It wasn’t 1968. It wasn’t even close.
After months of anticipation, planning and vows of mass protest in Chicago that called to mind the tumult of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the demonstrators who challenged the Democratic Party over the conflict in Gaza remained largely in the background.
While thousands of people joined enthusiastic daily protests in parks and on the streets of Chicago, a city with a deep history of protests, their numbers were fewer than organizers had hoped.
All week, demonstrators chanted and marched near the convention site, angrily calling for a cease-fire and an end to U.S. aid for Israel, but failed to seriously disrupt the convention and its celebration of Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee. Though many demonstrators hoped that the convention organizers would grant a speaker of Palestinian descent a chance to address the crowd, that request was ultimately denied.
And after four days of protesters pushing to make the war in Gaza a focus of the convention, its final evening on Thursday ended with Ms. Harris directly acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and repeating calls for a cease-fire, but also centering her speech on discussions of abortion access, immigration and the record of her opponent.
“There is some sort of wall between what we’re saying and what these politicians are willing to hear,” Josephine Guilbeau, an Army veteran, said at a pro-Palestinian protest on Thursday, lamenting that Democratic leaders had mostly ignored the cries of protesters.
On the last night of the convention, protesters acknowledged they were tired after days of demonstrations, but hundreds marched until after 9 p.m. Organizers summed up the week on an optimistic note, pointing out that President Biden had mentioned “protesters out in the street” when he addressed the convention.
Hatem Abudayyeh, an organizer of the largest protest marches, said that the group’s activism had brought together a range of causes on the left, letting Democrats know that many voters are looking for a policy change on the Israel-Hamas war.
“We didn’t expect that in four days of the D.N.C., that all of a sudden, 75 years of policy on Palestine are going to be changed and they were going to say, ‘We’re going to stop Israel today,’” Mr. Abudayyeh said. “But what we do believe is that they heard us.”
Others in attendance said they had hoped for more robust numbers at the demonstrations.
“I think the passion is still there,” Robert Felton, 46, a case worker for the state of Illinois, said at a rally on Tuesday. “I would like to see maybe a little bit more passion in Chicago. I think I just was hoping the movement was a little bit bigger.”
Before the convention, there were indications that the protests could be significant, both in size and impact. The Chicago area has one of the largest concentrations of Palestinian Americans in the country, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been held frequently in the city since October, when Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel.
Chicago Police Department officials vowed that violence or destruction from demonstrators would be met with arrests. But the department also prepared for months with de-escalation training to manage protests, eager to show that it was not the same department of 1968, when officers used tear gas to disperse antiwar demonstrators and beat them with billy clubs.
“Let’s stop talking about 1968,” Larry Snelling, the police superintendent, said. “It is 2024.”
Strategists said that the smaller-than-expected turnout could suggest that the Democrats might have less of a schism over policy than the party leadership has feared, and that concerns over Gaza were not foremost among Democratic voters.
A recent survey of American adults, by GenForward at the University of Chicago, found that 2 percent of those surveyed believed the war in Gaza was the most important problem facing the United States. The survey also found that 6 percent of people, and 10 percent of those 26 and younger, said they had been inclined to vote for Ms. Harris but that the Biden administration’s handling of the war made them less likely to do so.
Far more of the people surveyed — 49 percent to 18 percent — disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the war than approved of it.
“There’s very little organic energy or organic participation,” said Tom Bowen, a Democratic strategist in Chicago who worked for both Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot, mayors who saw robust, angry street protests during their tenures. “You can generally tell when there’s an energy behind a movement or sympathy with its cause, and that’s just not the case here.”
In Chicago this week, protesters held signs and Palestinian flags, gave speeches and chanted as they walked through the streets of the Near West Side, some of them pushing children in strollers. At times, demonstrators called out, “Free, free Palestine,” and displayed a range of signs, including many that were homemade. One read: “Work harder for my vote.”
Most of the protests were concentrated around two city parks a few blocks from the United Center, where thousands of delegates and attendees gathered each evening. The protests took place outside imposing metal barricades that separated several blocks around the convention center from the rest of Chicago.
Through the week, the weather was nearly perfect — with temperatures in the 70s and sunny skies — and the police were omnipresent, following protests on bicycles and on foot, and quickly donning helmets and holding riot shields when things turned tense.
A small protest organized on Tuesday night outside the Israeli consulate ended in dozens of arrests after masked demonstrators scuffled with police officers, and on Monday, several protesters who breached a barricade outside the United Center were arrested. By Thursday, at least 70 people had been arrested, the authorities said.
The largest protest occurred on Monday, with several thousand people, including activists who rode buses from other states to attend. Other days drew smaller crowds. Small groups of activists interrupted events tied to the convention, including a welcome party for delegates at Navy Pier. On a bridge over the Chicago River, someone unfurled a banner with a pro-Palestinian message while tour boats passed below. And early Thursday morning, several dozen activists held signs on Michigan Avenue.
Some people who joined marches said that it was Mr. Biden’s absence from the ticket that might have dampened enthusiasm for demonstrations.
Byron Sigcho-Lopez, a Chicago City Council member who has supported the coalition leading the marches, said he believed Ms. Harris’s substitution as the presidential nominee contributed to smaller crowd sizes, even as protesters continued to press for changes to White House policy, not just campaign rhetoric.
“If President Biden would have remained at the top the ticket,” he said, “I think that we would have seen not only 30,000, probably more than 30,000 people, outside protesting the president.”
Inside the convention hall, pro-Palestinian activists also had a presence, though not the platform they had wanted. A group of 30 delegates representing voters who had remained uncommitted in protest of the Biden administration’s policies in Israel and Gaza had their votes announced as “present” during the roll call. They also had called for someone of Palestinian descent to be permitted to speak at the convention.
“Yes, we’re looking for a change in policy, but we’re also looking for signs of good faith,” said Jeremiah Ellison, a Minneapolis City Council member who was among the uncommitted delegates. “We don’t think that was a big ask, but the campaign acted like it was an incredibly high bar to clear.”
Taher Herzallah, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota who helped organize campus protests this spring, said he was among the movement’s leaders who concluded there was little point in traveling to Chicago this week.
The relatively small numbers of demonstrators — which appeared to be well below organizers’ estimates of tens of thousands of activists — reflect a lack of enthusiasm for the idea that they would influence Democrats attending the convention, he said.
Mr. Herzallah said movement leaders were switching strategies, starting to focus more on local races and to boycott campaigns.
“People are trying to employ different tactics because we recognize that after 10 months of being on the streets, we have to deploy different tactics to make sure we are being heard,” he said.
Holding a sign condemning U.S. support for Israel, Joe McKeown, a retired teacher in the Chicago area and a longtime Democrat, said he was planning not to vote for either major party — for the first time — unless the Democrats made a marked change in policy.
“I’d need to hear absolute evidence that they are willing to stop funding genocide,” said Mr. McKeown, 66, adding, “If I don’t see that, I’m not voting for them.”
In the middle of a crowd, Safiya Fatima, 22, marched among the beating drums and chanting of fellow protesters.
“I’m glad that we were able to make our voices heard,” she said. “In Chicago, we have such a big population of Palestinians, so this just seems like the right place for us to make our voices heard to the people who are here in the D.N.C.”
Ms. Fatima was active in campus protests last spring at the University of Illinois Chicago. As students are about to return to college, she hopes to see a return to the protests and encampments that roiled campuses in the spring.
“I don’t believe that there should be any need to slow down until we see a free Palestine,” she said. “Not just a cease-fire.”
Robert Chiarito and Dan Simmons contributed reporting from Chicago.