Chicago mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel celebrates with supporters after winning the election.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative
Rahm Emanuel has been elected the next mayor of Chicago.
With 97 percent of precincts reporting, the former White House chief of staff had 55 percent of the vote and was on pace to become retiring Mayor Richard M. Daley’s successor without a run-off election.
Emanuel claimed victory in a speech to supporters shortly after 9 p.m. He touched on the reformist promises that he had made since resigning from his high-level post in Washington and returning to Chicago to run for mayor almost five months ago.
“It’s a victory for all those who believe we can overcome the old divisions and old ways that have held Chicago back,” said Emanuel, who was a North Side congressman for six years and who was Daley’s chief fundraiser in his first successful mayoral run in 1989. “Tonight we are moving forward in the only way we truly can — as one city with one future.”
Emanuel praised Daley as an “impossible act to follow,” but hinted at the sacrifice that he has said all Chicagoans and city workers would have to endure in these tough economic times.
“Nobody has ever loved Chicago more or served it with greater passion or commitment,” Emanuel said of the city’s longest-serving mayor. “This city has his imprint, and he has earned a special place in our hearts and our history.”
But he hinted at the city budget problems that he has said all Chicagoans and city workers would have to help solve. “We know that we face serious new challenges and overcoming them will not easy. It requires new ideas, cooperation and sacrifice from everyone involved.”
He also said he wanted to reach out to the the City Council, which has been bossed by Daley for more than two decades.
“We have a chance for a new partnership,” Emanuel said.
Emanuel’s closest competitor, Gery Chico, conceded the race, taking the podium at his campaign party shortly after 8:30 p.m. and saying he spoke by phone with Emanuel.
“We had a very, very pleasant phone call,” said Chico, who received less than 25 percent of the vote. “I pledged to Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel my full support … He couldn’t have been more gracious in the phone call.”
Chico concluded by again calling on his supporters to help Emanuel govern Chicago.
“Let’s all work together to get behind the new mayor and make this the best city on the face of the earth,” said Chico, who once was chief of staff to Mayor Daley and also led the park district and city colleges boards.
Based on all pre-election polling data, it appeared that the main question would be whether Emanuel would be able to win the majority needed to avoid a run-off election. In his quest to take Daley’s place, Emanuel entered with vast public recognition thanks to his ties to President Barack Obama.
The Emanuel campaign saturated the airwaves for the last three months, spending a record-breaking $7.88 million to air campaign commercials since Nov. 15, according to documents obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative.
Emanuel’s nearest rival in the fund-raising fight, Chico, spent a relatively paltry $2.7 million, sources told the CNC. The four other candidates did not have enough campaign cash to ever air a single ad on broadcast channels.
Emanuel also enjoyed the support of former President Bill Clinton, who visited Chicago to make a campaign speech and to headline a fund-raiser for his one-time White House aide.
Clinton and other supporters lauded Emanuel as the candidate who was tough enough to make the changes necessary in a time of economic stress. But labor unions, including the police and firefighters, instead endorsed Chico, whose late-stage campaign ads touted him as the best choice for “working families.”
As the campaign wound down, campaign aides to his rivals privately expressed hope that Emanuel would fail to win the majority needed to directly claim the mantle of Daley’s replacement, and that their candidates could at least finish second and get another chance to appear on the ballot in the run-off election.
With the vast majority of precincts reporting, Emanuel won wards across the city, but he enjoyed particularly huge margins in wards downtown and along the city’s northern lakefront. (Scroll down to see a ward-by-ward breakdown.)
Emanuel got 75 percent of the vote in the 42nd Ward, which includes most of the Loop, and 74 percent in the 43rd (the Lincoln Park neighborhood) and the 44th (Lakeview).
He also received more than two-thirds in the 46th (Uptown), 48th (Edgewater) and 32nd (Bucktown and Wicker Park), the partial returns indicated.
Chico appeared to enjoy a majority of votes in four wards — the 14th, 23rd, 12th and 10th. The aldermen of those wards had endorsed him, including powerful Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke, the 14th Ward alderman and Democratic boss for more than four decades.
Chico also won a plurality in some clout-heavy wards that historically have dominated City Hall, including Daley’s native 11th as well as the 19th and 13th.
Carol Moseley Braun was the first to concede, capping a disastrous run for the former U.S. senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood.
“We gave it our best,” she told supporters. “It is a very painful thing to lose an election.”
Less than two months ago, Braun’s leading black rivals dropped out of the mayor’s race and anointed her as the “consensus” candidate of the African-American leaders. But as she committed a series of verbal gaffes and struggled to raise campaign funds, her standing in polls plummeted dramatically.
Although black voters make up roughly 40 percent of the city’s electorate, it appeared that Emanuel won far more African-American votes than Braun, the only black woman senator.
If results hold and she finishes fourth in the six-candidate field, Braun will finish with a smaller share of the votes than any of the black politicians who were trounced by Daley over the past 22 years.
Braun and the third-place finisher, City Clerk Miguel del Valle, each received less than 10 percent.
In his concession speech, del Valle said he remained true to his ideals and bemoaned what he said was the the increasing divide between Chicago’s haves and have nots.
“Progress should be for all, not for some,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Danny Davis blamed the low voter turnout–barely 40 percent of registered voters– on the fragile state of the economy.
“People are hurting,”" Davis said as he waited for results at Braun’s election night headquarters at the Parkway Ballroom on the South Side. “People’s spirits are down and low. They don’t have any money. Hope.”
Davis, who dropped out of the mayoral race on New Years Eve to make way for one major African American candidate, said the campaign “trail was always muted” because people were “wondering if their heat is going to be on next week,” adding that all of the candidates “had a hard time convincing the voters that they really had some answers.”
Also at stake were all 50 seats in the City Council, where many longtime Daley allies recently retired and created open races in wards across Chicago.
Under Daley, the council supported the mayor’s agenda more faithfully than at any time in the city’s history, with a majority of aldermen defying him only once since he took office in 1989.
But a federal investigation into hiring fraud in 2005 led to the demise of the patronage armies that formed the Daley machine. And increased political activity by labor unions led to the defeat in the last election, in 2007, of several mayoral council allies.
Even more change could come in this year’s council races, as labor continues to be heavily involved in ward politics.
The retirements of such council veterans as William J.P. Banks (36th), Patrick Levar (45th) and Eugene Schulter (47th) prompted their Democratic ward organizations to try to cement hand-picked successors in the election. A record number of candidates sought to disrupt those plans with promises of change.
The results in the council races, perhaps more than the outcome of the mayor’s race, will reveal the extent of discontent in a city that faces huge budget deficits and where many voters expressed anger at the 2008 lease of the city’s parking meters to a private company.
Don Terry contributed reporting.
