Some thoughts on the election
It slipped a bit under the radar, but we had an election earlier this month.[1] While presidential and congressional races are a foregone conclusion in Chicago, a lot happened under the hood that has implications for the future of the city. Here are a few things worth noticing.
Presidential race
1. Harris won the city 78% to 21%. That 57% margin is a 10-point shift towards Trump relative to 2020, when Biden won Chicago 83% to 16%. That tracks the trajectory of other large blue cities: Harris’s margin of victory in New York was 15 points smaller than Biden’s 4 years ago, and her margin in LA County was 11% smaller (65-32 in 2024 versus 71-27 in 2020). It’s a far bigger shift than we saw in the popular vote (6%), and in swing states, which on average moved 2-3% points to Trump relative to 2020.
2. Looking at the maps from 2020 and 2024, it’s easy to see his strongest areas: the far Northwest and Southwest sides (home to a high shares of city workers, particularly police officers and firefighters), Latino areas on the nearer Northwest and Southwest sides, and Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods on the far North Side.
3. It’s hard to make 1:1 comparisons because the city’s precincts have changed from 2020 to 2024, and don’t map directly to demographic data. But if you overlay the 2020 and 2024 results on the City’s census tracts, we can start to quantify shifts by census tract: [2]
4. High income and majority-white areas had the smallest shifts towards Trump (3% and 5%, respectively). Majority-black tracts remain the most reliably Democratic parts of the city, but moved right about 10 points, which tracks the average move citywide.
5. Majority-Latino census tracts displayed dramatic shifts towards Trump. On average, they moved 23 points to the right (28 points in tracts that are 75%+ Latino). They’ve also shifted from being, on average, more left-leaning than majority-white census tracts to being more conservative.
6. There are only 9 majority-Asian census tracts in the city, so take analysis on them with a grain of salt – but they had one of the largest swings rightward, moving 27 points towards Trump. This dramatic shift away from Democrats is in line with shifts nationally and in other blue cities.
7. On the 2024 map, the single precinct in pale red surrounded by a sea of blue (Ward 24, Precinct 19) contains the Cook County Jail, which prompted some jokes after the election. Jack Leyhane points out that the precinct includes more than just the jail, and that most inmates who would vote from jail have other addresses. But 416 of the detainees used same day registration, which often means that they claimed the jail as their address.[3] There were only 1,221 vote cast in the precinct, and Trump only won it by 18 votes. All that’s to say - while it’s certainly plausible that detainees flipped this precinct to Trump, you shouldn’t read more into the result than that.[4]
State’s Attorney
8. Eileen O’Neill Burke (the Democrat) cleaned up here, winning 66% to 29% over perennial candidate Bob Fioretti. That’s a better showing for Democrats than four years ago, when Kim Foxx won 54% to 39%. And it came as voters shifted right in the presidential election – again, Harris’s margin over Trump countywide was ten points worse than Biden’s was in 2024.
School Board
9. It was a bad day for the Chicago Teacher’s Union. The CTU endorsed candidates in 10 districts, but only won four of those races. In one of those, the CTU candidate ran unopposed. In the three contested races the CTU did win, their candidates tried to distance themselves from core union positions.
On the Northwest Side, Jennifer Custer ran on a very moderate platform that included supporting selective enrollment schools and opposing the proposed $300M high-interest loan backed by the Union. A similar dynamic occurred in District 7 on the Southwest Side, where CTU-supported candidate Yesenia Lopez backed current CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, and campaigned against the $300M loan. Finally, Ebony DeBerry, the CTU candidate on the North Side, ran a campaign closer to the CTU’s positions than Custer or Lopez, but still opposed the idea of taking out a loan.
In total, only 1 of the 4 winning candidates endorsed by the CTU backed the $300M loan the Union is supporting—Aaron “Jitu” Brown, who had the luxury of running unopposed. That reflects smart campaigning by the candidates in question, and the CTU’s political savvy (they knew the makeup of the districts they were running in, and backed candidates who could win).
But going 3 for 9 in competitive races isn’t exactly the sign of a dominant performance.
10. Of the remaining 6 districts, 3 were won by candidates that received substantial backing from charter school advocates. The other 3 were won by ‘independents’ who weren’t supported by either camp. As a reminder, the Mayor will still control the School Board for the next two years – the 10 districts will be split in half, and he’ll appoint a member from the other half of each, along with a board chair. In 2 years, the other 10 districts will be up for re-election.
