Back in his car, Levin caught up on his recent messages. “I’m sure some people, even in my own family, will see this as a mistake,” he said. That afternoon, he texted with Norm Ornstein, a moderate policy wonk in Washington and a longtime friend of the Levin family, who had caught wind of his involvement with the “uncommitted” campaign and did not approve. “Criticize him for his policies,” Ornstein wrote, of Biden. “But to undermine him now can only hurt him in a contest against Trump.”
Long before Biden dropped out of the race, it was clear that 2024 might feel, at least in some respects, similar to 1968. A high rate of inflation; an ambient sense of end-times fervor; campus protests followed by mass arrests; an incumbent President with a long list of domestic-policy achievements who, nevertheless, kept slipping in the public’s esteem. For a time, there was even a guy named Robert F. Kennedy running for President. The Vietnam War was America’s war in a way that Israel’s current one is not. There is no draft in 2024, and large numbers of American soldiers aren’t dying in Gaza. Still, the war remains deeply divisive: Americans disapprove of it by wider margins than they did the Vietnam War in early 1968.
“There was a sense everywhere, in 1968, that things were giving,” Garry Wills writes in his book “Nixon Agonistes.” “The cities were in danger, and the college campuses.” When Martin Luther King, Jr., said that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” in 1968, he was giving a speech in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and referring in part to the previous summer, when residents of downtown Detroit, worn down by segregation and neglect, torched more than five hundred buildings in less than a week. The following month, King was murdered. Bobby Kennedy, the leading antiwar candidate, was assassinated that summer. As Wills puts it, “Senator Kennedy’s death made men realize that worse can follow worse indefinitely, no terminal worst in sight.”
Lyndon B. Johnson, after campaigning as a peace candidate, had rapidly reversed course, escalating the conflict in Vietnam and ramping up the draft. In terms of American deaths, 1968 was the war’s worst year, without a close second. Students for a Democratic Society, a group of antiwar radicals, was founded at the University of Michigan in 1960. According to its mission statement, adopted in Port Huron, “The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak.” By the end of the sixties, at a gathering in Flint known as a “wargasm,” S.D.S.’s guerrilla offshoot, the Weathermen, was plotting to assassinate police officers. Explosives were planted at a University of Michigan building, and a car blew up outside an R.O.T.C. office.
“Tell me if anyone bullies you and I’ll spend hours writing a carefully worded e-mail to your teacher.”
Cartoon by Julia Thomas
From inside the White House, Lyndon Johnson could hear chants of “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” In a biography called “LBJ: Architect of American Ambition,” Randall Woods writes, “Antiwar liberals seemed to be willing to go to any lengths to stop the war and get rid of LBJ, even to the point of sacrificing Democratic rule.” Johnson, the most adept politician of his era, took a look around and decided not to run for reëlection. The historian Luke Nichter, in “The Year That Broke Politics,” highlights more personal factors contributing to Johnson’s retirement, including his failing health and his almost supernatural premonition that 1968 wasn’t destined to be the Democrats’ year. The Party had to decide whether to nominate the antiwar upstart Eugene McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice-President. “I admired Humphrey, and I personally disliked McCarthy,” Sandy Levin, who was the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party at the time, told me. “But the war was so divisive—I couldn’t support someone who wouldn’t make a clean break from that.”
Humphrey got the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. TV networks cut to footage of the so-called Battle of Michigan Avenue: Chicago police officers indiscriminately beating street protesters, as onlookers called the police “pigs” and “fascists.” On September 30, 1968, after trying for months to dodge the issue, Humphrey gave a speech on Vietnam, drawing a tepid contrast between Johnson’s policies and his own. It helped, but not enough. “Because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected,” Abbie Hoffman, a leader of the Yippies, said. The group’s theatrical antics—dancing naked and dropping acid in Lincoln Park, nominating an actual pig for President—were great at attracting media attention. Silent-majority voters, watching TV in their living rooms, saw a country that looked increasingly disordered, a perception that played into the Republicans’ hands.
But, of course, 2024 is not 1968. Nixon, who had not yet revealed his crookedness and paranoia to the nation, was able to run as a levelheaded centrist; Trump is running more or less openly as a vengeful maniac. Nixon had a “secret plan” to wind down the Vietnam War, and eventually did, after several more years of brutality. Trump’s stance on the war in Gaza is not particularly coherent, but he would probably escalate it. During the debate in June, Trump criticized Biden for not letting Israel’s military “finish the job.”
