Well, Chicago, we have a run-off. Now what?
When I wrote in the beginning of the week that incumbent Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel might be forced into a run-off against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, I hoped it might happed. But, in the heart of hearts, I didn’t get my hopes up too much.
Emanuel had $13 million in campaign funds. He had political connections and loyalty of some of the most powerful political figures in Chicagoland. Emanuel’s campaign blanketed TV, radio and newspapers with ads. He got endorsements from Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, Chicago Defender and Chicago Citizen newspapers (The last two were especially important, since they serve Chicago’s black community). Emanuel got a sort-of-endorsement from Barack Obama.
Garcia, who was polling ahead of other challengers, hasn’t been involved in Chicago politics since the 1980s. He only managed to raise $1.4 million (mostly thanks to Chicago Teachers Union and Service Employees International Union, which also helped with voter outreach). He was endorsed by the Windy City Times, Chicago’s only surviving LGBT newspaper.
But in spite of all of that, Garcia did better than expected, earning 33% of the vote. And Emanuel earned 45% - less than the polls a day before the election predicted.
The mayoral election hasn’t been this close since Harold Washington became the city’s first black mayor back in the 1980s.
This Chicago Tribune cartoon, which was printed in today’s issue, summed up the significance of this quite well.
Pretty much every single newspaper and media website in Chicago expressed the same thought I had when I first heard about the results. If Garcia could do significantly better than poll predictions without the advantage of Emanuel’s campaign funds and connections, when success seemed like a long shot… Imagine what would happen now, when it looks like he would actually have a shot at winning.
Not that it would be easy. Looking at the Chicago Sun-Times map of the election results, I was struck by the fact that most of the wards where Garcia got the majority were either majority-Hispanic or had sizable Mexican and/or Puerto Rican populations. Chicago Tribune’s map is a bit more nuanced, making the distinction between wards where candidates won more than 50% and wards where they won a majority that’s less than 50%. That map shows that Garcia has a more than 50% in wards with Hispanic majorities, while Rahm got more than 50% at most North Side wards, including ethnically/racially diverse 46th, 48th and 50th wards. In other wards… if you take the votes for candidates that didn’t make it to the run-off and add them to Garcia, you gets wards where either difference either shrinks dramatically or Garcia gets a clear advantage.
According to a more detailed breakdown of the numbers, if Garcia manages to get all the votes in majority-black wards that went for Willie Wilson (an African-American candidate who came third in the election), he would be able to win those wards outright. In mixed wards, he would need to get the votes from all three challengers. In white-majority votes, getting all the votes that were cast for three other challengers would narrow the difference, but Emanuel would still be in the lead.
So Garcia’s challenge is to not only to get people who voted for challengers that aren’t Emanuel, but to get some voters who did vote for Emanuel.
Of course, one should keep in mind that voter turnouts were pretty low. Like, about 33%. So if the candidates manage to get a decent chunk of people who didn’t vote at all on their side, that could change the entire equation. Given that, if this RedEye article is anything to go by, people didn’t vote because it was too cold and/or because they assumed Emanuel would win anyway, this may be doable.
A bit part of that will be convincing voters that they will be able to do run the city well (or, at the very least, not make the existing problems worse). They need to be able to show that they will be able to improve the lives of individual residents, whether its in post-industrial communities near Lake Calumet, the working-class neighborhoods on Southwest and Northwest sides, the multi-ethnic communities on the North Side, the middle-class South Side communities that struggle to attract business simply because of their location, the communities where newer and older populations clash in the shadow of gentrification and, yes, even reasonably well-off middle-class and upper-middle-class communities throughout the city.
When I was talking about the election results with my mom earlier today, I realized how embarrassingly little I knew about Garcia’s plans for the city. I imagine that a lot of Chicago residents are in the same boat.
That is going to have to change.
The runoff election is on April 7. Emanuel and Garcia have less than six weeks to convince the voters that they are the best choice for Chicago.
No pressure or anything.
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