Chicago Elections

[silversandbea]

Chicago had an election yesterday, and for the first time since 1983 someone named Daley ran and lost. 1983 was the only time since 1955 that someone named Daley ran and lost; and in those 65 years, a Daley has been mayor for 43 of them. The only reason why Bill Daley didn't run during the last open election was because he was taking Emanuel's place as Obama's Chief of Staff - so Emanuel could go back and run for mayor. And this time, he didn't even make it to the runoff before the democratic primary. 1983 was also the last time an incumbent mayor was voted out of office - Jane Byrne (the last time Chicago elected a female mayor), losing to Harold Washington (the last time Chicago elected a black mayor). Neither of the previous Daleys had been voted out; the first one died in office and the second one resigned. The two remaining candidates are black women - Tori Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot.  Lightfoot is also a lesbian.

 

Considering the reports for a low turnout, this was a huge surprise.  Neither of them would be my perfect candidate - Preckwinkle has machine ties and machine responses to Burke et al, and is running as the progressive who can work within the system, Lightfoot is promising to be an outside progressive candidate, but she's also a former prosecutor who was with the Office of Police Standards during the Daley administration and the Police Board during the Emanuel administration. How much she was fighting against the Daley and Emanuel administrations seems to depend on who you ask (for against). I'm personally for Preckwinkle because I don't trust Lightfoot with the necessary police reform. And also, even with people I know that are familiar with Lightfoot and would, in theory, be okay with a 'reform the police from the inside candidate' don't seem to trust Lightfoot. It's also notable that, looking at the map - Lightfoot is favored on the North Side while Preckwinkle is favored on the south side. But both of them would be better than Daley, whose campaign promise mostly seemed to be graft?

 

Part of the reason why it's so hard to get an incumbent mayor out of office is because of the sheer number of signatures you need to even get on the ballot.  New York requires 3,750 (1 for every 2300 people), Los Angeles requires 500 (1 for every 8000). Chicago requires 12,500 signatures (1 for every 217 people) - all of which you can expect to be contested, and about half of them struck out, so you really should come with twice or three times the number you need. Chicago's high number of required signatures is because of a law that Richard M. Daley put in place requiring 25,000 signatures (50-75k in reality) for anyone who was not an incumbent. He'd blamed Washington's 1983 win on the fact that he and Byrne split the white vote and tried to make sure that wouldn't happen again. Someone contested the law as an undue burden on any challenger, and the courts agreed - and decided to halve the amount to today's 12,500. Learning about this was young silverandbea's first introduction to modern vote suppression and shifting the overton window in politics. So fourteen candidates had to get 12,500 unique signatures of registered voters - and did so. That means that over a tenth of the registered voters in Chicago signed a petition for at least one candidate.  That's also equivalent to about a third of everyone who voted yesterday. 
 

On the Aldermanic side of things, Ed Burke kept his seat - the one he's had for 50 years. He the one that's the subject of an FBI wiretap and whose law offices were raided earlier this year, also he's Trump's local property lawyer. Joe Moreno, whose scandals include impersonating a police officer and reporting his car stolen after his . . . girlfriend. . . borrowed it? Lost his. He was also mentioned in the Ed Burke wiretap, but not currently accused of doing anything illegal. 

There's a lot more that's going to runoff, which is also exciting.

Comments

thank you for this

[jesse_the_k]

Pocket guide to Chicago politics.

Which is better than any soap opera ever, except for the folks whose lives are destroyed.

Re: thank you for this

[silversandbea]

Ha, yeah. It's both hilarious and depressing, especially today (the vote to approve the vastly overbudgeted cop academy went through, despite widespread protests). And of course there's more! I didn't even cover the Willie Wilson campaign! My facebook feed has been wild. The worst part of it is the idea that the status quo can never change, and maybe the status quo isn't all that bad, really. I ended up explaining a version of that post to a friend of mine a few weeks ago (I'm fun at parties), and then had to explain why my mom, who is generally politically informed, might have turned around and voted Daley anyway.

So I guess the best part of this is that people seem to be willing to act for change, even if everything is stacked against them and some of them might have to end up in jail before they're voted out. And the choices that are left aren't the best, but at least I don't think either of them are likely to stay in office for 23 years if they end up being horrible.