The DNC Is Preparing for the Worst in Chicago — Without the Help of the City’s Mayor

CHICAGO — President Joe Biden’s top advisers are all too aware the ghosts of 1968 may haunt their convention here, but they’re grappling with a pair of more urgent and thoroughly modern-day challenges as summer nears: How far can they go in reprising their virtual 2020 convention to mitigate the threat of disruption inside the arena, and how will they navigate a rookie mayor who unabashedly sympathizes with protesters?

Trumpeting the success of their Covid-era convention four years ago, some in Biden’s orbit are aggressively pushing to make the 2024 conclave a hybrid production. That would mean in-person speeches from the president, party luminaries and rising stars to draw television attention alongside a mix of pre-recorded testimonials and videos from other parts of the country.

The goal: drive maximum viewership on television and the internet while minimizing live programming and openings for protest in Chicago’s United Center. This would mean moving party business, such as rules and platform votes, off the floor and denying would-be demonstrators a chance to seize on contentious debates.

While the Biden campaign, White House and convention planners have only just started hatching plans, senior Democrats tell me they’re discussing whether to conduct such business before the convention even begins or move it out of the arena and across town to McCormick Place, their other Chicago venue. Serendipitously, Biden’s advisers may have a very good reason to move up such housekeeping: If the Ohio Legislature does not relax its ballot certification deadline, which is before the Democrats’ August convention, the DNC may have no choice but to technically nominate the president before the conclave begins.

Also under consideration for Chicago: reviving the pre-taped delegation roll call from each state featured in 2020.

Not only were the clips memorable — who could forget the Rhode Island chef standing on a state beach with a plate of calamari — but a video montage also means one less opportunity for hot mic spontaneity, and therefore disruption, from 50 states and territories worth of delegates.

“If there is one peep in that hall, the networks will be all over it,” a convention planner lamented.

The challenge, of course, is that the delegates attending and, more to the point, the donors financing the convention expect the rites of an in-person convention. The political convention industrial complex remains strong after centuries of tradition, no matter how much the operative class relished having total control over what was effectively a multi-day commercial four years ago.

So with campus protests over the war in Gaza raging and Biden being disrupted nearly everywhere he goes, Chicago’s organizers are plotting on how to preempt opportunities for heckling and quickly tamp down demonstrators who do get into the arena.

William M. Daley, the former Commerce secretary and son and brother of Chicago mayors, has urged top Biden officials to install a capable convention chair who knows how to wield a gavel and can restore order as needed, I’m told. One obvious possibility is Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and another is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who before entering Congress was speaker of the California Assembly.

Convention planners are also considering a different chair for each night of the convention, to both share the burden and showcase as much of the party’s talent as possible.

For all the 1968 clips now being replayed of Chicago police clashing with protesters, it’s the prospect of disorder outside and inside the arena this summer that so alarms Democrats, because either display could hand Republicans fodder.

“The mayor owns the street but the party owns the inside,” Daley told me. “What happens inside the hall is reflective of our party.”

As Daley knows well, it wasn’t just the Grant Park images that conveyed chaos to the American voter. It was broadcasters Mike Wallace and Dan Rather being jostled at the convention, the latter of whom prompted Walter Cronkite on live television to denounce the floor managers as “a bunch of thugs.”

And while people are well aware of the video where then-Mayor Richard J. Daley mouths profanities at Abraham Ribicoff for accusing the police of using “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” what’s less remembered is when the Wisconsin delegation used their turn in the roll call to propose suspending the convention and moving it elsewhere. Then-House Majority Leader Carl Albert struggled to keep control of the floor and was replaced as chair by up-and-coming Chicago lawmaker Dan Rostenkowski.

Democrats are quick to point out this is not 1968, when Americans were being drafted, or even 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ bitter clash led to a summer convention that included thousands of unhappy Sanders delegates. The number of delegates who are attending as “uncommitted” — the write-in protest used by Democrats angry over Biden’s handling of Gaza — will only be in the dozens.

“They’re going to be so small in numbers, this is not like 2016 or even 2008, with the PUMAs,” said former DNC Chair Donna Brazile, alluding to the Hillary Clinton diehards who refused to back Barack Obama and created a vivid acronym for Party Unity My Ass.

What alarms some Democratic strategists is the evolution of this era’s protests. Protesters are savvier — they’ve managed to get inside dozens of events featuring the president and vice president — and their demonstrations also include some bad actors who are determined to provoke a reaction.

