Lori Lightfoot won in a “landslide” and has a “mandate” in a “change” election for mayor. Three claims, all thrilling, all need some chilling.
The landslide: Seventy-four percent of voters chose Lori Lightfoot, and she won in every one of Chicago’s 50 wards. What a landslide, what a mandate! But not mentioned enough — only only 33% of registered voters turned out.
The numbers, rounded off: Lightfoot won 74% of that 33% — that means she won only 24% of all registered voters. The numbers are more dispiriting if you remember there are some hundreds of thousands of eligible voters who aren’t even registered.* Yes, this was a historic election, a landslide and a mandate. But as always in Chicago politics, there are the included and the far greater number of the excluded.
Change: It was definitely a change election. And for more than the 24% who voted for Lightfoot. It wasn’t just Lightfoot’s voters who wanted change; plenty of Preckwinkle voters wanted change also. Despite people demonizing her as the machine candidate, she too had a leftist change platform, and she was supported by some of Chicago’s biggest agents of change — the CTU and SEIU Healthcare. But “change” is a powerful slogan partly because it is vague. Lightfoot said she sees herself as “the vessel into which people poured their hopes” — a good metaphor, rather like Obama’s “Hope and Change.”
Mandate: That word has been used a lot by Lightfoot and by news media since April 2. “Mandate” implies the struggle for power is over and there is consensus and unity. But the reality is that the “mandate” will continue to be shaped and contested by Chicago’s power players and interest groups, even more because this “change” election has unsettled and destabilized the city’s formal and informal structures of power. For all the editorials about Chicago’s dire and intractable financial crisis, city government with its $10 billion budget is a reservoir of wealth and resources — a precious prize for the taking, to be fought over by the political class, the business elites, and, if only they awaken, the people.
Lightfoot’s authority will be challenged in the city council, in the city’s ruling elites, and in the social movements, each striving to impose their own meaning on the mandate.
First, the city council. The turnout may have been small, but it is the voters who turn out, and only them, who matter to the political class. The aldermen all know that Lightfoot won overwhelmingly in every one of their wards. If they conspire against reform, she can, as she warned Ed Burke, “shine a light on them” in their wards. Ald. Matt O’Shea is one loyal Rahm alderman who “sees the light.” He voted Rahm’s way 94% of the time, but while he stood for the status quo before, now he knows that Lightfoot won 84% of the vote in his ward, and he has become her ally. When asked if aldermen will go along with the new mayor, he answered, “Mayor-elect Lightfoot has a mandate. She carried all 50 wards, she carried 2050 of 2070 precincts in the city. Every one of our communities overwhelmingly support her, including mine.”
The first test of Lightfoot’s power will be the selection of committee chairs. City Council Rule 36 may make clear that it is the aldermen who decide who chairs the committees, but this is Chicago. Rahm always decided, as did Mayor Daley before him. This is separation of powers the Chicago Way: The mayor separates the aldermen from power. The mayor controlled the aldermen through his huge campaign fund, control of the budget and projects, and ability to mobilize donors to support his friends and punish his enemies with primary challenges. Rahm’s campaign fund handed out over $620,000 to loyal aldermen in the election, and extra thousands to thank them in advance for their “yes” votes for the police academy and Lincoln Yards.
Enter Lightfoot, without Rahm’s millions and without his solid bloc in the council. Will the aldermen remember Rule 36 and remember it is their votes which decide the ordinances? Or will they remember the landslide for Lightfoot in their wards and “collaborate” — the word Lightfoot and some aldermen are using now? Carrie Austin (34th) and Anthony Beale (9th) are two who are posturing defiantly in defense of their privileges; but voting in their wards suggests Lightfoot is far more popular than they are.** Meanwhile, Lightfoot’s allies are coalescing around reform — or, at least, around the rising power. Scott Waguespack (32nd) told the Sun-Times, the 74% mandate means “people who are holding out for the old way of doing things — they’re not gonna have a choice.” Check back in six months.
What does “mandate” mean to the business class?
The city council won’t be the main obstacle to change. Nor will it be the main pressure or temptation for “compromise,” retreat, or sellout that Lightfoot will face. In her campaign, she made commitments to spend heavily to end Rahm’s regime of regressive taxes and fines; spend seriously on schools to reduce class size, hire nurses, social workers and librarians; replace the lead water pipes poisoning our children ($2 billion?); and redirect funds for police reform, affordable housing, neighborhood development and social programs. The mayoral candidates in the forums and meetings with editorial boards evaded this question before all others: What will you cut, who will you tax? And now Lightfoot faces the city’s looming financial crisis — a $251 million budget shortfall and $276 million in new pension payments in her first year, with an additional $1 billion in new revenue per year to fund pensions starting in 2023.
Here she meets the non-negotiable demand of the financial sector that rules Chicago: Tax the middle class and poor and cut spending. FIRE rules Chicago — Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, the real Borg of city politics everywhere. History is replete with reformist politicians who heard its mantra and succumbed: “Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.”