11. We can take a closer look at the breakdown if we classify the ‘independents’ based on their stance on the $300M high interest loan that the CTU is fighting for, and which prompted the resignation of the prior school board appointed by Johnson. It’s the highest visibility issue in the race, most closely associated with the election. If an independent candidate came out against the $300M loan, I think it’s fair to code them as anti-CTU. Candidates that didn’t stake out a position against the $300M loan can be assumed to at least be more favorable to the union.
Keeping score that way, the CTU ended up winning 5 of the 10 seats. Che ‘Rhymefest’ Smith wasn’t the CTU candidate in 10, but refused to take a stance on the loan, while the independent winners in Districts 6 and 9 (Jessica Biggs and Theresa Boyle, respectively), both came out firmly against it.
So the final score is 4 CTU wins, plus 1 candidate who appears sympathetic to their goals. But of those 4 CTU wins, only 1 one of those members supported the loan during the campaign.
12. I think this is also a pretty decent way to look at the vote shares across the city. If we group CTU-endorsed candidates plus independent candidates who *didn’t* oppose the loan in one category, and charter candidates plus independents who actively opposed the loan in another, we can get a pretty good picture of voters’ sentiment around the school board. In aggregate 44% of the citywide vote went to team CTU, and 56% to non-CTU candidates opposed to the loan. Those numbers move to 41% - 59% if you exclude District 5, where the CTU candidate ran unopposed.
13. Note that this map really doesn’t correspond to the Trump/Harris map you saw above: the CTU eked out a win in some of the most conservative territory on the far Northwest Side, and picked up the 7th District seat, which covers a large swath of the heavily Latino Southwest Side territory that has shifted right the fastest. Anti-CTU candidates did well in across large portions of both the South and Near-North sides, which are as pro-Harris as they get. While you can see evidence for some D-R splits (voters on the relatively conservative far Southwest Side broke hard against the CTU, for example), voters generally seemed to reject efforts to frame this as a battle between Democrats and Republicans.
14. The anti-CTU coalition could have done a better job coordinating. As we worried about in our election guide, Ebony DeBerry ended up winning the 2nd District with just over 40% of the vote. There’s no guarantee that she would have lost a head-to-head race, but the anti-CTU coalition fragmented between her two closest opponents.
And while we can’t know what would’ve happened in the 5th District, the map across the rest of the city (and especially in neighboring contested precincts in the 3rd District) indicate that it was a missed opportunity to field a candidate. Unsurprisingly, turnout was much lower there – Aaron “Jitu” Brown’s 38,004 votes came out to roughly half the citywide average of 75,635.
15. If I was a member of the Socialist caucus, I might be a little worried. CTU-aligned candidates lost Rosanna Rodriguez-Sanchez’s Irving Park-centered 33rd Ward 55% to 45%. In Logan Square, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa’s 35th Ward broke 51% to 49% against the CTU. And in Uptown, Angela Clay saw her 46th Ward vote 56% to 44% against Union-aligned candidates.[5]
16. Why do we think the CTU did so poorly, after it and its allies cleaned up in these wards just a few years ago? Part of it is probably the chaos on the school board in the last few months, which included the whole board resigning over the Mayor’s effort to push through the $300M payday loan, and then the Mayor’s replacement board chair resigning for a history of political posts that aligned him with a wide range of noxious conspiracy theories.[6]
But some of it may also be that this election saw almost 400,000 more voters turn out than voted in the runoff round of the Mayoral Election. Those voters are probably not following city politics as closely, and likely have more moderate views than the hardcore partisans who turn out for off-year municipal elections without a presidential candidate on the ticket. Time will tell, but the elected school board might end up less captive to entrenched interests, at least in the short term.
17. People are now acting surprised that the vast majority of the money in this race was spent by the CTU and affiliated groups ($3.3M reported as of October 29), charter school donors ($1.6M), or self-funded candidates. But what exactly did they expect? These are relatively low visibility races (i.e., not going to attract a ton of small-dollar donations), and there aren’t a lot of other parties with major vested interests here.
18. By the same token, you should be suspicious of people wringing their hands about the role of outside money in these races. Anyone concerned about ‘outside money’ that isn’t also worried about the ‘inside money’ spent by the district’s largest union is making an isolated demand for rigor – and putting their thumb on the scales for the CTU next time around.
Judges
19. One judge failed to hit the 60% threshold necessary for retention, likely thanks to reporting by Injustice Watch (and reflected in our endorsement guide). Shannon O’Malley, who claims a homestead exemption in Will County, and changed his name from Phillip Spiwak to get elected first time around, is sitting at 58%. Based on City and County returns as of 11/19, he looks to have missed by 29,815 votes.
