But even the more radical demonstrators might do the same. Several young people I spoke with said they would support the Vice President if the Biden-Harris administration reaches a ceasefire agreement. ‘She’s not getting my vote unless she can permanently get a ceasefire in Gaza,’ one Chicago woman told me.

I asked another man named Omar why he was part of the ‘uncommitted’ movement of voters refusing to back Harris. ‘I want to give a message to the DNC that if they continue to fund this genocide, they’re not going to get my support,’ he said. When I inquired whether one uncommitted protester would vote for Harris under any circumstances, he replied: ‘If they did a ceasefire, yes.’

That’s no easy task for the administration, of course, nor are the protesters totally inconsequential. In the midday sun, a mixed crowd of fringe activists mingled with hipsters and grandparents. This is not an irrelevant group. Indeed, in his speech last night Joe Biden conceded that they ‘have a point’.

One study of Jill Stein’s impact on the Clinton campaign in 2016 found, as Vox put it, that ‘if Clinton were given all of Stein and [Gary] Johnson’s votes, Trump still would have won Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina. But Clinton would have won Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — enough to win her the election.’ Bear in mind that Stein only managed to win about 1% of the total vote.

That puts the ceasefire front and center. It’s true we have no idea how many Stein voters could have ever been persuaded to vote Clinton. This time around, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could outperform the margins earned by both Stein and Gary Johnson eight years ago, and with little appeal to the pro-Palestine crowd. As in every nail-biter election, Democrats and Republicans are chasing fractions, trying to cobble together the right patchwork of voting blocs — and Israel will matter.

Whether the festival-like atmosphere of Day One builds into something more combustible by Thursday is an open question. In the daylight, entrepreneurs sold t-shirts and parents wheeled babies around in strollers. As the sun dipped lower, the police line was breached and an arrest was made.

After President Biden has gone on his Santa Barbara vacation and Harris becomes the convention’s centerpiece, law enforcement — and party leaders — may have their work cut out for them. For now, though, the protest is smaller than expected, a vocal group shouting from the outside as loyalists mingle inside a secure perimeter. Whether it stays that way is anyone’s guess.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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