national guidelines for counting these provisional votes. This raises just a few questions for state and local election officials and newspaper editorial boards, among others.
*After 2000, Jeb Bush rejected the recommendation of a bipartisan task force that he make state and county election supervisors nonpartisan. Shortly afterward, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature made all top election officials appointees of the governor.
I have not seen these specific items, several strongly suggesting the GOP does not want the sorts of problems that turned up in 2000 and since to be fixed, reported by any of the media bigfoots. Another shocker.
A bit OT, but I thought I’d post a version of a comment I made on the Mystery Pollster site, regarding his argument that Party ID was quite unstable, and therefore should not be used as a weighting factor. In fact, as I point out, the results he quotes from studies deal ONLY with increases in the number of INDEPENDENTS:
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One significant weakness in your [i.e., the Mystery Pollster’s] logic, as you present it, is that you don’t get at the nerve of Ruy’s argument, which assumes that the DIFFERENCE between party identification for Republicans and that for Democrats has been stable.
The particular research you’ve quoted demonstrates something VERY different, namely that the number of INDEPENDENTS has varied a great deal. This is completely consistent with the idea that the difference between Republican PID and Democratic PID are stable. And, indeed, it stands to reason that a convention might polarize independents, drive them equally in both directions into the hands of the ideologically nearest party.
Indeed, one of the very studies you quote says that the largest amount of variation in Party ID comes from movement in and out of independence. It seems very plausible to believe that politically potent events or circumstances might in general simply polarize independents, leaving the difference essentially intact.
If you have any evidence that the DIFFERENCE between Rep and Dem Party ID varies as wildly as we’ve seen across these polls, that would be very good.
Otherwise, you’ve proved exactly zero.
Another note on Wisconsin. In the ABC poll, the breakdown was 35% R, 29% D, 36% I/Other. In the Moore (GOP) poll, it was 39% R, 39% D, 22% I/Other. In 2000 it was 32% R, 37% D, 31% I/Other.
So…it’s back to that issue we keep debating. Has there really been a sizeable shift to the Republicans in registration, or is something else going on. I lean toward the latter, but I don’t think we’ll know till election day.
Rick-
I don’t know what to make of Wisconsin. As with national polls, I’d point out variability. As best I can tell, there are 10 polls of Wisconsin released 9/12 or later:
ABC, Bush +6
Moore (GOP), Bush +3
Badger, Bush +14
TNS, Bush +10
Zogby, Kerry +2
Mason-Dixon, Bush +2
ARG, tied
Strategic vision (GOP), Bush +6
Gallup, Bush +8
Rasmussen, Bush +2
The median for those is Bush up by 4.5%. That’s probably not a terribly bad guess. That’s quite a recoverable lead, and then there’s turnout.
Just keep saying the mantra…it’s a close race. Let’s work hard to get Kerry the victory. And say it if the polls show us ahead, tied, or behind.
What do we make of Wisconsin? This looks like a point of concern.