John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 46 percent of nation-wide RV’s, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll, conducted 10/14-17. Bush’s approval rating is 44 percent.
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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.
State by state polls appear more central than national polls. Bush and Kerry can have 40% leads in Utah and Rhode Island, but 39 of those 40 points do not do anything.
However http://www.davidwissing.com has been kind enough to pile up about ten national polls and note that they fall in two groups of about the same size. One group shows a tie. The other shows Bush up by 5 or so. And, since I read D and R blogs (L blogs are more focussed on doing politics than on polls), I see substantial numbers of people who are D or R arguing, one poll at a time, that the polls giving the wrong answer should be dumped, because a whole family of polls says their side is right, with inadequate attention to the feature that the polls are in two families, and the number of members in the other family is about the same.
Without saying who is right, I am reminded of the early warning systems at Pearl Harbor, which gave signal after signal — radar, submarine in harbor,…–of the incoming event, and signal after signal was ignored as an isolated and obviously wrong datum.
AMEN ON GOTV!
If Bush’s approval rating is 44% and he has 46% of the voting population at this point, then my guess is that about 47% is his ceiling, because he’s getting votes from people who don’t like the job he’s doing, but think that Kerry’ll do worse. And this poll, I’m sure, doesn’t poll people with cell phones who are younger voters. In a 1936 telephone poll, the people doing the poll predicted FDR’s opponent the winner, and people who had phones tended to be Republicans at that time.
old records show that upon election day 2000 the polls were showing that Illinois was going to be close, something within the margin of error, but Gore carried that state by 12%
I find it unlikely that Bush can be leading among independents by anything near an 18-point margin. While I don’t dismiss Fox News polls out of hand–at times, they have been more pro-Kerry than several others–this clearly seems out of whack. Those results among independents are not even close to anything that any other poll (even Gallup) has put forth. I haven’t seen the Fox poll on any other site except Fox News itself and some references in blogs; maybe this is why.
one dumb question:
are we to ignore LV’s until elction day or eve? or at what day do LV polls have some relevancy?
on an additonal note , i am invovled in A.C.T . GetOutTheVote effort in a swing state. i can only say that it is a very impressive, effcient organization who i beleive will do a remarkble job on t/o in earlyvoting and election day. readers should be very much encouraged by this on the ground effort.
also recommend you find any GOTV organizaiton in your locale to help on election day t/o. any and all organizations can use you.
a consensus opinion from talking heads is that presidents poll on election day at their approval rating, regardless of challengers numbers.
that means bush would recive 44% of vote today.
after headline on chris matthews, scarbourgh country and cnn blare “bush ahead in gallup” the program’s guests reject that conclusion almost unanimously. Even scarbourgh admitted his guest made sense regarding “approavl rating” test and battleground state polls favoring kerry.(thus leaving gallup poll meaningless)
matthews had nearly the same guests drawing the same conclusions where upon matthew blihtely opined to tony blankely that bush was going to win. blankely (washington times) didn’t seem qutie as certain. he also answereded all the questions put to ron ssuskind by matthews for suskind.
i ceratiinly hope post election these “commentators” are challenged on their predicions and methodology.
Some more good news, if off-topic.
There’s a poll showing the Kentucky Senator race tied. And another showing the Democrat within 7% of Specter in Pennsylvania. Maybe there are a couple other places in which the Democrats can pick up a Senator and regain control at least of that part of Congress. Here’s hoping.
The MSNBC/WSJ will be comforting because the Fox poll is not. Fox does weight by party indirectly because it weights by urban/suburban/rural. Today’s poll assumes 36% D, 34% R and 30% I. Not unreasonable. But, they have Bush up 49-42 because Bush leads among Indpendents by 51-33. What does it mean Ruy?
The apparent recent swing toward Kerry is good news, but I expect advantage will swing back to Bush and then to Kerry at least one more time before voting day. It’s been that kind of election so far, sigh.
And you just know Bush/Rove will drop some big media bomb in the next few days. High profile arrests or terror alert or major military offensive. Double sigh.
Incumbents almost always poll their approval rating. If Bush’s approval rating is just 44%, then I’d say he’s in some serious trouble. Factor in the late-deciders going for Kerry and we could be looking at the first majority Democrat win since 1976.
i have read about four separate columnists (all bush partisans) writing about bush opening up a ‘widening’ lead. Do they ONLY look at the Gallup poll or what? Maybe their anticipating that Kerry will do with the soft-on-terrorism Bai spin what he did with the flipflop template. After all, THE AGENDA UBER ALLES
The one common thread in all of the polls is that
Bush is running between 46 to 48%. These numbers have held true in every poll for the last 10 months or more. It is extremely difficult for an incumbent president to be re-elected with support
under 50%. This has been reported on this website
as well as others many times. The reason for John
Kerry’s numbers changing have to do mainly with
Party ID weighting as has also been reported. I would pay attention to Bush’s poll numbers and
job approval numbers, as they will be more in line
with his actual vote totals after the election. This translates to a President is serious political trouble,a story that is not getting much play in the media.
This is not a comment but an FYI on the most recent Ohio poll, 10/19/04, here reported on by the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper:
Poll: Presidential race a dead heat here
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Enquirer staff report
The latest Ohio Poll finds the race for president is a statistical dead heat in Ohio.
