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.
It’s not going to be close, coldeye. It’s going to be Kerry in a big win, and the undervaluing of Dems in the polls will be identified as one of their compelling failures. Their inherent design defect will be another.
Kerry by 4-5 million, and by at least 40 points in the EC.
My worry is that the early voters are (likely to be, and this is just a guess) disproportionally students and the elderly, in which case wouldn’t we expect a bigger Kerry lead?
Ted
Very interesting. My only observation is that there are now more self identifingrepublicans then in the examples cited(especially in the midwest swing states). 9/11 had an impact that will be measured on tuesday.
This will be my final post before the election. Thank you Ruy and Alan and the rest for all the great information and insight into this crazy polling business.
Regarding the Pew poll, in the final analysis, I’m forced by hard reality to become a skeptic of weighting polls by party id (sorry Alan, I know you feel strongly on this one). MysteryPollster has an excellent and convincing refutal of the contention that polls should be weighted by party ID. I urge you all to read it.
However, there are real factors working in Kerry’s favor that aren’t fully reflecting in the polls; party-ID misweighting is simply not one of them (my humble opinion).
So what are the real polling unknowns in these final days?
The first is voter turnout. It would seem to favor the Democrats that turnout is expected to match or exceed 1992 (based on days of trolling the blogs and news cites, I predict it will exceed 1992). (Hence the sudden spike in Republican voter supression tactics in key battleground states – these are very real, very ugly, and very disgusting). The pollsters admit their models can’t effectively factor in the results of heavy turnout.
The second is possible underrepresentation of Kerry supporters in the poll samples and LV models. It’s probably a very small cumulative effect (1-2%) but in an election this close it could have an impact (well, obviously it will have an impact). I hate to be a wet blanket, but I tend to agree with the pros that the “unreachable cell phone” voter is given greatly more significance on this site than he/she deserves, at least for this election. The wingnut blogs entertain a fantasy that there are also millions of invisible Bush voters out there, but there’s really no good evidence to back this up. Invisible voters tend to be minority, young, mobile, phone-screeners, busy, politically unmotivated (in most election cycles), etc. They are probably more Democrat than Republican. Probably.
The last factor that may be skewing the national polls is Red states that are top-heavy with Bush supporters. Bush’s entire campaign has been aimed at energizing his base, which is very energized indeed and it concentrated in the (election 2000) Red states. When Fox stopped oversampling from Red states in their tracking polls, Bush’s support dropped seven points in four days, to +2 Kerry today. Kerry’s support in the battleground states is 2% or more higher than it is nationally.
When these three factors are combined, Kerry has a decent chance of winning the election even when the average of the final polls show Bush ahead by 2 or 3 points, which seems to be how it’s shaping up.
I don’t believe the predictions of a Kerry blowout (or a Bush blowout, either). It’s going to be very, very close, folks.
It’s been great blogging with all of you. I’ll now recede and await the outcome on Wednesday morning. God bless you all and God save the Republic (this coming from an atheist – that’s how nervous I am).
Among thost who have already voted, Pew has Kerry ahead by just 1 pt. But beneath the surface this number looks a lot more encouraging for Kerry. Most of the states that have early polling are red states and a few are battleground states. Assuming Bush is doing well in red states, Kerry must be doing really well in the battleground states.