20. Three Cook County judges look like they’re just going to squeak over the 60% threshold. Kathy Flanagan (had an attorney handcuffed to a chair), ended up with 63% of the vote. Kenneth Wright (claims a homestead exemption in Will County) is at 61%, and Ieshia Gray (under investigation for accusations of bias and unfair treatment) is at 61%.
21. All of these judges did much worse in the city than the suburbs. O’Malley got 53% of the vote, Gray only received 57% support in the city, and Wright and Flanagan both received 58% of the vote. Better numbers in the suburbs made the difference for Gray, Wright and Flanagan.
What comes next
22. It’s too early to know exactly how Donald Trump’s election will impact Chicago, but things are not about to get easier. Even outside of his signature policies on issues like immigration and the economy,[7] federal money for the City and the State are likely to be in much shorter supply. This might be a good moment to address the exploding cost of the Red Line Extension, now set to hit $5.3 billion.
23. If you’re just generally discouraged by the result at the top of the ticket and want to tune out from politics for a bit, I think that’s probably a pretty healthy reaction.[8] But if you want to ‘do something’ I cannot underscore enough just how valuable it would be to get more involved at the local level here in Chicago.
It’s less sexy, but local involvement still offers a chance to improve the lives of millions of people in one of the biggest cities in the country. The City of Chicago is making decisions with huge implications this year, and your Alderman is far more likely to listen to you than a White House intern or an out of state GOP legislator. And mayoral and city council elections will be here before we know it.
24. Here’s another reason to spend more time on local issues: big city governance may have turned into a serious political vulnerability for Democrats nationally. I don’t think it’s a surprise that big cities – like Chicago, with our 10 point swing – were some of the areas nationally that moved the furthest to the right. And it’s hard to imagine swing voters seeing the recent track record of blue city governance as anything but a reason to remain skeptical of Democrats. After cataloguing a laundry list of governing failures in New York City, Josh Barro writes:
It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post-George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat.
I’d also recommend this great LA Times piece, which cites a wide range of political strategists pointing to a similar dynamic coming out of California.
25. A lot of the national handwringing on this topic has focused on blue city and state governance on the costs (housing crisis, cost of living, general perception of disorder). Sometimes, I think it’s easy for commentators based in New York or Los Angeles to forget that the big city most relevant to residents of Wisconsin and Michigan is Chicago.
Google Trends, November ’23-‘24
26. I wrote this piece right after the convention, but I think it’s a lot more relevant now: perceptions of Chicago matter for Democrats nationally. And those perceptions really are influenced by our results on the ground.
27. Conor already laid out a compelling case for why Chicago needs to grow. But if you’re part of the 78% of the city that voted for Kamala Harris, here’s another. The 2028 election will be fought on the same electoral map as 2024. But after 2030, another census redistricting will happen. Here are the projections today for those outcomes:
That’s a net shift of 11 electoral votes to reliably red states, with two of those electoral votes coming at the expense of Illinois. If that plays out, Democrats could win the ‘blue wall’ of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and still be nowhere close to victory.
That outcome isn’t guaranteed. But if we want to avoid it, we’ll need to work hard to make the City (and State) a much more appealing - and less expensive - place to live.
[1] I know, easy to miss amid the high drama of the City’s budget hearings.
[2] I did this by weighting the vote of census tracts with their overlap on precincts. So a census tract that includes 50% of the area of a precinct is awarded 50% of the votes in that precinct (proportionally for all candidates). If there are any GIS experts who have suggestions on better ways to do this, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
[3] That’s according to a Chicago Board of Elections statement that Leyhane obtained
[4] It’s also depressing reminder that many of the individuals awaiting trial don’t have a stable place to call home.
[5] Jenette Taylor’s (20) ward also voted against CTU-aligned candidates, but Taylor endorsed Jessica Biggs, an independent candidate who campaigned against the loan (and won). In Ward 1, Daniel LaSpata saw pro-CTU candidates come out ahead 57-43%, but 16% of the total votes in his ward were awarded in the 5th School Board District, where the CTU candidate was running unopposed.
[6] If you haven’t read it yet, Conor’s explainer on the School Board Fiasco is very much worth your time
[7] Whatever your opinions on tariffs more generally, they’re almost certainly going to hurt the City. Our heavily service-dependent economy will face higher costs from imported goods, but doesn’t have much of the manufacturing base that could theoretically benefit from protectionism.
[8] Although it does raise the question, why are you on point 23 of a blog breaking down the results?
This is outstandin analysis.
Thanks for your hard work and good thinking on this. I especially like the call to get involved at the local level. Keep up the good fight!