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.
No Republican has ever lost Ohio and won the Presidency likely for two very good reasons I can think of:
1. Ohio is worth 20 EV making it one of the biggest swing states. You really can’t write off 20 EVs and have a lot of chance at the whole thing.
2. Ohio is a slightly right to the middle of the road state and any Republican not carrying it will also likley be loosing many other states.
NO causal relationship with the Ohio thing. It’s just a battleground state. 3 seperate influences, Farm Belt, Industrial Midwest, and appalachia. It is true that no Republican has won without carrying Ohio. But that just means Ohio is illustrative of trends in battleground states and not a causal agent.
As other states gain population and Ohio loses it, this relationship may break down.
As far as the 4 big states, 2 are blue (Michigan, Pennsylvania) The other two are up in the air (Ohio, FL) I’d like to see Kerry take em both early so I can go to bed.
Based on your comments I have told everyone I know that Kerry will win. I just hope it’s not hopeful spin.
There is a very real possibility that Bush will lose the EV and win the popular.
Oh, the Gods are nothing if not amused.
cheers.
If Kerry carries three out of four of those battleground states or more, then even if he loses WI, he seems to be leading in Iowa, he would win. Is it true that Kerry might carry Arkansas? That seems unlikely.
On the Osama tape, which could determine the outcome of the election, it is curious how the right has had NO problem proclaiming without condemnation in the media and insinuating in the campaign that Osama favors Kerry. Krauthammer (in the Washington Post a few weeks ago) and now Safire (in the NY Times) and lately — with a flap from the Kerry camp — FOX have insisted WITHOUT EVIDENCE that this is so. But now there is evidence of the opposite but liberals are squeemish or dutifully cowed. (Kerry, unlike on flipflop, where both he and the mainstream media, including liberals, were all but silent for 5 months, only raising the issue AFTER the Republican Convention, obviously can’t speak to this issue. On flipflop, Jonathan Chait devastated the spin, then went on to explain away press silence (none dare say ‘justifying the lying’) on the issue.
Here’s a letter on the Osama tape that I sent to the NY Times. Like my last 50 letters, they surely won’t print this one either. But progressives really should have forced the mainstream media to confront this issue:
To the editor:
William Safire’s “Osama Casts His Vote” (op-ed, Nov 1) is remarkable for brazenly levelling the potent standard Republican charge that Al Qaeda released the tape to help Kerry, but then diverts attention to other subjects without making any substantive argument to back his point. Using a semantic method of argument, that bin Laden is “echoing” the Kerry campaign in suggesting that Bush is deceptive is itself a transparent sleight of hand — as if bin Laden could not possibly have gotten that bizarre notion anywhere else. But then, to top off the argument, he claims, as do all Republican and many Democratic pundits, that the tape helps Bush substantially.
So bin Laden releases a tape certain to help Bush in order to help Kerry? The more powerful argument, meekly given short shrift in passing by Maureen Dowd in “Will Osama Help W.?” (op-ed Oct 31), that “some intelligence experts suggest” that Osama prefers Bush for the latter’s foolish belligerence, fits the facts of the situation. Dowd also understates the case: Bush has failed to pursue Al Qaeda full force since the Afghanistan War, while also handing jihadism “Christmas” in the form of the Iraq war. Why wouldn’t and doesn’t bin Laden prefer Bush, a preference consistent with his actions?
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I know that this is an uncomfortable issue, but the playing field has been one-sided, and, as in flipflop, this could decide the election. Even if Kerry, in spite of all this and the distortions of the Matt Bai Oct 10 article that became the theme for the last three weeks of the Republican campaign, manages to win, in a truly level playing field, the Dems should have been able to take the White House and the Senate, and put the Repubs in danger of losing the House. But as things have gone, a reverse of 1994 just goes against the grain of the machine agenda.
You note that “no Republican has ever won a presidential election without carrying Ohio.” Indeed, I have heard this factoid repeatedly in various media reports over the past few weeks. In most reports, there is an implied causal relationship between Repubs winning Ohio and winning the White House–a causal relationship I find questionable at best. (Why Ohio–i.e., what is the special relationship between Ohio and Repubs? I also note that I have heard no report concerning the relationship between Ohio–or any other state–and Dems winning the White House.)
Anyway, just wondering if you can shed some light on whether there is in your mind any such causal relationship, or whether this is more a curiosity than anything else.
Thanks for the insightful blog.
I share your analysis, but you are clearly following assuptions that undecideds do not swing to the incumbent. Are your sure, given the emphasis on terrorism/security that seems to trump the Iraq war and economic/health care issues.
It looks like the polls are still over sampling republicans in the national tallies. The state polls seem to be more accurate. What about the Democracy Corp poll…any news yet. Also, the Repubs are still trying to go to the appellate court for the State of Ohio to appeal the decision by the lower court. Is there any news? Thanks for these wonderful and insightful updates on the Polls.