As Rahm Emanuel and a host of others consider campaigns to replace Mayor Richard M. Daley, they must reckon with a key issue: how to mount a successful citywide effort without the political machine that propelled Mr. Daley successfully through six mayoral elections.
For Mr. Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, it may be especially important. Not only did Mr. Daley endorse him in his campaign for Congress in 2002, but he also gave Mr. Emanuel the full support of his army of patronage employees, who knocked on doors up and down the 5th Congressional district. This time, political experts said, Mr. Emanuel will not be able to count on that kind of help.
“The days of Saturday mornings with 300 truck drivers taking marching orders and going into precincts — I think those are long over,” said Mike Noonan, a Democratic strategist who has managed campaigns for Lisa Madigan, the attorney general, and Todd Stroger, the Cook County Board president. “It is important to remember that was happening in the 2002 primary, when Rahm was running.”
At the time, Mr. Daley found himself at the apex of his political power. The economy was booming, and a jury was four years away from convicting his patronage chief, Robert Sorich, for his role in a city hiring-fraud scandal.
That verdict was portrayed as a fatal blow to the machine, but the mayor still managed to win his last election, in 2007, with the vestiges of the apparatus built on the longstanding practice of promising city jobs in exchange for campaign work.
In that election, Mr. Daley also enjoyed substantial financial support from business leaders he had cultivated over the years. As usual, he also benefited from the absence of a serious challenger.
Some political analysts estimate that a successful candidate in next year’s mayoral election will need $4 million to $6 million. Others are not so sure. “I think the money is critical but not a definitive as to who is going to win and lose,” Mr. Noonan said.
Peter Thompson, Mr. Daley’s nephew and chief fund-raiser for his 2007 campaign, said mayoral candidates should not fixate on raising a specific dollar amount. What is more important, he said, is how much candidates can raise compared with their opponents.
“When you are in the woods in Montana, and a bear is chasing you, you don’t have to be faster than the bear — you just have to be faster than your friend who also is trying to outrun the bear,” Mr. Thompson said.
Kitty Kurth, a Democratic consultant who is currently advising Stephanie Neely, the city treasurer, on her re-election, said: “There hasn’t been a real open election for so long, I think that many of the rules are going to be different, and all of the conventional wisdom, you should take it and throw it out the window.”
Further complicating matters is a $10,000 limit on donations from corporations and unions that will take effect on Jan. 1.
Some observers expect that the deadline will set off a mad dash to raise money before the first of the year. But, in a down economy and with a large mayoral field, corporate donors might be disinclined to commit money to candidates until the race narrows.
“It is a little game of chicken between candidates and donors,” said Thomas Bowen, a veteran Democratic operative who is managing the campaign of Forrest Claypool, a Cook County commissioner who is running for county assessor.
“I think business leaders are frequently cautious donors who are less likely to take a chance on an unknown quantity,” Ms. Kurth said. “They gave Daley money all the time because they knew him, and quite honestly because they were threatened a little bit. But trying to get them to invest in a new mayoral product is going to be pretty tough.”
So far, only a few potential candidates — Mr. Emanuel, who presumably could exploit his national Democratic connections, and Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, who possibly could tap Latino donors around the country — show a likely ability to raise significant money outside Chicago.
“By February, I think it is going to be even harder,” Ms. Kurth said. “We’ll have just finished the November election where people will be pretty tapped out anyway. Mayor Daley was able to essentially strong-arm his donors to give money so he could keep things at status quo, and nobody can make that promise now.”
Local unions have also written large checks in the past, and have recently shown a willingness to do so still. In 2007, the Service Employees International Union spent $2.5 million on the Chicago City Council elections.
“Right now, S.E.I.U. has demonstrated the ability to spend millions of dollars in aldermanic races; the business community has not,” said Greg Goldner, a Democratic consultant who ran Mr. Emanuel’s Congressional campaign in 2002.
But Mr. Allen thinks labor unions, like big business, will wait until the mayoral field narrows before opening their wallets.
“If there are a number of candidates and several of them are friendly to labor and respect labor’s issues,” he said, “I don’t know if they are going to get involved too heavily until it is really Door No. 1 or Door No. 2.”
Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said he expected labor to act in “lock step.”
“There is a sense of occasion with folks in the labor community to understand that this is an opportunity to elevate issues and discussion, and they are going to seize that opportunity,” Mr. Ramirez said.
But he added that his organization would be largely focused on the race for governor until November.
Aside from the issue of money, there is the calculus of manpower, as candidates figure out how to find their foot soldiers and how to best put them to use.
For so many years, the ground game has been the bailiwick of the old guard: Democratic organizations, unions and Mr. Daley’s patronage armies. Now, as happens in other cities not dominated by machine politics, people working to get votes in the wards will have to be volunteers sufficiently motivated to use their time and effort for a candidate.
“The influence of the traditional precinct organization has been on the decline for 10 years, not to mention that in a bad economy, people are a little anti-authoritative right now anyway,” Mr. Bowen said.
This campaign, he added, “is more of an opportunity to build new organizations than to measure some of the old ones.”
With expectations of a high voter turnout, some observers are uncertain whether a door-to-door operation is necessary for a candidate’s success.
But the former alderman William Banks, who heads the 36th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, said he believed that, despite the shifting political landscape, foot soldiers would remain crucial.
“I have been a committeeman for 31 years,” Mr. Banks said, “and I wouldn’t trade my membership for the world.”
He acknowledged, however, that it was increasingly difficult to fill his roster with effective volunteers.
Mr. Allen agreed. “If people were energized behind a particular candidate, you will get people to volunteer and help,” he said. But with a completely open seat with no incumbent, it is hard to get a grass roots, populist “surge of people behind one person.”
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Source: The New York Times