This is how FIRE understands the “mandate”: Reform means balancing the budget, and the mandate means, by whatever means necessary: Cut the pensions and health care of city workers, privatize parking and everything else you sell off, close schools and mental health centers and libraries, tear down public housing, raise property taxes, drive out the poor and working class and bring in the professional class — but don’t let that stop you from diverting billions away from schools and infrastructure and into mega-projects like Lincoln Yards and The 78.
The power struggle has already begun. Lightfoot called for a halt on Lincoln Yards and The 78 — estimated to cost the city $1.3 billion and $700 million, respectively. Surprising many, Mayor Emanuel also called to delay the vote in the Finance Committee, and lame duck Finance Chair Patrick O’Connor agreed to hold off a vote for two days. Chicago is known for its vibrant theater scene.
You would think that the massive city expenditure now, in the midst of a budget crisis that clearly worries the elites, would bring them to oppose the projects; but rationality typically takes second place to mega-profits and the expectation that costs can always be passed down to the taxpayers. And let’s remember that Lightfoot is calling for a closer look and maybe some renegotiation, but never said she opposed the project.
The social movements. The activists have yet another interpretation of the mandate — a mayor and city government held accountable to the people. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the mayoral contest was the leftist, social justice framing of the mayoral candidates’ platforms — they all had to address the demands of the progressive activists and the unions.
While editorials hail the “historic” “change” election, it’s easy to watch the two candidates fight it out and forget who made it all happen. We get so pulled into the spectacle that it seems like it was the two of them, Lightfoot and Preckwinkle, two warriors alone on the battlefield with their campaign staffs, their elite supporters, and donors. But when Lori Lightfoot walked into the mayor’s office, it was only after thousands of activists had battered down the door. It was the years of protest that opened up this election to Lightfoot and Preckwinkle by forcing Rahm out of the running.
Lightfoot rode a blue wave into power. Remember the pictures in the news — the 10,000 teachers and supporters marching down State Street, Black Lives Matter shutting down the Gold Coast and Lake Shore Drive. None of this would have happened without the Movement for Black Lives confronting police racism and violence, the 2012 teachers strike, the community activism against school closings and gentrification, none of it without the nationwide surges of resistance that swept through Chicago and every other city, the many movements coming together, and the unseen work and talk and sacrifice of countless people marching, messaging, conversations, doors opened and closed.
Activists know all this and are encouraged by their ability to propel progressives and socialists into the city council — five, possibly six socialists, and more independents to join the council’s Progressive Caucus. But the celebration has to be tempered by the many who stayed away, untouched by the hopes and enthusiasm. It’s a Marxist trope that it’s the people who make history — yes, but while they are making history, most of the time most people aren’t paying much attention. We have to remember the 67% of registered voters who didn’t vote, and the many thousands more who are left out on the far margins of the political system.
To develop into a truly broad-based movement, progressives need to scale up the numbers. They also need to bridge deep racial divisions. It matters that there was no Hispanic candidate in the runoff. It matters that there was no single candidate around whom either Blacks or Hispanics could unite. It matters that the turnout was disproportionately low, 31%, both in the majority Black and the majority Hispanic wards (39% in the majority white wards).
Hopes for change in Chicago have looked back to the “Rainbow Coalition” of Blacks, Hispanics and liberal whites which defeated the machine and propelled our only genuine reform mayor into power, Harold Washington. But that was not a mature movement, because it was one leader, Washington, who held it together, and at his death in his second term, the coalition fell apart and the machine revived.
Richard M. Daley came to power determined to prevent any such coalition from forming again, determined to put an end to the periodic eruptions of black power that were the drivers of Chicago’s movements. He drew on the machine’s resources of jobs, contracts, zoning to coopt Black leadership in the city council and the churches, and absorb Hispanic leadership into the machine in the Hispanic Democratic Organization. That divisive strategy, aided by increasing competition between Blacks and Hispanics for scarce jobs and contracts, poses what may prove the most intractable strategic challenge for Chicago’s progressive activists.
It’s no mystery why most people stay away on election day. They have learned that voting will make no difference to their lives. Elections will have to look very different for them to come out to vote, movements will have to look very different for them to take part. The left will have to look very different.
But eight years ago, who could have expected these victories? Then Rahm Emanuel was closing schools and mental health clinics, trying to eviscerate the teachers union — but now, with Chicago starting to look different, it’s easier to imagine how different it can look again in eight years.
—Paul Elitzik
*Only 519,728 voted in the runoff. The 2010 census shows 2,073,968 over 18, but the census of course doesn’t ask how many are citizens. Yet.
** Beale got 59% and Austin 54% in their wards, where Lightfoot, in the runoff, got 70% and 69%, respectively. (Summary Reports, Chicago Board of Election Commissioners)
