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.
to whoever played devils advocate on NJ,
This is the Bush feint into blue territory. Remember the California feint in 2000? That’s what these stories are.
As for McGreevy, he’s such a local politician that not even any New Jersyites link him with the national party. I mean he was just an obscure state legislator before 2001. Besides which, governors can;t really do much for their national party. Republican gov. Ernie Fletcher is very unpopular in KY, but Bush will still win there. Ditto on NJ.
I agree that this is all going to come down to turnout. I have another question, though.
Again this morning, Zogby shows Bush ahead 48/44. The explanation is that more Republicans are voting for Bush than Dems are voting Kerry (by a pretty large margin, I think; 14% of Dems are polling for Bush, 5% Repubs for Kerry). I’m just finding this sort of odd, and wonder if you have any idea of what gives with this.
Addy
Mark –
I have the same take on all this as you do.
I just read the Big FIVE-OH a few days ago, about the maximum for the incumbent between the last poll and the election day numbers, and I think it is completely valid that that last poll % is his election day %, too.
I have been saying for several weeks (months, really) that if Bush is not leading by MORE than five in a state he is toast. My reason has to do with the massive turnout that is coming – and will blow the pollsters out of the water. The 200 election was boring, boring, boring, and the turnout of 50.8% reflects that. I can’t see the turnout being less that 56% (I am expecting 60%), and I also cannot see how Bush can get more than a 20% share of the increase in vote totals. I have so far only heard of a 1 million increase in GOP voters.
Anybody else that has better figures on that?
SO many people stayed home in 2000 because they were bored or because they bought into the Rove lie that Bush was the same as Gore anyway, so what difference does it make?
The rest of the increase will go to Kerry, who did not bore us – even though the press seems to think he does. Hatred for Bush is rampant, and I don’t think the media and pollsters have a clue.
Mark,
Just to play devil’s advocate — someone I know suggested that NJ might be a lot tighter than expected this year due to a backlash against the Dems from the McGreevey scandal.
According to these two news stories just out, Kerry appears to be surging in Florida. After several weeks of being behind by 3-5 points, two polls out Friday show he is tied in one and 4 points AHEAD in the other. Here are the links:
http://www.bocaratonnews.com/index.php?src=news&category=Local%20News&prid=9844
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36823-2004Oct15.html
Difference of 4 with MOE +/-3? I don’t think you
really needed to actually explain the difference, did
you?
Although I tend to buy your argument about weighting
by party, I don’t see how you can just reweight the
way you do in all your posts here. If party ID is correlated
with other demographic categories, then won’t
merely reweighting make the other demographics wrong,
given that the samples have *already* been reweighted
to fix those demographics?
For example, if men are more likely to be GOP, then
reweighting a survey with too many GOP would also
make the survey too female. That doesn’t seem like
an improvement to me. Obviously, including
party ID as part of the reweighting matrix (where the
relationship between party ID and age/sex/income
is taken into account) is reasonable, but that’s not
what you’ve done here (unless you have all this
data, which I didn’t think was so easily obtainable).
i agree about not being concerned about tracking poll changes. although i think of zogby as being one of the best pollsters, i don’t think things change that fast unless something big happens. just a few days ago kerry was up by 3 or 4 in zogby’s poll.
Based on what I’ve seen in all the polling thus far, I believe we are looking at an electoral landslide for Kerry on Nov. 2.
First of all, incumbents do not win re-election with approval ratings in the 40s, with 56% of voters consistently saying the country is on the “wrong track” and when they are presiding over a wobbly, if not failing, domestic and foreign policy (see Jimmy Carter).
Second, numerous pollsters including Ruy have said that within the last 3 weeks of a campaign, the only number that counts is not the spread but the INCUMBENT’s percentage. In all of the polls taken over the last week, Bush is at between 44% and 48%, meaning that is almost certain to be the MAXIMUM he will get of the popular vote. Not a good sign for the president.
Third, and perhaps most important, I am convinced that Democrats and Kerry voters are being DRAMATICALLY undersampled in every one of these polls. The most clear evidence of this are the state polls in New Jersey that show Bush within 5 points or less. Now, Gore won New Jersey by 15 POINTS in 2000, and there are actually more registered Dems there now. And nothing in the dynamic of New Jersey has changed to explain a 10-point swing from 2000 (I don’t buy the ‘terrorism has touched them’ argument because that is not showing up in the NYC polls). The only plausible explanation is that a substantial number of Democrats and Kerry voters are not being reached by the pollsters in New Jersey — and that trend obviously would hold true in every other state. Therefore I would wager that any state in which Bush is not at least 5 points ahead on Election Day he will lose.
