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.
randy—I was not joking, but I could certainly be insufficiently informed. It’s hard for me to believe with the almost inconceivable amount of media resources being devoted to polling in this election (this site routinely tracks about a dozen separate national polls), that both campaigns are not happy to receive, use and rely at least in part on the results. Of course I assume campaigns do some of their own polling, but is it really as extensive as the Zogby network, and this NYT/CBS effort? If the campaigns themselves run even more elaborate, sophisticated polling operations, how exactly did the Glorious Leader get caught with his pants down at the close of the 2000 election, apparently thinking he had a substantial lead? I’d love to hear more about the campaigns own polling efforts (are they as extensive as the one at issue here?) and certainly defer to those with information on the subject. (I do try to be a member of the reality based community!)
“Would the Republicans get this data absent all of these fabulous polls?”
You’re joking, right? You think the campaigns rely on the NY Times for their polling data? Both campaigns are spending huge sums of money to conduct their own polling.
Polls polls polls….. In 2000 they all had Bu$h up by 5 or more at the end and he LOST! This time around he’s only winning on a few like Gallup which is joke anymore. What’s more important is the state by state and right now Fla. and Ohio are a tossup with 1 poll saying Bu$h and another Kerry . In the end I’ll put my $$ on Kerry winning 1 of those 2 and with that the Presidency.
So I agree that this doesn’t look good for the incumbent. But here’s what I don’t understand: We’re hoping that Independents break for the challenger, and it looks like they will, by and large. How much can we expect them to when Kerry leads among them only by seven points? And can we expect them to break for us substantially when the internals show the favorable/unfavorable opinions of JFK are essentially equal (38-37, according to the PDF file linked in the post)? And if so many people have an unfavorable opinion or are undecided about JFK (59%), do we have to change campaign strategy toot suite?
Decal, I could not agree with you more. While I wouldn’t necessarily want to see Kerry ease up on Bush completely in the next couple of weeks, I do think that a well-timed, positive, uplifting message delivered at the tail end of the campaign could provide that final impetus to push the undecided voters our way.
From what I’ve read about the mindset of the undecideds, it’s clear that they are fed up with both candidates. They hate the way the country is headed, they know Bush is a disaster, but they desperately need something positive to latch onto to convince themselves that a Kerry presidency won’t just be “more of the same.” If Kerry can provide even a tiny little glimmer of hope in the face of all this negativity, he can seal the deal.
All of this data on the views of independents is heartening. Unfortunately, the Bush team now has possession of this valuable information and will work night and day to tailor its spin to alter these views. They have plenty of money and time to do this. Would the Republicans get this data absent all of these fabulous polls?
It really infuriates me to watch CNN keep broadcasting what a big lead Bush has in the latest Gallup poll throughout the day.
wow. thanks ruy!
consider this post linked.
I’d feel much better if it was an even or slightly GOP weighted because then Bush would be even MORE trouble, but hey, turnout people!
According to several papers in all the battleground states but Florida, Dems are winning the battle of registering voters.
If this data is reliable, then is it possible Kerry is pursuing the wrong strategy these last 2 weeks? If the independents have already decided against re-electing Bush, then Kerry no longer needs to convince them Bush is a failure. Kerry just needs to get them to get out and vote. Kerry’s been raising the spectre of a draft and Bush’s plans to privatize Social Security, and not talking so much about his own plans for the future (at least that’s what we see on the news). We know the GOP wants to suppress turnout and I believe it’s generally thought a negative campaign tends to suppress overall turnout though it can help motivate the base. Should Kerry be “going positive” instead in these last days of the campaign?
Ruy:
I’m a faithful reader of your blog, find your arguments pretty persuasive and am not mathmatically illiterate. So here’s what puzzles me: you review the internals of these polls and things look TERRIBLE for Bush (which makes me glad; he deserves it). But then the horse race numbers are pretty much a dead heat. How can that be? I can think of a bunch of reasons, but none that seems paticularly powerful. I’m sure there’s an answer, I just don’t get it. Can you write a quick comment clueing me in?
Thanks.
Great news indeed from this poll. But what IS up with the Washington Post tracking poll? Their LV numbers were tracking higher than their RVs for a few days, so I figured it was just a split between those. RVs were 48-47 Bush for a few days after 48-47 Kerry for a couple of days before that, so no big swing there, or much difference from several other polls out there. But, today, suddenly it’s 50-45 Bush among RVs. Huh?
I don’t mean to be gloomy, but it’s just weird. But man, if the internals on this CBS/NYT poll are even close to being on the mark, Bush is toast. DR is indisputably accurate on that point.