In the sixties, most states were battleground states, and the rancor in the streets corresponded with fluidity at the ballot box. Nixon won Illinois; Humphrey won Texas; George Wallace, running to Nixon’s right, carried five Southern states—the last time a third-party candidate won any electoral votes. These days, the nation’s discontent doesn’t have a reliable democratic outlet. The political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck refer to calcification—the politicians may get crazier, but voters’ partisan allegiances stay mostly the same—and to a related phenomenon called parity: almost no matter what happens, the two parties remain perpetually neck and neck. The result is that even a few thousand votes in the right state can be enough to swing a national election. The 2000 Presidential race, which came down to five hundred and thirty-seven votes in Florida, may have been tipped by “el voto castigo”—thousands of Cuban Americans who, outraged at the Clinton Administration’s handling of the Elián González affair, voted as a bloc for George W. Bush—or by Muslim voters in the state, who overwhelmingly voted for Bush.
If past is prologue, then what should Harris do? Make a play for the antiwar youth vote, or accept that much of it will remain out of reach? Harris often reaffirms her “unwavering commitment” to Israel’s defense, yet she clearly also sees some upside in distancing herself from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now wanted by the International Criminal Court. In July, when Netanyahu came to Washington to address a joint session of Congress, Harris skipped the speech, citing a scheduling conflict; she then gave public remarks expressing “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza” but announcing no change in policy. “Harris is not going to come out tomorrow and say, ‘I’m not sending Bibi one more bomb,’ ” Levin told me. “But if she changes nothing, and she loses a few thousand votes in Michigan because of it, there’s a chance it could cost her the election.”
On most domestic issues—guns, abortion, climate change—the Democratic coalition is, by historical standards, remarkably unified. But foreign policy, and particularly the war in Gaza, is an issue that seems almost designed to highlight dissension within the Party. After the October 7th attacks, Biden gave an Oval Office address in which he implied that Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, Netanyahu’s Israel, and Biden’s America represent a sort of twenty-first-century axis of democracy. After that idea didn’t seem to land, he apparently switched to a quieter strategy that involved mostly supporting Netanyahu in public, pushing for diplomacy in private, and hoping that the issue would fade from voters’ minds.
Meanwhile, a group of left-wing political strategists formed a Signal group to brainstorm ways to prevent it from fading. “People are opposed to the war, but it’s not a top-priority issue for them,” Waleed Shahid, a strategist who helped recruit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman to run for Congress, said. “The way it becomes a top-priority issue is we need to keep driving the urgency.” Shortly after October 7th, he set up an outfit called Israel Palestine Communications and started sending e-mail blasts, multiple times a day, to the hundreds of journalists and political flacks in his contact list. In December, a producer at MSNBC told him that cable news would soon pivot from war coverage to election coverage. “If we wanted to keep the same amount of media attention on Gaza,” Shahid told me, “we would have to find a way to make it an election story.” For Shahid’s cohort, this was not a new strategy. “In 2016 and 2020, if we wanted to drive coverage of Medicare for All, we had a go-to frame—‘That’s a priority for Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders is running for President,’ ” he said. In December, a member of the Signal group published an opinion piece urging Andy Levin to run against Biden as a protest candidate. “I’m not running for President,” Levin told Politico. He did add, though, that the people who’d tried to recruit him were “serious” about their concerns.
By late January, the group had identified another opportunity: the Michigan primary. Abbas Alawieh, a thirty-three-year-old organizer with a clean-shaven head and a linebacker’s frame, convened a meeting of community leaders in a back room of a Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn. (The city, which is just outside Detroit, recently became the first majority-Arab city in the U.S.) Alawieh was born in Lebanon, and his family moved to Dearborn when he was six; after grad school, he spent five years as a legislative staffer in Congress. Some people at the meeting were eager to see the Democrats suffer at the polls. “I don’t love Trump, but I will not vote for Biden even if he stands on his head from now until November, and he can’t even stand on his feet,” Osama Siblani, the editor of a local paper called the Arab American News, told me in February. “We gave him our support last time, and he gave us the middle finger.” Already, local leaders were spearheading a campaign called Abandon Biden, asking voters to pick any candidate other than the President. Alawieh argued that they should mobilize the community to vote “uncommitted” in the primary instead. If they got just ten thousand votes, the margin there in the 2016 Presidential election, they could claim victory.
