Why pick Chicago for the Democratic National Convention?

On Monday, the Democratic National Convention is returning to a familiar location: Chicago, Illinois.

No other city in the United States has hosted as many presidential conventions. Chicago holds the record, having welcomed 26: Fourteen of the conventions were Republican, and the other 12 — including this year’s — have been Democratic.

But the city holds special significance for the Democrats, as a party stronghold for much of the last century.

Since 1931, only Democrats have presided as mayor there. And the city sits in the solidly blue Midwestern state of Illinois, which last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988.

Still, experts and strategists say Chicago — the country’s third-largest city — is also symbolic of the hurdles the party faces, as it looks ahead to election day.

Chicago “is a real microcosm for the American experience”, said Meredith Shiner, a politics reporter and communications strategist based in the city.

“I think it also can symbolise some of the challenges that need to be conquered in order for the country to really realise its full potential.”

National conventions are highly scrutinised events, serving as the platform for major political parties to formally announce their presidential nominees.

This year, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to accept the Democratic nomination at the Chicago convention, alongside her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

The choice of location — announced more than a year in advance — is often seen as an extension of the party’s campaign strategy.

In the case of Chicago, the Democratic National Committee unveiled its pick in April 2023, with a nod to the city’s critical position in the Midwest region.

“Illinois, along with Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota — part of the ‘blue wall’ — were crucial to the 2020 victory of President [Joe] Biden and Vice President Harris and to Democrats’ success in the 2022 midterm elections,” the committee said in a news release.

But that “blue wall” of support has been eroding. Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan — both reliably Democratic in the 1990s and early 2000s — are now considered political battlegrounds.

Former Republican President Donald Trump won both states in 2016, putting an end to the Democrats’ streak in the region. Trump is running again this year against Harris.

Chicago is often seen as a blue beacon in a region increasingly flickering between Democrats and Republicans.

Shiner points out that Chicago and Illinois as a whole offer abortion access as a “fundamental right” to patients under state law, a key Democratic priority.

That makes it an outlier in the Midwest. Neighbouring Republican-led states like Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri and Iowa have almost completely banned the procedure.

“States like Illinois, cities like Chicago, have become a safe haven for women to travel from across the Midwest in order to access healthcare,” Shiner said.

As an island of abortion care in a region where access is largely cut off, Shiner explained that Illinois — and Chicago by extension — serve as a mirror for the Democratic platform, which promotes reproductive rights.

Harris herself has made abortion access a key pillar of her campaign appearances.

“In this moment, we are witnessing a full-on attack against hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights. Take reproductive freedom,” Harris said at a high-profile rally in Philadelphia earlier this month.

She blasted her rival Trump for his support of abortion restrictions and his track record of appointing anti-abortion judges. “As a result of his actions, today in America, one out of three women live in a state with a Trump abortion ban.”

Shiner indicated that Chicago’s status as a destination for abortion patients, smack on the border with Indiana, was just one of the ways Democrats can use the city to their advantage.

“I think that there are certain built-in storylines that they can use, in order to project the kind of image and political conversation that they're looking for,” she said.

Another one of those “built-in storylines” is the city’s intimate history with the labour movement.

Situated on the banks of Lake Michigan, not far from the Mississippi River, Chicago has long been a crossroads for American industry.

At the turn of the 20th century, with its railway yards, meat-packing businesses and manufacturing sector, Chicago gained a reputation for gritty, physical labour, earning it the nickname, “the City of Big Shoulders”.

Those labour conditions, in turn, sparked a backlash. A deadly protest in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886 came to symbolise the fight for the eight-hour workday. Several years later, the city gave rise to the 1894 Pullman Strike, which ground the country’s rail traffic to a standstill.

Even after more than a century, Chicago continues to represent higher-than-average union activity.

According to a 2023 report from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Chicago’s union membership rate hovered approximately 13 percent — well above the national rate of 10 percent. The report noted that Illinois itself had the 12th highest union density of any state in the US.

Embracing that organising power could be a boon to Democrats, according to Geoffrey Cowan, a lawyer and director of the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California.

Already, Harris’s boss, President Joe Biden, declared his intention to be “the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history”. Harris is expected to carry forward that mantle in her race to replace Biden in the White House.

“What the Democratic Party has done is, as a party, gone back to seeing the importance of organised labour for things that affect people, whether or not they're part of labour unions,” Cowan said.

Shiner, meanwhile, pointed to the 2023 Chicago mayoral election as a testament to the power of the city’s unions.

Critics held up that race as a bellwether for the future of the Democratic Party. It pitted progressive candidate Brandon Johnson against centrist Paul Vallas.

Johnson, however, surged to victory, powered by support from the Chicago Teachers Union.

“When you think about the new mayor, he was elected on the back of the Chicago Teachers Union,” Shiner said. She called union organisation “an actual, actionable, political way forward” for the Democrats.

But for all the ways Chicago represents Democratic ideals, critics say it has also exemplified the party’s failings and divisions.

Looming large over the upcoming Democratic National Convention is the spectre of an earlier convention in Chicago that ended in unrest and violence.

In 1968, the Democratic Party was facing questions about police violence, racial inequality and an unpopular overseas war, just as it is today. Then, as now, a turbulent election season was unfolding.

Still, the party assembled in Chicago for its 1968 Democratic National Convention.

But the Democrats were in turmoil. Less than three months prior, the assassination of Senator Robert F Kennedy, who was widely expected to be the Democratic nominee, left the party in disarray.

A late entry into the Democratic race — Hubert Humphrey — ultimately became the nominee. He did not win a single primary, a point of some contention.

Also looming over the convention was the unpopular Vietnam War, which sowed deep divisions within the party. Chicago was a tinderbox. Protesters poured into the streets to vent their frustration. Chicago police were there waiting for them.

Images of their clashes have since become seared in the national consciousness.

At the time, political consultant Don Rose, 93, was the media spokesman for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), which called for demonstrations against the war.

“The most important thing I observed were horrendous beatings on the last day of the convention,” Rose said. “I think the world has seen famous scenes people refer to as the Battle of Michigan Avenue, where police were beating the hell out of protesters.”

Rose believes the present-day Democratic Party should look back on that time as an example of what not to do.

“The main lesson to be learned is that protesters should be given the opportunity, as the First Amendment in the United States [says], of being able to protest,” he said.

He added that it was important to allow the protesters “within earshot” of the convention “so that they get their voices heard” by the high-ranking party members inside.

Already, questions about how to respond to protesters have swirled around this year’s Democratic ticket.

Hundreds of demonstrators are expected to gather outside the 2024 convention site to protest Democratic support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

And critics have seized on Walz’s track record as governor during Minnesota’s racial justice protests in 2020 to probe whether he reacted quickly and decisively enough.

Those questions are part of larger rifts within the Democratic Party, between centrists who often prefer a sterner approach to criminal justice and progressives who seek reform and an end to police misconduct.

Still, Cowan said the current optimism surrounding the Harris-Walz campaign may overshadow any protests outside this year’s convention in Chicago.

“The protest may be strong, but the protesters may find themselves to be in a very small minority because of the tremendous enthusiasm for [Harris],” Cowan said.