CHICAGO, IL — A Trekkie, a salsa dancer, a member of the 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame, even a man who once went by the nickname “Cinnabon John”–all are among the roster of candidates running for council today in this city’s municipal elections, according to the Chicago Tribune.
A colorful crop of candidates is nothing new: For years, the alt-weekly Chicago Reader has dubbed its coverage of the city’s legislature “Aldermania!” But there is a renewed sense of competition, and potential political significance, to the ward races as well. That means it has been a fun season for reporters tracking the campaign–even as perennial concern about scant coverage of ward races persists.
Chicago’s 50 aldermen are elected every four years to represent separate wards, or districts, across America’s third largest city. Traditionally, though the council members provided juicy fodder for the political columnists, Election Day offered few surprises. But the end of the father-son machine that ruled the city for more than four decades and the aldermen’s own redistricting have given the neighborhood races a jolt.
“It’s really interesting to cover,” said Mick Dumke, a senior writer at the Chicago Reader, the city’s alternative weekly. “This is municipal politics at the most local level, hilarious and discouraging. It’s just a circus.”
That’s partly because Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is also on the ballot Tuesday, is an outsider in a city of insiders, with money but not the deep neighborhood relationships his predecessors had. Emanuel was elected in 2011 after Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley, decided not to run after a record 22 years in office. (His father, Richard J. Daley, was mayor for 21 years.)
Emanuel’s relative outsider status didn’t hurt much in his first term, as the council mostly rubber-stamped the mayor’s proposals, according to a recent study. But in 2012, the aldermen redrew the ward boundaries, reshaping the neighborhoods they represented and creating new contests for election. The city’s unions, which often oppose the mayor, have become involved, backing their own ward candidates in the election.
“Nobody cared about the aldermanics from the eighties to 2007,” said Dan Mihalopoulos, a veteran City Hall reporter who has worked for both of the city’s main dailies and is now an investigative journalist at the Chicago Sun-Times. “Daley rebuilt the political machine of his father. There was very little turnover. There’s more competitiveness in the races now.”
On Tuesday, 43 incumbents are running to hold onto their seats, according to Aldertrack, a Chicago-based website that mines election data and campaign mailers for insider information on the ward races. In Chicago elections, if no candidates wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-getters face a run-off.
“I do think there will be a lot of run-offs,” Mihalopoulos said. “There’s no machine to enforce some of this stuff. I don’t think there will be many incumbents who lose. There could be.” (Emanuel himself is hovering close to the run-off threshhold in the latest polling, though he is widely expected to win re-election.)
With more competition in the races, the stories are getting better, said Andy Greiner, who oversees the Ward Room blog for the local NBC station. And the political stakes are growing. “There’s a lot of hope among progressives that the machine is breaking down,” Greiner said.
But while the campaigns are more active, many voters may still have a hard time finding in-depth coverage. Dick Simpson, a former alderman and now political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said it’s an ongoing problem for the city’s news organizations to give the races enough attention. This year, there are 184 candidates, with three to five candidates in some races, and the media cannot keep track of all of them, Simpson said.
“They do the endorsements,” he said of the media. “The Sun-Times stopped endorsing a few elections back. They’ve gone back to endorsing. That is helpful as a cue to voters. But generally they can only cover one or two wards at a time. They can’t cover all the territory.”
After every election, Chicago journalist Steve Rhodes, who runs the Beachwood Reporter, a website focused on local politics, culture, and media criticism, publishes a review of which races never got coverage in major local outlets.
“I show which challengers came within 100 votes and never got their names in the Tribune or Sun-Times and not in TV news,” Rhodes said. He added that his own best source on the upcoming election has been his Twitter feed. “That’s where I’m seeing residents or campaigns themselves or interested advocacy groups,” he said. “That’s where I’m seeing the mailers. People are posting a lot of the direct mail.”
The city’s metropolitan dailies have never covered the local races especially well, said Heather Cherone, who covers the northwest side of Chicago for DNAinfo. “Unless it’s linked back to the mayor, there are very few stories on northwest side,” said Cherone, a former suburban reporter for the Chicago Tribune who also teaches journalism at DePaul University. “It’s hard to cover local issues from downtown.” (At DNAinfo, with its neighborhood-level approach to coverage, it’s the ward races—not the mayor’s race—that gets the big election treatment.)
In the neighborhoods, the details matter, which is why local reporters like Cherone spend a lot of time sifting through the sometimes messy campaigns to tell stories that resonate with voters. In addition to the usual fights over development and potholes, the ward races this year have turned up a few gems: a candidate accused of sending armed investigators to question her opponent’s supporters, and another candidate who advertised businesses on his Facebook page that would offer voters a discount. Then there’s the incumbent whose sister is making calls on her behalf–not normally fodder for headlines except the sister in question is Patti Blagojevich, the former first lady of Illinois whose husband is in jail.
If some of the ward races do go to a run-off, that will provide more chances for journalists to dig in. Back at the Sun-Times, Mihalopoulos said Chicago voters are intensely interested in local politics–and hold their aldermen responsible for what happens (or doesn’t) to their neighborhood.
“If the snow removal isn’t good, [voters] are just as likely to take it out on the alderman as the mayor,” he said. “No one likes the patronage clout system, but everybody would like to have an alderman with clout.”
Dumke put it this way: “Everybody knows who their alderman is. They don’t know the secretary of state of the United States. But they know their alderman.”
Jackie Spinner is CJR’s correspondent for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. She is an associate journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago and a former staff writer for The Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter @jackiespinner.