A scant two days after Mayor Richard Daley announced he would not be seeking re-election as mayor of Chicago, the Sun-Times has produced a poll of the leading candidates for the job. Here are the results:
| Bob Fioretti | 3% |
| Jim Houlihan | 3% |
| Terry Peterson | 4% |
| Gery Chico | 6% |
| Rahm Emanuel | 7% |
| Jesse Jackson, Jr. | 8% |
| Luis Gutierrez | 9% |
| James Meeks | 10% |
| Tom Dart | 12% |
| Don’t know | 35% |
| Other | 3% |
That supports the observations I’ve been making about a Rahm Emanuel candidacy rather nicely: it’s far from a done deal. I think the national media has misunderstood what Mr. Emanuel meant when he said he was interested in being mayor of Chicago. I think that what he meant was that he was interested in being crowned mayor of Chicago, the way he was anointed Congressional representative from my district, not that he was interested in running for mayor in a crowded field of Chicagoans with constituencies and organizations of their own.
Mayor Daley has declined to endorse a successor; I see no reason to doubt his word that he doesn’t plan to. There’s a big difference between running as the designated successor and running as just another guy on the ballot. Rahm Emanuel is a smart guy, I strongly suspect that polls like this will show him what his real prospects are, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an announcement from him soon that he doesn’t plan to go anywhere.
I suspect that what we’re going to see at first is struggle within racial, ethnic, and other factions, then struggle between the winners of those factions. There are several credible African American prospects, e.g. Terry Peterson, Jesse Jackson, Jr., and James Meeks, as well as several solid prospective Hispanic contenders, e.g. Gery Chico and Luis Gutierrez. I expect we’ll see more possibilities being raised within each group. So, for example, I don’t see a female candidate in the poll above. I also don’t see any Bobby Rush proteges there.
I continue to believe another contest between the southeast side and the southwest side is more likely than not.
I don’t what the opinion of Russ Stewart’s analysis in Chicago is, but he has an interesting chart trying to quantify mayoral probabilities. He has Rahm ranked 10th (tied with Jackson, Jr.), with him being high in fundraising ability, but low in organization and ability to expand a base.
Here’s the chart:
http://www.russstewart.com/8-4-10chart.htm
An interesting handicapping. Thanks, PD. I tend to like Stewart’s analyses.
As I intimated in my post I think the front-runners at this moment are Meeks and Dart. If anything, I think that he’s over-estimating Emanuel’s ability to expand his base. For one thing, what base? He’s never run in a contested election for anything.
I guess I’m more interested in how Chicagoans are reacting to the idea that their future mayor hasn’t been picked for them.