Where Was Daley?
As it was, Chicago voters did a pretty good job of rallying on their own. Kerry won all 50 wards–including the 41st, which has the city’s only Republican alderman–racking up about 81 percent of the total vote.
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Nevertheless registration and turnout were slightly lower this year than in 2000, when Daley’s brother William was Al Gore’s campaign manager. In the Hispanic wards around Little Village and Pilsen turnout was around 50 percent. In black areas on the south and west sides it ranged from 62 to 73 percent. By my conservative count there would have been at least 30,000 more votes for Kerry if blacks and Hispanics had voted at the same rate, 80 percent, as whites.
Daley’s father, Richard J. Daley, wasn’t any nicer to independents, but at least he was loyal to Democratic presidential candidates. He held torchlight parades and sent out his precinct captains to bring in a big vote. In 1960 he supposedly slowed down the city’s vote counting until the statewide totals came in and he knew just how many west-side votes were needed to put John Kennedy over the top. He was so loyal to his party that in 1972 he held a gala fund-raiser for George McGovern, even though McGovern’s supporters had booted him out of the Democratic convention.
About three weeks before the election the Sun-Times reported that up to 18 percent of black voters might cast ballots for President Bush, according to a poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research firm that specializes in polling African-Americans. “Bush is picking up support among self-styled conservative Christian blacks and blacks making more than $60,000 a year,” the paper stated. The president’s “support among conservative Christian blacks is tied to his backing for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and his ‘faith-based’ initiatives to funnel federal social welfare funds through church-linked groups.”
In some precincts the total vote count was around 400, and Bush managed to get only 8 or 9 of them. In the 26th precinct of the 21st Ward he didn’t get a single vote. Of 296 votes cast, Kerry got 295 and Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate, got one.
The precinct–bounded by Wells, LaSalle, Chicago, and Oak–contains a big subsidized-housing complex with a large contingent of Jewish immigrants from Russia. “Here’s what happened,” says Natarus. “[Former New York City mayor Ed] Koch came out in favor of Bush, and that had a big impact. Even though Jews are very sensitive to economic and social issues, the status of the state of Israel is important. But you should know, I came out strong for Kerry. We carried every single precinct–except for that one.”