The poll says 48 percent of likely voters support Sen. John Kerry, while 46 percent support President George W. Bush. Five percent are undecided, while 1 percent support another candidate.
The results are similar to the August Ohio Poll, conducted after the Democratic National Convention. Bush led Kerry by 11 percentage points in the September Ohio Poll.
The poll also found that in the race for U.S. Senate, Sen. George Voinovich leads Eric Fingerhut, 62 percent to 35 percent.
The poll was conducted Oct. 11-17 by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. A random sample of 757 likely voters was interviewed by telephone. The sampling error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
Looks like the internet and sites like this one are beginning to have an impact. The NYT today includes a story about the discrepancies among polls based on RV/LV methodology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/campaign/19poll.html
Some good coverage of all the issues everyone here is familiar with. In particular high voter registration is this years wild card. However, there was still no mention of the problem of weighting for party ID.
Dear EDM:
At my site I’ve listed email addresses for Sinclair advertisers.
http://www.guerillastickers.com/Boycott%20Sinclair.htm
You can cut and paste the addresses into your email browser.
Send them an email and urge them to cease advertising on Sinclair-owned stations. Furthermore, tell them that, for the time being, you intend to boycott their products and services.
I got the list from this site: http://boycottsbg.com/
but the link to “email addresses” was down.
I cut and pasted myself.
Have fun!
S. H. Horton
Thought you might enjoy a little look back on Gallup’s polls from 2000 (ALL LV):
Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.
Oct17 Bush 48 Gore 42
Oct18 Bush 49 Gore 39
Oct19 Bush 50 Gore 40
Oct20 Bush 51 Gore 40
Oct21 Bush 50 Gore 41
Oct22 Bush 46 Gore 44
Oct23 Bush 45 Gore 46
Oct24 Bush 48 Gore 43
Oct25 Bush 49 Gore 42
Oct26 Bush 52 Gore 39
Oct27 Bush 49 Gore 42
Oct28 Bush 49 Gore 42
Oct30 Bush 47 Gore 44
Oct31 Bush 48 Gore 43
Nov1 Bush 47 Gore 43
Nov2 Bush 48 Gore 42
Nov3 Bush 47 Gore 43
Nov4 Bush 48 Gore 43
Nov5 Bush 47 Gore 45
Nov6 (last poll before the election)
Bush 48 Gore 46
Bush got 47.9% Gore 48%
This sounds interesting. From Josh Marshall’s blog (“Talking Points Memo”) today:
(October 19, 2004 — 11:23 AM EDT // link // print)
NBC/WSJ has its new poll out tonight. And I hear it’s got welcome news for Kerry. Dead even among likely voters.
— Josh Marshall
I, for one, would be delighted to go into election day with the race showing a tie and the polling internals as they are today. Undecideds break more toward the challenger as has been said many times; Democrats have the proponderance of newly registered voters and still have the superior groiund game in battleground states. Tie goes to the challenger.
TPM adds another positive poll indicator,
NBC/WSJ poll tonight has a tie among LIKELY voters. The tidal wave is starting to reach shore.
If Bush’s approval rating truly is at or about 46%, then he is in deep, deep doodoo. The kind liable to swallow one up.
It may not sound like it, but I mean this to be a serious question. Is anyone forecasting the percentage of votes that will not be counted? For example if 50% of the voters turn out to be Democrats, will 100% of their votes be counted?
I will agree with Zogby to this extent — if we have (or had!) an honest election, it’s a Kerry win.
But we know the Republicans are actively suppressing the vote to a possibly unprecedented degree nationally. Jeb Bush was Governor only of Florida in 2000; with W as prez, we’re all Floridians now. But unless something is done using those electronic ballots an honest election means a Kerry win — in my view there should simply be a national law requiring that EVERY vote have a paper ballot, period. Scans are OK, computers that spit out a card that must be cast are OK, and traditional ballots are OK. Punch cards should be phased out nationally too — even though they ARE paper ballots.
But an honest election means also Democrats fighting to win. Kerry’s performance in the debates was quite adequate — although against Bush [and for all the protestations about his wisdom, Cheney] I thought it could have been much MORE of a blowout. It’s like seeing political heavyweights like Jesse Jackson and Dick Gephardt go up against Ann Coulter and punt (tho not as bad as that).
But Kerry must refrain from Dukakissing. It’s the ONLY way the Democrats can lose in the absence of something spectacular, like the widely predicted Osama surprise. Kerry needs to resolve the terrorism issue in ways I’ve described in previous posts; had he really confronted the flipflop spin effectively, I would agree with Zogby.
If that approval rating in the CBS poll is reasonably accurate and our 50%”rule” for the incumbent is valid, the Monsieur Bush is in deep trouble.
But…. stories of voter suppression efforts — what happens “on the ground” — multiply like rabbits and just may save it for Bush.
We’re getting more like some banana republic or Soviet Russia.
An eensy bit off-topic, but since you didn’t blog on it, it is fresh, and others have expressed concern in the past, I wanted to mention that the new Rutgers poll has New Jersey at 51% Kerry and 38% Bush with a 3.8% MOE.
That’s for those who doubted me when I said to ignore those other polls, and that NJ would be solidly Dem come the election. My take is that most of the polls are way off the mark and it will be a big Kerry victory in NJ, and probably in the US generally.