Bill Schwartz on Tuesday fed his ballot into a ballot box at a polling place in the basement of a bungalow on North Rockwell.
Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago News Cooperative
Terrence O’Brien got his start in Chicago Democratic politics like so many of his peers and the generations that came before him, dutifully ringing doorbells to solicit votes for his state senator on the far North Side. He rose to coordinating other precinct captains for such candidates as a young Cook County state’s attorney and mayoral hopeful named Richard M. Daley.
After serving some 20 years as an elected leader of the obscure-but-jobs-rich Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, Mr. O’Brien decided last year that the time was ripe to seek higher office, to run for county board president. So he lined up the longest list of endorsements from Democratic Party leaders of any of the four candidates in Tuesday’s primary election.
Not so long ago, Mr. O’Brien would have had armies of precinct workers ringing doorbells — for him this time — and the backing of the party brass would have ensured a strong showing. Instead, Mr. O’Brien placed a distant second, 26 percentage points behind Alderman Toni Preckwinkle.
In doing so, Mr. O’Brien was one striking example of a major shift toward something new in Illinois Democratic politics: The end of the political machine has led to the primacy of the outsider candidate.
On Wednesday morning, Thomas Manion, Mr. O’Brien’s senior campaign strategist and a former mayoral political operative, said he lacked the stomach to look at the breakdown of votes: Mr. O’Brien had lost in most Chicago wards and suburban townships where local party leaders had endorsed him.
“The areas where we needed to do well, they gutted us,” Mr. Manion said of the opposition.
The party organizations “have been struggling with the decline of patronage,” he added. “That’s what made organizations strong. It’s a new world.”
Mr. Manion then recalled how in 1991, as director of field operations for Mayor Daley’s first re-election campaign, “we had 10,000 volunteers.”
“We were four and five deep in the precincts,” he said.
Until just a few years ago, the local political machine could still hum powerfully by promising plum spots on the public payroll to its most loyal and effective campaign workers. The courts had ruled that the rewarding of jobs to political insiders should not continue, but a federal corruption investigation revealed that the practice continued to thrive.
It all ended, however, after a midnight raid of Mayor Daley’s patronage office in April 2005. The next year, a federal jury convicted Robert Sorich, the mayoral patronage chief, and two other city officials of rigging hiring and promotions to increase the mayor’s power, and they were sentenced to federal prison. Mr. Sorich remains in prison in Yankton, S.D. — his release is scheduled for the day after this fall’s general election, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons.
While the federal case never led to charges against the mayor or his top aides, its impact on local politics was pervasive Tuesday. Even in races where the establishment’s candidates prevailed, outsiders came surprisingly close.
After Jesus Garcia crossed Mr. Daley 11 years ago, he was bounced from the state legislature by Hispanic patronage workers who answered to the mayor’s organization. On Tuesday, Mr. Garcia ousted Joseph Mario Moreno, the incumbent and a consummate party man, from his county board post.
Alderman Ricardo Munoz (22nd Ward) quarterbacked the campaigns of both Mr. Garcia and Rudy Lozano Jr., who was 565 votes shy of toppling State Representative Daniel J. Burke of Chicago, despite having a far smaller campaign war chest than the incumbent. Mr. Burke is the brother of Edward Burke, chairman of the City Council’s finance committee and Democratic boss of the city’s 14th ward.
“It’s an awakening,” Mr. Munoz said. “It’s the end of the caciquismo, the bossism.”
Mr. Lozano said that he had come up against the money and power of Michael J. Madigan, the Illinois House speaker, and he promised to challenge Daniel Burke again in the next election.
“Losing by a few hundred votes to the Madigans and Burkes is a political victory,” Mr. Lozano said.
Mr. Lozano has deep family ties to Chicago politics; his father helped Harold Washington become Chicago’s first black mayor in 1983.
Edward Burke could still brag that he handily delivered the precincts in his ward for his brother.
“In the 14th Ward, Dan carried with almost 72 percent of the vote,” Edward Burke said. “In the area where the Burkes are best known, we can still draw on the loyalty of voters.”
Beyond the Burkes’ political backyard, however, Mr. Lozano did well. “With the demise of patronage,” Edward Burke said, “the kind of political armies that used to be fielded have diminished.”
The Cook County Democratic Party’s fading potency was also evident further down the ballot. Edward Burke, a 40-year City Council veteran, is the chairman of the party’s committee for judges. Two of the party’s three picks for vacancies on the state appellate bench lost on Tuesday.
The true powerhouses of local politics today, Alderman Burke said, are unions that have the financial wherewithal as well as members who are willing to campaign door-to-door for labor’s favored candidates. Organized labor unseated several aldermen in the 2007 election, singling out Council members who had supported non-union Wal-Mart’s opening more stores in Chicago.
The Service Employees International Union spent at least $1.5 million to help Gov. Patrick J. Quinn win Tuesday’s primary. They also backed Ms. Preckwinkle as well as Mr. Garcia.
Another longtime beneficiary of that union’s largesse, Alderman Joe Moore (49th), bounced happily from one election-night party to another with his wife on Tuesday and into Wednesday morning. Accustomed to the lonely life of the rare mayoral critic on the Council, Mr. Moore was largely in the company of winners for that night.
First, he and his wife cheered Ms. Preckwinkle’s victory speech. From her party, they went to cheer David Hoffman, the United States Senate hopeful who made his reputation as the corruption-fighting city inspector general unafraid of confronting the mayor’s friends and family.
Although Mr. Moore was among the few elected officials who endorsed him, Mr. Hoffman finished a strong second to Alexi Giannoulias, the state treasurer. The vote breakdown shows that Mr. Hoffman won a plurality in many areas where party leaders endorsed Mr. Giannoulias.
The Moores’ evening ended at Governor Quinn’s packed party. The outcome of the Democratic primary for governor had still not been decided then, but the governor eventually claimed a narrow victory over Dan Hynes, the state comptroller and heir to a Southwest Side political dynasty.
“We’re witnessing the slow evolution of politics in this state,” Mr. Moore said at the end of his long night in hotel ballrooms.
He acknowledged that Ms. Preckwinkle and Mr. Quinn eventually had support from many of the local political powers. Ms. Preckwinkle had gratefully accepted help from friends of Mayor Daley, and Mr. Quinn held a news conference shortly before the primary with Joseph Berrios, chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party.
But Mr. Moore added that Ms. Preckwinkle and Mr. Quinn had built their careers outside the traditional path to power in Illinois.
“They went solo,” he said. “They did not rely on any political patron. They went over the heads of the establishment and went directly to the voters.”
In Ms. Preckwinkle’s case, power brokers like Mayor Daley’s allies only “jumped on her bandwagon when she looked like a winner,” Alderman Moore said.
Success stories like that, he predicted, will inspire others to seek political advancement on their own terms.
“Many have tried that over the years,” Mr. Moore said of the outsider candidates who now jockey for election. “Increasing numbers are succeeding, or coming close to succeeding.”
