The exit poll results, both national and state, cited in my previous post have now been substantially revised and do not look particularly favorable to Kerry. While some of the patterns discussed previously remain, others have changed fairly dramatically. Much more discussion to follow, of course, but way too tired to pursue it now.
TDS Strategy Memos
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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.
What about voting purges? Greg Palast, author of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” writes on his website http://www.gregpalast.com that voting purges, some of which could be illegal, in the states of New Mexico and Ohio could have swung the vote to Bush and not to Kerry. The problem existed in Florida in 2000 and likely did in 2004.
Let’s face it….The R’s will do anything to hold power. The only thing for Dems to do is cheat better than them or to outsmart them in their cheating game. Maybe we need to run candidates for SOS in southern states as Republicans and after the win, lead as a Democrat. I feel the R’s care more about their party being in power than they care about their country being a democracy. Ironically, their voting habbits insure neither their political freedom or a country based on freedom.
The reasoning is mind boggling. Here’s how it goes: exit polls show Kerry is ahead in certain states. Final results show Bush is ahead. Therefore, voting machines must be broken or there’s a conspiracy.
Could it be true the exit polls were *biased*? Nothing evil or premeditated even… just biased, possibly leading, surveys?
Wouldn’t that be a shock.
Satisfying as it might be to do the Reps what DeLay did to the Dems, it would be the worst possible course of action–not only because it wouldn’t work (face it: Dems aren’t sufficiently bloody-minded) but because it would do great damage to the Republic.
So, let me understand this.
The exit polls are correct almost everywhere to within 0.1%. In Florida and Ohio, the two states where electronic voting critics have been complaining that there is no paper trail, the margin of error is 4%.
Yet, you think it’s the polls that are fault, not the electronic voting machinery. I’m not claiming there was deliberate fraud, although I am open to the possibility, just that it seems like closer scrutiny is warranted.
For example, there is anecdotal evidence that the computer interface was designed such that people whose hand grazed the edge of the screen caused the choice to be flipped. This may easily account for a few percent of the voters choices going awry.
I think the comment from onprotractedwarfare sums up the terrible situtation quite well. I can’t help wondering whether after the coming disasters a modern equivalent of FDR will emerge to help put at least some of the pieces back together. I also can’t help reflecting that FDR didn’t have to contend with CNN, Fox, and the like.
This is a huge defeat for us. Even if Kerry pulled Ohio he would be a minority president. We can’t say our message didn’t get out. The resources were there. The situation in the Senate and the House is very bad. I would like to know what kind of message we have that can be understood and bought by a majority of citizens, short of issuing a machine gun to every household, putting a Baptist preacher in every science room, and burning gays at the stake. (In retrospect it clearly was a stroke of Republican genius to have the anti-gay measures on the ballots. But we have to wonder why so many people fell for it.)
Speaking for myself, I am familiar with the literature on “critical realignments” and all I can say is we are definitely in a specific sort of electoral era. Reagan was the start and it jelled in 1994. This could easily last till 2014-2020 if past “electoral systems” hold. I’m running out of decades in my personal arsenal to be around for this to turn around. And there are a lot of lurking calamities: on the dollar, in the environment, in the Middle East, that are going to come crashing down in the next four years which the re-elected national leadership won’t be able to cope with and which won’t be reversible by Dems with a simple election victory, even if it is a sweep.
My predictions for the next four years: A severe financial crisis, probably associated with a decline in the dollar; the draft; a national sales tax; privatization of social security; reversal of R v Wade; and some kind of very bad news on the environmental front.
I do think that we should be thinking along the lines I have posted here before, to wit, that we should at a minimum be signing up for contributions of $10 to $20 a month to the Democratic party to help it get on its feet for a permanent mobilization.
The other thing I think we need to look at is whether in certain areas, like CA, MA, NY, maybe CT, we can do to the Republicans something analogous to what was done to the Dems in TX. Obviously there won’t be a redistricting opportunity. But in the current juncture having “Red” members of Congress in blue states is a luxury we can ill afford, so strategies need to be developed that chisel away at the very concept of a “safe seat.”
The bright side: we showed we can raise money en masse and mount a vigorous campaign. That’s about it.
Well, based on all the comments and analysis I read that said Bush would not win because his highest approval ratings were his ceiling in the popular vote, and all the polls were rated unfairly to rvs instead of lvs, I took two weeks off work to focus on this election. I read the blogs alot, did gotv efforts, donated all the spare cash I had to get Kerry elected, because based on all the analysis I read here and on MYDD, it seemed improbable Bush would win. All the major media polls were biased, they were oversampling repubs, blah, blah blah.
Turns out they were right. We’re living in a right-wing, Christian conservative nation and I don’t see anyway for the democratic party to compete nationally. Look at all the red on that map. It’s heartbreaking. The dems and all the hopefuls like yourself and your contributors need to wake up and admit — we are on the outside looking in.