In anticipation of some protesters obtaining tickets, convention organizers said they’ll stage a war room and be prepared to drown them out with chants — “four more years” is always a standby — and block any banners with Biden-Harris signs.

That’s all how to manage the convention itself.

Just as complicated is how to handle the protesters beyond the walls of the United Center.

There’s already a joke going around Democratic strategist circles that the main difference between 2024 and 1968 is that the Chicago mayor this year will be on the side of the protesters, not the cops.

Forty-eight-year-old Brandon Johnson, who was elected mayor last year after incumbent Lori Lightfoot failed to even make the runoff, was an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union and has yet to fully make the jump from activist to mayor of one of America’s largest cities.

It’s ironic because soon after he became mayor, he hosted DNC Chair Jaime Harrison for lunch and, according to a Democrat familiar with the conversation, immediately pronounced that “nobody else represents the city but me.” He also asked if Harrison would have his back as a fellow Black man (Harrison, I’m told, tried to delicately explain that the convention would be a partnership between the party, the city and the state of Illinois).

“If there’s any mayor that understands the value of protest and demonstration, it’s me,” Johnson told reporters earlier this week at a groundbreaking, dismissing a question about Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) concerns over unrest in the city during the convention. Johnson said, “Without protests and real demands of a government, people of color and women do not have a place in society.”

More striking was how Johnson responded to whether he thought it was appropriate for police to have been dispatched last weekend to a protest at one of Chicago’s art museums. He spoke in a detached manner — the museum “made that request and the police department reacted,” the mayor said — evading the question and leaving the impression he somehow wasn’t in charge of the city and its police department.

Johnson praised the importance of protecting free speech and initially said that was paramount to safety, which he called “second most important,” before seeming to recognize his error.

When I asked him what his vision of a successful Democratic convention looked like, Johnson repeated the same formulation — “safe, vibrant and energetic” — before saying he wanted young people to “see what democracy really looks like.”

At no point did he mention Joe Biden or the importance of the convention in helping the president’s reelection.

It was an eye-opening exchange. And it made clear why so many Democrats, in Chicago and beyond, respond to questions about Johnson with a sigh and hope that he’ll recognize the weight of this moment, both for his career, the city and the country.

Exacerbating matters, Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who lobbied the White House relentlessly for the convention, have a strained relationship. They’ve disagreed on issues from immigration to a new, subsidized stadium for the Chicago Bears.

When I first saw the governor and mayor earlier in the week, it was at the Field Museum for an unveiling of an exhibit on a newly discovered bird fossil. As the two sat in the front row before the event got underway, just a single seat separating them, they looked straight ahead in silence and did not speak to one another in the way politicians of the same party almost always do in such moments.

With the demise of longtime Illinois Democratic boss (and state house speaker) Michael Madigan, though, there’s no semblance of a political machine here. What’s left is Pritzker, a billionaire who’s won two terms and can bankroll the party, and a handful of public employee unions, most notably the teachers from which Johnson emerged.

The best Democrats could say about the Johnson-Pritzker dynamic was that, well, at least it’s not as bad as the Andrew Cuomo-Bill de Blasio relationship in New York.

“It's an event that’s critical to the Democratic Party, so we’re all going to work together to make it a success,” Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle, a veteran of Chicago’s political wars, told me when I asked about the mayor and the governor.

Preckwinkle was far less enthused about a disruptive cacophony of free expression in the city. While noting she was “old enough to have been in a lot of anti-war marches,” she said that although people are free to protest, “the challenge, of course, is when people decide that expressing their opinion involves impeding other people’s ability to go to work, or go to school or acts of vandalism.”

Senior Democrats made clear they’ll mostly lean on Pritzker and his canny chief of staff, Anne Caprara, this summer.

The governor already prevailed in a proxy war with the mayor over who would run the host committee. Pritzker installed another of his lieutenants to oversee the local organization that helps put on the conclave along with the convention directors, national party and Biden campaign. Johnson was, though, able to make a member of his inner circle a senior adviser to the host committee as part of an agreement to keep peace between the mayor and governor.

It’s a détente Pritzker is eager to sustain, at least through August.

Asked at the groundbreaking this week if he was open to calling in the National Guard for the convention, the governor said he didn’t think “we’ll need it.” But Pritzker made sure to note the Chicago police had jurisdiction and he’d only call in the guard if “the city asks us to — it would be completely inappropriate to just march into a city.”