Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel may have won the run-off election to keep his office but he still has a long way to go to repair relations with the liberal activists who forced him into one in the first place.
Emanuel, a Democrat, handily beat rival Jesus “Chuy” Garcia Tuesday night, 55 percent to 45 percent, but the groups, mainly labor organizations and progressive activists that backed the latter’s candidacy, are arguing that it is the mayor that needs to change his outlook post-election.
“We just hope that he is true to his word that he will change his approach when it comes to negotiations between the unions and the city,” said Chicago Teachers Union spokesman Ronnie Reese.
The union, one one the leading groups opposing Emanuel’s re-election, was even blunter in a post-election press release, claiming that Emanuel mayor didn’t win the run-off election. He merely “survived it.”
“[W]e believe that if he is sincere about owning his faults, and listening to the voices of average, working Chicagoans, those sentiments expressed in his television ads won’t just be conciliatory, they will be needed to move this city forward,” said Vice President Jesse Sharkey.
Neil Sroka, spokesman for Howard Dean-founded Democracy For America, which backed Garcia’s candidacy, said Emanuel “absolutely” had to make the first move to mend relations.
“Rahm is coming off of this quote-unquote ‘victory’ as probably one of the weakest mayors Chicago has seen in a long time,” Sroka said. “He tried to pick off seven progressive Chicago alderman [during the runoff] and he failed at six of them.” The last race is undecided at press time.
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In his victory speech Tuesday night, Emanuel did make overtures towards his critics. “I understand the challenges we face will require me to approach them differently and to work in a different fashion,” he said.
Reese said there had been no communication between the union and the mayor’s office since the election though.
A famously brash, aggressive staffer for both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Emanuel first won the mayor’s office in 2011.
His efforts to reform Chicago’s educational system, primarily by closing down and consolidating schools, and to balance the books on the city’s drastically underfunded public pension system — it has $20 billion in debt — resulted in a very public battle between him and city’s unions and their allies.
The situation got so bad that Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis recalled in 2013 how one meeting between the two deteriorated into them shouting the f-word at each other.
When Emanuel came up for re-election in 2014, the unions and another activists threw their support behind Garcia, a Cook County commissioner. Emanuel failed to win an outright majority in the February election, resulting in the April runoff.
Activists hoped to make an example out of the mayor, who they saw as too close the party’s wealthy donors, but Garcia was never able to get an edge over the incumbent. Emanuel raised an estimated $21 million in his re-election bid, about three times Garcia’s haul.
Emanuel’s supporters argue that his relative ease of victory shows that his opposition was not that broad. “He did have 70 — seven-zero — unions endorse him yesterday,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic political consultant and senior advisor to Ready for Hillary.
For those that did oppose him, the bitter feelings linger. The American Federation of Teachers issued a statement Tuesday saying, “As we congratulate him tonight, we urge him to start by reinvesting in the communities he unnecessarily gutted by closing schools he could have chosen to fix and make the hub of neighborhoods.”
Education policy analyst RiShawn Biddle, who followed the Chicago fight closely on his blog Dropoutnation.net, says that the unions and activists will nevertheless have to back down and make nice with the mayor. He noted that Gov. Dan Malloy, D-Conn., pushed education reforms that were controversial on the left, but still ended up getting labor endorsements in his 2014 re-election campaign.
“Even all of the issues that they have had with centrist Democrats over education reform, they’ve still put money behind them,” Biddle said. “The problem that they have is that they have nowhere else to go.”