Anyone have any thoughts on these observations?
I’ve long thought that the Dems had benefitted from not having a someone run on their fringe, unlike Republicans, who have been losing votes to the Libertarians and other right-wing fringe parties for years. The Dems will just have to get used to dealing with a crankish fringe siphoning off the occasional percentage point on their left.
At this point, anybody who is actually going to cast a vote for Nader is someone who, absent Nader, probably wouldn’t vote for Kerry anyway – they’d vote for some other third party (what’s Peace & Freedom doing this year?), write in “Donald Duck”, or just not vote at all (and sneer about how “all those parties are owned by the same corporate fascists, maaaaan.”) Those votes aren’t really “lost” to the Democrats. The Dems should just plow forward and concentrate on registering and getting the votes of people in critical battleground areas.
That doesn’t mean the Dems should make it easy for Nader – they should work to stymie his candidacy at every level, if only to hone their election law skills. Hell, they could try a bit of old Clinton-style triangulation and run against Nader and his crazier ideas, to burnish their moderate appeal.
This issue is up my alley, because I am a progressive and not a DLC Democrat at all. Many people I know supported Nader in 2000 — but somehow managed in NY to support Hillary against Lazio. (Kind of odd to be FOR a Clinton Democrat in NY against an honorable Republican, but not nationally against a self-evident turkey. I supported both Democrats, because, when the chips are down, the national Republican Party has NOTHING to offer positively either in Congress or the White House, while the Democrats are at least the lesser of two evils — on many issues no different but other significantly so.)
On Nader — He’s polling around 1%, and Andrew Kohut says his numbers are going down and down steadily. In swing states it should even be lower. But in one region — the upper midwest (Iowa, Minn, and Wisc) he appears to have a substantial base, more likely to tip a state there all other things being equal than anywhere else. A concerted effort by the Michael Moore progressives for Kerry in that region, figuring out where the pockets of Nader voters are and with 527’s buying up media time in those less than superpricey markets with progressive voices like Chomsky should be able to make a real dent right in that area. A strategic approach to the problem would be helpful.
Nader’s alliance with sleazy corporate Republicans in the election (openly) should be flaunted in front of these voters, then have trusted progressives who support Kerry make the case for Kerry Edwards to the Left RATHER THAN wasting the time and concern of the candidates themselves.
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For some voters, really getting down to brass tacks about unemployment and the strategic deficit as a lever against future Social Security, as well as the draft should win over both mainstream AND progressive voters. These are areas that gain broader support in BOTH directions at the mass level rather than sacrificing the swing voters to win progressives.
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I’m much more concerned about the fallout from the ‘nuisance’ article — which is what it was. I even read a poster at this site whose views I highly respect praising the picture of Kerry in the article.
Its distortions were crafted to be subtle, but they were distortions and not merely differences of interpretation. And they were systematic and deliberate, which is probably why Kerry was (by the reporter’s own account) so suspicious of him. He was clearly fishing for materiel to use against Kerry and has done the job. Kerry MUST respond more effectively, both to the distorted article and then the second layer of distortion from the Dick Morrises of the world.
It is a case of highbrow demagogy — more dangerous as you can’t always recognize it, but having spent 15 years of my life in and around Harvard and Berkeley (degrees from each) I do know how to smell it a mile off. Slicker than the SwiftBoat smear but no less slimy.
If Nader gets 1-2% of the vote, how many of those people would vote for Kerry even if Nader didn’t exist? If Nader voters are otherwise non-voters (or Socialist Worker Party voters), it doesn’t matter.
Frankly, I’m not worried about the Zogby numbers. There’s no reason why Bush’s numbers ought to have gone up, plus he’s still under 50%. If he can’t break 50 in at least a few polls, he’s in trouble, since late deciders always go for the challenging party.
As for Nader, I can’t see him getting much more than 1.5%, maybe not even that much. He was polling 4% in 2000 and only got 2.7%, and it’s reasonable to expect that some of his supporters will defect when they see that there’s a real possibility of Bush remaining president. Almost half of Nader’s 2000 supporters defected at the last minute, so why not again?
What do you think the odds are that those polled purposefully lie about what their party preference is? If it is known ahead of time that the pollster weights the survey based on party preference, I can tip the survey in favor of Bush if I state that I am a Democrat but am voting for Bush. The converse is also true. Is there any scuttlebutt out there that operatives are encouraging their followers to misstate their party affiliation when polled?
Okay, I did freak out at Zogby today, but I’m chilled now…