The editors of the Chicago Tribune via Yahoo News remark on the ward remap just approved by the City Council. Here’s the new breakdown:
The battle royale over Chicago’s ward remap appears to be over. The City Council’s Black and Latino caucuses had been tussling for months about the decennial redrawing of aldermanic boundaries, but it seems as if both sides have reached a compromise.
The new map lays out 16 Black-majority wards along with a ward with Black plurality, Ald. Walter Burnett’s 27th Ward. The proposed map also establishes 14 Latino wards, one less than the Latino Caucus had sought, as well as an Asian-majority ward, a first for the city.
then the explanation:
The compromise speaks to what really motivates too many on the City Council — the ceaseless quest to accumulate more clout.
Before backroom wheeling-and-dealing prevailed, the Latino Caucus appeared to embrace the ideal that everyday Chicagoans should play an integral role in the remap. The caucus aligned itself with Change Illinois, a civic advocacy group that led an effort to craft a remap that incorporated citizen input. The caucus had hoped to pit that document, known as the “People’s Map,†against the Black Caucus’ map in a referendum that would appear on the June 28 primary ballot.
When the Latino Caucus failed in that bid, its members still had a choice: Put an earlier Latino Caucus map up against the Black Caucus map in the referendum and let Chicagoans decide the democratic way, through a vote. Or, put themselves first, shut voters out of the process, and cut a deal that gives them a more favorable set of ward boundaries ahead of the 2023 city elections.
Naturally, they selected the latter alternative. Finally, the implications:
Focusing attention on crafting a fair, sensible ward remap that incorporates the will of voters doesn’t have to mean that all other aldermanic work and City Hall functioning must stop, or even get short shrift. City Hall is supposed to multitask. And if giving voters a say in the remap puts another task in each alderman’s in-basket, then so be it.
The disappointing outcome of this year’s remap debacle exposes a core problem in how Chicago redraws its ward boundaries every 10 years. The process is never going to be fair as long as it remains the sole purview of the politicians who stand to benefit from keeping the effort behind closed doors, where they can carve up whole communities into gerrymandered fiefdoms.
Aldermen should, for once, put the interests of everyday Chicagoans above their own and work with Springfield to craft legislation that would put the city’s decennial remapping in the hands of an independent citizens commission. That would take the process out of its current Star Chamber environment, and give voters a voice that has been muted for far too long.
This year’s remap must be the last in which Chicago voters get shoved to the side.
I think they’re dreaming. Maximizing clout means maximizing the amount of money not just for the wards they notionally serve but, more importantly, for themselves.
I believe there are implications other than those to which the editors draw attention. To understand what is happening you should know more about the demographics of Chicago’s 50 wards and how they have changed over time.
| Year | Group | Wards |
| 2001 | Black | 20 |
| Hispanic | 11 | |
| White | 19 | |
| 2012 | Black | 18 |
| Hispanic | 13 | |
| White | 19 | |
| 2022 | Black | 16 |
| Hispanic | 14 | |
| Asian | 1 | |
| White | 19 |
The first column is the year in which the map was approved, the second is the major ethnic/racial group, and the third the number of wards with a majority of that group. What do you notice? The number of wards with black majorities has declined substantially over time, the number of wards with Hispanic majorities has increased, and the number of wards with white majorities has remained the same. Meanwhile, the absolute number of Asians has increased to the point where one ward has an Asian majority.
I have written about this previously and everything is proceeding precisely as I have predicted. I believe that total black “clout” peaked in 2019 with the election of Lori Lightfoot as mayor, running in the run-off against Toni Preckwinkle who is also black. Hispanic “clout” lags because, frankly, they don’t vote. I don’t know what percentage of Chicago’s Hispanic population are eligible to vote but only 13% of Chicago voter turnout in the presidential election was Hispanic, so that might give us some idea. In other words Chicago Hispanics are already punching over their weight.
And white “clout” is not declining. If anything it’s increasing, able to set black and Hispanic politicians against one another.
My own opinion is that a) Chicago’s overall population will continue to decline (I think it already has since the census was taken); b) Chicago’s black population will decline faster than that of any other group; c) Chicago’s Hispanic population may already have peaked; and d) over time we won’t speak of “Hispanic population” any more than we do of “Irish population” or “German population” although those were encountered frequently in years gone by. We’ll just talk about the white population and Hispanics will be an ethnicity among the white population just as the Irish, Germans, and Italians are.
