CHICAGO — In between the baseball diamonds of Union Park, with just enough clouds overhead to make it a truly beautiful day to celebrate the First Amendment, Cheryl Juris stood alone Monday morning, wrapped in a Palestinian flag.
“I was expecting a lot more people here,” she told NOTUS. Asked if the changing of the top of the Democratic ticket had anything to do with the disappointingly small crowd, she demurred. “It’s Monday, and a lot of people are at work, I guess,” she posited.
This park was meant to be the nerve center of the protest movement that just months ago vowed to be impossible to ignore at the Democrats’ convention. But about 90 minutes before protests were meant to kick off here, Juris was one of a small number of protesters dwarfed by protest marshals ready to hand out water and preprinted signs to surging crowds that had not yet materialized and reportedly never did, at least in the expected numbers.
It is so far proving harder to protest Vice President Kamala Harris than it was the man she replaced, President Joe Biden. Monday morning was only a few hours into the four-day Democratic celebration, meaning there was plenty of time left for things to grow, but protest organizers were not ready to promise larger crowds.
Would more people have been in Union Park if Biden was still the nominee? “We still think there’s going to be thousands here,” Hatem Abudayyeh, chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, told NOTUS at the protest movement’s morning press conference in Union Park. Abudayyeh added that he sees no difference between Biden and Harris, before later calling the vice president “Killer Kamala.”
Divisions over how to protest the new Democratic nominee were obvious during the press conference. A different speaker, wearing a keffiyeh, didn’t repeat Abudayyeh’s nickname for the VP, instead using his time at the mic to note that Harris’ candidacy is “historic.”
“She’s not the problem,” the organizer said. Instead, he said it was the entire Democratic Party.
Protesters are still finding ways to get attention. On Sunday night, a protester reportedly got in some delegates’ faces when they briefly stormed the stage at a convention party. But the party rolled on after the interruption. Independent presidential candidate Cornel West stopped by Union Park on Monday, drawing supporters and journalists. But delegates not in the park were blissfully out of earshot as their candidate was criticized.
And by Monday afternoon, in a parking lot several lots away from the main one used by delegates to enter the United Center, a group of protesters could be seen but not heard by arriving revelers straining to look at them.
Though there were reported clashes with police and knocking over fences, the protesters barely registered inside the secured perimeter.
Chicago itself is a friendly territory for the Palestine argument. The city government voted in January to support a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. Mayor Brandon Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote. His background is in the city’s vibrant progressive movement, where protest and civil disobedience are common and respected tools of political change. At the United Center, Johnson helped open the festivities and for the most part ignored questions from reporters about the size of the pro-Palestine protests.
“It’s very clear that Vice President Kamala Harris has brought a tremendous amount of excitement to this race,” he told NOTUS when asked if there were fewer protesters than he planned for after Democrats switched to Harris. “Here’s what my focus is, it’s about electing Vice President Kamala Harris.”
But after months of worry about wide-scale, all-consuming protests, Democrats are starting to breathe a sigh of relief.
“I spent my time in the military reading intelligence reports that were often exaggerated. So when you hear, you know, tens of thousands of people are coming, I’m not necessarily surprised that this hasn’t materialized,” said Chicago Alderman Bill Conway. Like other city officials, he’s received safety briefings from security officials prepared for big, bold and repeated clashes. Pictures floated around X Monday, which showed officers in gas masks standing behind fences, waiting to put that training into practice.
If the protest hype proves to have been overhyped, it’s a big deal for this convention and, potentially, for Harris’ future. The protest movement was one of the sorest points of Biden’s primary campaign, a sign that the president had lost his 2020 coalition and Democrats were in for a bumpy ride to November. Harris appears to have found smooth air in Chicago so far.
“It’s not a surprise to me that these protests are not very active. I think it’s dawning on people that Donald Trump and the Republicans aren’t the solutions,” Rep. Mark Takano told NOTUS as he made his way through party caucus meetings. “The solution isn’t to beat up on Democrats or to beat up on people that are most likely to be able to do something about your concerns.”
Biden himself acknowledged the protests during his speech to the convention late Monday night. “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” he said. “A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”
The monthslong protest fears have been wrapped up in the historical memory of 1968, the last time the Democrats nominated a president in Chicago, under waves of violent and intense protests that overshadowed the actual convention. The much-discussed redux of 1968 has not materialized so far here, though some Democrats cautioned that the show is not over yet.
“I’m not sure it’s died down,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes, a longtime Harris ally. “But I think that there is a dialogue that is happening where people understand that we have a presidential nominee who understands just how complex this issue is.”
There are also protesters inside the convention hall each night. “Uncommitted” delegates represent hundreds of thousands of Democratic primary voters who cast votes against Biden’s Israel policy by officially voting for “none of the above” on their ballots through the summer. During Biden’s speech to the convention Monday night, a small group of people briefly unfurled a banner that said “stop arming Israel,” before being blocked out by other delegates. It’s not clear how much these activists, or the voters behind them, hold Biden’s policies against Harris, however. “Uncommitted” activists still hope to change U.S. policy on Israel, but the tone has definitely changed now that Harris is the nominee.
Still, advocates say they must continue to place pressure on her. “We need her to quickly adopt our demands, which are a real policy change, a policy that upholds American and international law,” said Layla Elabed, co-founder of the “uncommitted” movement in Michigan.
Hala Hijazi, who formerly served on Barack Obama’s National Finance Committee and said she has had family members killed in Gaza, said the mood among Arab American voters she’s spoken with has shifted since Harris’ ascension.
“People are looking for leadership,” said Hijazi, who does not affiliate with the “uncommitted” movement. “People are looking for someone with a moral compass, someone that’s going to listen to everybody and not just the few. I think that’s what the vice president presents. She comes from California with a diverse constituency, so I think she’s in a better position than other folks to hear everybody out.”
Progressive electeds generally backed Biden this summer even as centrists in Congress called on him to step down and vocal left-wing advocates tore into him over Gaza. But with Biden gone, some of those progressives said they can now shift from defense to offense. They’re eager about the potential for new policies from a White House not led by a guy with basically the same stance on Israel he had in the 1970s.
“I think that there’s a hope that the party will turn a corner and have a pivot on policy that’s in a more just direction, and people are hopeful for that,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, who earlier this year tried to play peacemaker in the intraparty Democratic argument over Israel.
Some protesters resent the implication that a younger, historic woman candidate is harder to protest. Also in Union Park on Monday morning stood Lubangala, a 21-year-old Black woman who declined to give her last name. She, too, came prepared to protest and vowed to keep doing it, even as Harris’ party rolls on.
“The atmosphere may be chill and quiet right now but this is the DNC now. There’s no turning back,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that a Black and Brown woman is now running at the top of the ticket — it’s still a corrupt system anyway. It cannot change off of identity alone.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro and Jasmine Wright are reporters at NOTUS. Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.