If you were busy watching flops in the World Cup, or preparing your float for the Pride parade, you might have missed the unofficial start of the 2015 mayoral race last Thursday.
The consensus among many elected officials, political operatives, activists, and pollsters is that Mayor Emanuel can be defeated, but no one wants to say so too loudly, for the simple reason that he’s still the safest bet to win in February. He has the name, the money, the connections, and the proven ability to get elected, and there’s no doubt that he’s running. You can’t say that about anyone else.
Can she win? Not if she doesn’t run. “She would wallop Rahm in my ward,” says an alderman of an affluent white part of the city—which is supposed to be the mayor’s base.
Lewis might be able to win if she forges a coalition like Washington’s: almost all the black voters, half the Hispanics, and 20 percent of the whites, nervous Nellies or not.
He’s now on year four of what he describes as a “listening tour,” hitting churches on Sunday mornings and driving through wards far from his own. And as a white guy representing a mostly black area, he’s shown, at least on a modest scale, that he can build a wide base.
If Lewis, Preckwinkle, and Fioretti don’t run, we will have essentially returned to the later years of the Daley regime. That’s when horribly underfunded unknowns like William “Dock” Walls and the Reverend Paul Jakes ran kamikaze campaigns against the powerful incumbent.
