With strong support from the Jewish community, Richard Daley will follow in the footsteps of his late father and occupy the fifth floor of City Hall as mayor of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city.
Daley, who beat Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer in the Democratic primary last month, won Tuesday’s general election by an impressive 150,000-vote margin, defeating an independent bid by black Alderman Timothy Evans, running on the Harold Washington Party ticket, and Republican Edward Vrdolyak.
Chicagoans again voted mostly along racial lines, with Daley taking 90 percent of the white vote and Evans 92 percent of the black vote.
Daley’s margin of victory was due to a larger turnout among whites than blacks and strong support for him among Chicago’s Hispanic, Asian and Jewish communities.
He won 79 percent of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls conducted by The New York Times.
Anti-white rhetoric by black political leaders in the city made it difficult for even the most liberal of whites to support Evans, who had to frequently distance himself from the inflammatory charges.
Late in the campaign, Evans himself said that Daley was “getting ready to open his father’s plantation. The new machine is going to be just as bad as the old one, if not worse.”
The special mayoral election was held because of the death 18 months ago of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Washington had strong backing among Jewish voters, who were three times more likely to vote for him than other whites.
It was the Jewish vote in the 1983 mayoral election that proved to be the margin of victory for Washington, who faced a Jewish Republican candidate.
END OF BLACK-JEWISH COALITION?
This time, however, the black-Jewish coalition never materialized. That was due primarily to last year’s Steve Cokely affair. Cokely, an assistant to Sawyer, made several anti-Semitic statements, including a claim that Jewish doctors were injecting blacks with the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Although Evans was one of only three black aldermen to sign a petition criticizing Cokely, he failed to win Jewish political or financial support.
Don Rose, Evans campaign strategist, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the black-Jewish coalition was “irreparably damaged” by the Cokely incident.
Rose, who is Jewish, added, however, that “the fact that concern over the Cokely episode has spread to virtually all blacks and was seen as a symbol of massive black anti-Semitism is a hysterical reaction.”
The strong Daley victory was seen as a blow to the political prestige of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who resides in Chicago. Jackson campaigned hard for Sawyer in the primary and for Evans in the general election, but was unable to bring together the fractured black community or enlist the broad support of white liberals for Evans.
The focus will now be on Daley, who will be sworn in as mayor on April 24, his 47th birthday.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
