Echoes of 1968.

Echoes of 1968 grow louder as 2024 counts down toward November 5 and Election Day.

Those who are old enough will remember the wave of student protests that began in the spring of 1968 on the campus of Columbia University. The issue in 1968 was rapidly growing opposition to U.S. policy as it pertained to the War in Vietnam in which 58,000 American military men would eventually die. The issue in 2024 is the war in Israel against the terrorist group Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7 of last year.

The Columbia campus protest of 1968 culminated in the takeover of Hamilton Hall on April 24. The New York City police department was eventually called in to evict and arrest the protesters.

Here in 2024, protesters over the weekend again took over Hamilton Hall. The NYPD was called in last night to do as they did in 1968 and evict and arrest the protesters.

But just as it happened in 1968, protests that began at Columbia have spread to other campuses across the country. This morning, the breaking news is violent protests on the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles.

The protests of 1968 reached a crescendo at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August. The proceedings inside Chicago's International Amphitheater – at which sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated to run against the GOP's Richard Nixon – were overshadowed by the violent anti-war protests outside.

The nightmare for Democrats in 2024 is rooted in the fact that their 2024 convention is again taking place in Chicago. Unless the conflict between Israeli and Hamas is resolved in a way that is satisfactory to the far-left pro-Palestinian sympathizers who are currently driving the unrest on college campuses, a repeat of the 1968 Chicago convention chaos is a very real and very disturbing possibility for Democrats in Chicago in 2024.

Meanwhile, on other fronts, the New York City criminal trial of Donald Trump is in its second week of testimony. The court is taking today off, and Trump is holding campaign events in Waukesha, Wisconsin and Freeland, Michigan – two of the seven battleground states that will decide the 2024 presidential election.

As to those battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the Real Clear Politics average of polls has Trump leading in all of them. In four of the seven his lead is greater than the margin of error. In Michigan he is up by 1.2, in Wisconsin his lead is 1.8 and in Pennsylvania he leads by a single point. It is worth noting that this is first time that the average of polls shows Trump with a lead in Pennsylvania.

In the admittedly cliché “if the election were held today” exercise, for Trump to win the presidency he would have to hold the four states in which he is beyond the margin of error and then pick off any one of Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.