Chicago mayor race: Democrat v Democrat in ideological battle on the left

His opponent has dubbed him "Mayor 1 per cent", the candidate of the rich, and the tag has stuck. The approval rating of Democratic Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is down to 29 per cent and he has just been given an unexpected bloody nose in the first round of a re-election campaign that is being watched nationally. Truth is stranger than fiction, but the tantalising immersion of The Good Wife's Alicia Florrick in the no-holds-barred rough and tumble of Windy City politics could pick up a few pointers.

The contest to run the fourth largest city in the US has pitted President Obama's former chief of staff against an opponent who is not a Republican but a Democrat on his left. An election that has been about austerity and cutbacks has parallels with the remarkable victory of of radical community activist Bill de Blasio in New York in 2013. In some ways, it is also a proxy for the ideological struggle within the Democrats between the Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren wings of the party in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Chicago has been through tough times. Criminal violence and economic uncertainty have blighted Emanuel’s first term, which has seen him embracing “municipal neoliberalism”, closing mental health facilities and some 50 schools (thus setting off the first teachers’ strike in a quarter of a century) and privatising city services. The city is broke and has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Although unemployment has eased, most new jobs are low-paid. Only six out of 78 communities report a per-capita average income of more than $50,000 (€45,400), while nearly half of them have average incomes below $20,000 (€18,200), $3,000 below the poverty line.

Although the right-wing Emanuel, who has clashed repeatedly with liberals, has spent some $7 million (€6.35 million) on TV ads and has a war chest of $15 million (€13.6 million), 12 times that of his main rival, the latter has, to great surprise, denied him a first-round majority, forcing a runoff election on April 7th.

Emmanuel took 45 per cent, a "huge embarrassment", according to the Chicago Sun Times, against Cook County commissioner Jesús "Chuy" García's 34 per cent. The balance was taken by minor candidates.

On a roll

“Chuy”, a Latino former alderman and state legislator with strong links to organised labour, who had run specifically at the request of the teacher unions, is on a roll.

“Today, we the people have spoken,” he declared. “Not the people with the money and the power and the connections. Not the giant corporations, the big-money special interests, the hedge funds and Hollywood celebrities who poured tens of millions of dollars into the mayor’s campaign. They all had their say. They’ve had their say for too long. But today, the rest of us had something to say.”

García's involvement in local politics goes back to 1987, when he was first elected alderman as a supporter of Harold Washington, an anti-machine progressive who became the city's first black mayor. City politics have always been fiercely fought, a mix of machine, personal, class, ethnic (Irish, of course) and racial tensions. García, who has embraced a style and rhetoric that owes much to strands of the Occupy movement, appears to be succeeding in bridging the city's deep Latino/African-American divide, which was skilfully exploited by the Irish machine of the Daley clan that ran the city for years.

Favours

Emanuel’s reputation for favouring the rich has not been helped by a report in the

Chicago Tribune

that of his top 106 campaign contributors, 60 received favours from the city. The

International Business Tribune

claimed that he was evading his own much trumpeted executive order banning campaign contributions from city contractors by shovelling $38 million (€ 34.5 million) in city resources to his donors via “direct voucher payments”, a loophole that lets businesses get city money without bids or contracts .

But even if the votes of the two eliminated candidates now go predominantly to García, his challenge in closing the gap with Emmanuel is substantial, not least because of a low turnout in the February first round which particularly affected African-American and poor white voters. With the Hispanic vote unlikely to turn out in greater numbers, he will have to take the battle on to Emmanuel’s home ground.

Yet what appears to be happening in Chicago, as in New York and Seattle (where, last year, 90,000 voters elected an openly socialist councillor, of the Joe Higgins hue), is the emergence at municipal and state level of a different kind of politics from that practised at national level, where the gridlock between the establishment parties has alienated so many voters. Echoes perhaps of our own anti-austerity movement and a harbinger of things to come?

psmyth@irishtimes.com