ASpeaking of the complexities of Chicago politics, 43-year-old Councilwoman Maria Hadden was sitting in her car near East Rogers Park, watching a broken-down garbage truck on North South Street being pulled over, bringing traffic to a standstill in the area. She wondered who she should call, because she figured someone would most likely call her.
Haden’s district, in the northeast corner of Chicago, is just over two square miles—small enough that you could tell every inch of it. As she was planning her plan, one Haden constituent, tired of hearing car horns, decided to take matters into her own hands. “So she went out and got two brightly colored billboards—like a 16-by-24-inch billboard—and literally taped handwritten signs to the front and back of a parked garbage truck saying ‘broken down,’ so people could see it was broken down and not come here and not honk their horns.”
This is Chicago politics: famous for retail, famous for local, famous for personality.
“Chicago is the Hollywood of politics,” Hadden said, “because I feel like Chicago politics has a certain amount of celebrity, a certain amount of glamour, a certain amount of power, a certain amount of corruption, all of the really interesting elements of Chicago politics.”
This is, of course, the city of democratic giants Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Richard Daley.
As thousands of delegates take to the streets of the windy city for the Democratic National Convention, they will find themselves in a city struggling to reinvent its politics after decades of dominance by the city's famous Democratic machine.
That mechanism began to break down a generation ago, starting with the election of Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, in 1983, said Dick Simpson, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former Chicago city councilman.
Obama’s rise, Simpson says, was not the result of the Chicago machine, but of the appeal of Washington as a reformer. Obama came to Chicago to work on community issues, and he saw a glimmer of hope in Washington’s victory over the machine. Obama persuaded the city to open a job-training office on Michigan Avenue in Roseland, then a voter registration project, before he himself sought public office.
In the past, the political machine worked to bind Chicago’s disparate communities together. But a series of court orders in the 1970s undermined the use of patronage appointments—the granting of government jobs to campaign workers as an act of loyalty by a politician—to buy political support at the neighborhood level.
“There are remnants of the machine in the Democratic Party,” Simpson said. “Democrats still have neighborhood committee members. But their patronage jobs have gone from over 35,000 to less than 5,000. It’s fragmented.”
Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, U.S. ambassador to Japan, and two-term mayor of Chicago, was perhaps the last person to run Chicago with full force. His withdrawal from a third run opened the door to Lori Lightfoot, who lost reelection after finishing third 18 months ago. It was the first loss for a sitting mayor in 40 years.
Reform has become the dominant force in city politics today, Simpson said.
“There are two factions now in Chicago,” Simpson says. “They are what you might call the moderate Democratic faction, or the pragmatic Democratic faction, and the progressive reform faction within the Democratic Party.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, one of those progressive reformers, has been dogged by problems from all sides since taking office in 2023. The fallout from the corruption conviction of Ed Burke, a prominent figure in Chicago politics for six decades and a longtime Democratic Party chairman, continues to unfold as the cases of his co-conspirators dominate headlines.
Chicago is still struggling to accommodate migrants being sent from southern states as part of a partisan political game. Although the number of migrants crossing the Texas border has dropped sharply over the past year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pledged last month to continue busing them to Chicago.
Another central issue, both political and personal, is crime. Violence has been on the decline in Chicago since the start of the pandemic. The 28-day average of homicides is now at a five-year low, according to city statistics. But the city still has an annual homicide rate of about 21 per 100,000 by 2024, about four times the national average and a source of continued bad publicity.
Johnson, a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, has watched contract negotiations with the union collapse over disagreements over how to address a massive budget deficit and underfunding of schools.
Chicago politics are so divided that anyone in the spotlight is vulnerable, said Don Rose, 94, Martin Luther King’s press secretary in Chicago and a respected political consultant. “As angry as they were with Lori Lightfoot … the current mayor, he probably won’t get a second term either,” Rose said. “He started making rookie mistakes. He made himself unpopular too early, and he’s never fully recovered.”
Republicans live in Chicago, too, of course.
“I see red hats everywhere,” said Susan Patel, executive director of the South Asian American Chamber of Commerce of Illinois and a Democratic delegate for Chicago’s Suganash neighborhood, adding that only eight neighborhoods in the city could elect a Republican.
Urban renewal and migration complicate city politics, she said. Neighborhoods don’t stand still. Change in a city of 2.7 million is constant. And each neighborhood tends to have political and ethnic clusters that make neighborhoods distinct.
Complaints about crime, police quality, traffic, taxes or anything else are unlikely to change that, she said. But failure to act quickly is a political death sentence.
Against this backdrop, the Democratic National Convention will descend, bringing more and more attention, but also more obstacles.
Most of the convention will be held at the United Center in downtown Chicago on the Near West Side. Other events will be held at McCormick Place, just south of downtown and east of Chinatown. Organizers have begun fencing off convention areas in ways that are already starting to irritate neighborhoods.
“Chicago. We want attention and we don’t want attention,” Haden said. “I think that’s what we are.”
This article was modified on August 20, 2024. Brandon Johnson was elected mayor of Chicago in 2023, not 2022.
