Ex-Obama aide hopes to avoid run-off in Chicago mayoral race

FORMER White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel hoped to win more than half the vote yesterday in the Chicago mayoral race to avoid a run-off election.

Emanuel has been running close to or past the 50% mark in recent polls in his bid to succeed Richard M Daley, who is retiring in May after 22 years as mayor of the nation’s third largest city and President Barack Obama’s home town.

Emanuel’s closest contender is former Chicago public schools president Gery Chico, who had 19% of the vote in the most recent poll, with a four-point advantage over Emanuel among the growing Hispanic electorate.

If Emanuel didn’t win outright yesterday, the second runner-up will compete in a run-off election on April 5 — and have that much more time to attack Emanuel’s ideas for running the financially troubled city, a Democratic Party bastion.

“I’m praying for a run-off,” said mayoral contender and city clerk Miguel del Valle. “This has been such a shortened campaign season, I think the city desperately needs a run-off to delve into these really complicated issues that are affecting everyone in the neighbourhoods.”

Emanuel won endorsements from the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune and built a $12 million (€8.78m) campaign war chest. He has blanketed local TV with ads lavishing praise for Emanuel from Obama and former President Bill Clinton.

But Emanuel’s campaign hasn’t been trouble-free. He spent weeks this winter fighting claims by some residents that he didn’t meet residency requirements because of his time in Washington, DC. A state appeals court threw him off the ballot in late January, but the state’s Supreme Court reinstated him.

Emanuel’s five rivals, which include former US Senator Carol Moseley Braun, have mostly focused their attacks on him rather than on each other. Chico, for example, has run ads attacking Emanuel’s proposal to extend the city’s sales tax to some services, calling it “the Rahm tax.”

Whoever wins must make unpopular choices. Chicago, like many local and state governments, is staggering under fiscal problems, with a half billion dollar deficit and shortfalls in its public worker pensions.

“The next mayor will face enormously difficult decisions,” said Laurence Msall, president of The Civic Federation, a non-partisan research group.

The new mayor also will have a new, less pliable city council, with 20 of its 50 wards getting new aldermen, said Dick Simpson, head of the political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Reuters