The latest Democracy Corps survey, conducted Oct 23-25 Shows John Kerry leading George Bush 49-47 in their national sample and 52-45 in the battleground states. The poll also found that Kerry is ahead by 22 pts among new voters and includes substantial additional information on the latest trends among population subgroups and target voters.
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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.
Mady-
Yesterday afternoon, I looked at all polls with post dates of October at race2004.net. I excluded those with either a GOP or Dem designation. I used 3 way data, if available, when Nader was on the ballot, 2 way data, if available, when Nader was not on the ballot. If a given organization did more than one poll, I used the most recent.
Of the 11 polls in Florida, 4 had Kerry in the lead, 4 Bush, 3 tied. The unweighted (by sample size) average was Bush up by 0.5%.
Of the 11 polls in Ohio, 7 had Kerry in the lead, 4 had Bush in the lead. The average was Kerry up .8%
Of the 7 polls in Wisconsin, 2 had Kerry in the lead, 3 Bush, and 2 were dead ties. The average was dead even.
Of the 8 polls in Iowa, 2 had Kerry up, 5 Bush, with 1 tie, average Bush lead of 2%.
Of the 5 in New Mexico, 2 had Kerry up, 3 Bush, average Bush lead of 2%.
Of the 4 in Minnesota, 2 had Kerry up, 2 Bush, with an average Kerry lead of 0.75%.
Of the 9 in New Hampshire, 6 had Kerry up, 3 Bush, with an average Kerry lead of 3%.
So…each of those polls has both sides winning some of the time this past month. It’s hard for me to think of any of them as solid. And Wisconsin is probably the least solid of any of them.
Those 7 seem the key battlegrounds now, with the possibility of an Arkansas or Hawaii creeping in.
[Others states for which at least one independent poll has shown both both sides in the lead of at least 1% at some point last month, using only the most recent poll from the organization…:
Colorado, Bush 5, Kerry 1
Oregon, Kerry 7, Bush 1
That’s it. Hawaii, Arkansas, Michigan, New Jersey, and Nevada seem to have been close here or there…]
If all but the 7 listed above are considered solid, you’re looking at 228 EV’s for Kerry, 227 for Bush. Kerry can get the other 42 with Ohio, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and either Florida, Wisconsin, or [Iowa and New Mexico].
Looking at today’s state polls, I think Wisconsin is up for grabs, while Iowa seems to lean slightly–but not irrecoverably–to Bush. Giving Nevada and especially Arkansas to Kerry seems a little overoptimistic, but not impossible. Probably the most important–Florida and Ohio–are split down the middle (if you discount what I hope is the out-of-whack Gallup result in Florida), with new polls divided on who is ahead, usually within the margin of error.
I think general polls of battleground states weight their sample so that more people are sampled from the largest states, with many more Floridians than Oregonians, for instance. But the samples from each state are almost certainly too small to reliably extrapolate results from individual states.
Zogby’s rolling tracking is showing a Bush lead on the basis of one day’s result having Bush +7. He’s up 3 which means the other days in the survey have to net a +4 to Kerry. Once that Bush +7 drops out in 2 days, it will be back where it was most likely.
I don’t know what’s going on with Tipp.
WaPo seems to be going Kerry’s way as is Rasmussen a bit (It was B+3) last week. So things are looking better.
Mady: There’s nothing addressing an analysis of the early votes that I know of. Are California and New York having early voting this year? I know many of the Southern States do and some of the northern states do not. Could that be the discrepancy? Also, I don’t know if that figure is an estimate based on exit polling, or an actual count.
In the state polls, Race.com has taken PA, NH, NJ, ME from undecided to Weak Kerry.
Mady: I checked most of the recent polls in WI. They’re mostly from SV, a republican outfit. I’ll wait for some more credible polls there.
Same is true of Iowa.
Mady,
Steve Soto at Left Coast has an analysis of early voters and it’s great for Kerry. Typically, early voters are elderly women in western states (most early voting states are in the West) – and trend heavily Republican. I believe Bush beat Gore among early voters in 2000 by 55-44 or something. So if Bush only leads by 4 now among early voters (and with a sample size of 170 voters anyway) then Bush is doing poorly.
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/
Also, a new Gallup poll (yes, Gallup) shows Kerry up 1 in Iowa. I have less confidence about Nevada but with OH and FL Nevada doesn’t matter.
Can anyone tell me a poll on how many 2000 bush supporters are not voting for him this time. Are the polls weighted in such a way that fails to this into account. There are many who simply will not vote for him this time. There are some who may not vote for Kerry but they are definitely not voting for Bush. This seems like it would be a significant thing to know.
I’m not sure, looking at the polls tonight most of which show Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nevada as pretty firmly Bush, where you find the information that those states will go to Kerry. Is it the potential for Democratic turnout, or some way of reading polling that I’m not doing? I’d love to believe with you, but I really think it is totally up in the air right now.
Also, no one addressed a question I had posted earlier–why is the voting that’s been done already showing a Repub lead? Any information on patterns, where people are voting early, which groups are?
probably Kerry
Wisconsin
New Mexico
Nevada
Florida
Ohio
Arkansas
Minnesota
Michigan
Pennsylvania
Oregon
New Hampshire
probably Bush
Colorado
Missouri
West Virginia
Virginia
Tennessee
Kerry is going to win BIG.
According to ABC (Noted Now) both campaigns are now putting resources into Hawaii, which seems to be genuinely in play. That is really not a good thing.
Kudos, commendations, and additional crown jewels to Ruy for being the best Donkey Rising, hands down, thumbs up!!
To Ruy and staff …. thanks a bunch! Many are greatful for your efforts. Including me.
Is it possible to give us some feedback on early voting? Either turnout or exit polling, or anything concrete? Anything more concrete on election turnout in general?
Again, thanks.
Do we know what Demo Corps. considers battlegrounds still? If it’s the entire 16 or so that originally existed (including WA, OR, etc), then this is not surprising or exciting.
Numbers that would be meaningful at this point should essentially be confined to PA, FL, OH, IA, WI, MN, NM, NV and possibly AR and CO. If these numbers include OR and WA and perhaps some others, then these aren’t that useful, since OR and WA will obviously inflate Kerry’s numbers since these are barely battlegrounds now. In fact, I’d argue that we could take PA off the list too to get a really good number of how Kerry is doing.
Here’s hoping that similar numbers exist for the states I mentioned.
-Jeff
Personally, I find the “battleground states” polls unenlightening.
America does not elect presidents nationally; it elects them on a state-by-state basis through the Electoral College. As we learned in 2000, it does not matter if a candidate racks up big vote-margins in one state (and win the national vote), only to lose a couple of others by mere handfuls and therefore lose the EC.
Subsequently, I honestly don’t care if John Kerry is building up a big vote-total in all 15 battleground states. Does this mean Kerry is doing well in all 15 battlegrounds? Or does it mean Oregon has gone whole-hog for Kerry while Kerry is losing the rest?
You can’t tell. Therefore, these polls are completely uninformative to me, and don’t give me any strategic information whatsoever.
I wish polling firms would stop doing them, and either do state-by-state polls which would give us real data by which to predict EC outcomes, or divert the resources to states (like Arkansas) which are seeing little polling but which might just well be coming into play (as the last Arkansas poll indicated).
Zogby has Bush up by 3 nationwide and also ahead in most of the battleground states…The brief lead Kerry had in the Rasmussen poll is gone and it is a dead heat again. Boy, I sure hope that all the good polls are the ones listed on EDM, but I can’t help but be a little nervous at this point. At least EDM gives me some hope though!