Chicago will host Democratic convention. Will Biden be crowned or challenged?

The Democrats made a wise choice in picking Chicago to hold their national convention.

Aside from the economic benefit to this city, Chicago is solidly progressive blue, as the recent mayoral election demonstrated.

Mayor Lightfoot, Governor Pritzker and Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson all lobbied to have the convention here, beating out New York and Atlanta.

Pundits point out that we are the epicenter of the blue wall. Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota are all shifting blue, joining Illinois.

Chicago last held a Democratic convention in 1996 to nominate Bill Clinton for a second term.

Before that it was the Democratic debacle of 1968 which nominated Hubert Humphrey who, because of the Vietnam War, was wildly unpopular with the Democratic Party’s anti-war base.

The whole world was watching and didn’t like what they saw.

Humphrey went on to lose in a close race to Richard Nixon.

Now that the location of the Democratic Party convention has been decided the question left unanswered is whether it will be a convention that crowns Joe Biden for a second term or will he be challenged by the progressive wing represented four years ago by Bernie Sanders.

While Biden has not made it official, he has let it be known he intends to run.

Most rank-and-file Democrats think that Biden running for a second term is a bad idea.

According to 538:

Only 31 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they want the party to renominate Biden, while 58 percent said they’d prefer someone else, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll from Jan. 27-Feb. 1. That lack of enthusiasm is unusual. According to historical CNN polling, majorities of Democrats wanted to renominate Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012, and a majority of Republicans wanted to renominate Trump in 2020.

Early polling of the Democratic primary contest also shows Biden getting nowhere close to majority support. For example, he received support from just 36 percent of Democratic registered voters in a Feb. 15-16 national poll from Harris/the Harvard University Center for American Political Studies, while the rest of the poll’s respondents opted for the likes of Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders.

But what progressive with a strong chance of stopping a Biden nomination is willing to step up to the plate.

I don’t see it happening.

While I think a robust debate in the primaries would strengthen the Democratic Party in a run against Trump or DeSantis, Democrats - even many progressive ones - are risk averse.

So that even if Biden, were to win a contested nomination and then were to lose, god forbid, to a Trump or DeSantis, the progressives would undoubtedly be blamed for the loss by a sitting Democratic president.

Some people still blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s defeat even without evidence.

To me, the best thing would be for Biden to change his mind and skip the idea of a second term.

I think a contested nomination would be just what the Democrats need to energize the young, Black and Brown voting base.

The recent Chicago mayoral election demonstrated that.