Does Chicago need a Black consensus candidate?

The discourse that once ran through Black Chicago for decades about unity around a Black consensus candidate has waned.

Mayoral candidates at NBC forum
The nine Chicago mayoral candidates prepare for a forum at NBC 5 studios in the Peacock Tower, Monday, Feb. 13, 2023. With seven Black candidates on the ballot, this season has seen no traditional "consensus" candidate of the past. Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Chicago Sun-Times
Mayoral candidates at NBC forum
The nine Chicago mayoral candidates prepare for a forum at NBC 5 studios in the Peacock Tower, Monday, Feb. 13, 2023. With seven Black candidates on the ballot, this season has seen no traditional "consensus" candidate of the past. Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Chicago Sun-Times

Does Chicago need a Black consensus candidate?

The discourse that once ran through Black Chicago for decades about unity around a Black consensus candidate has waned.

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In 2011, a group of Black movers and shakers flanked mayoral candidate Carol Moseley Braun at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, state senators Mattie Hunter and Jacqueline Collins, Rev. Leon Finney and historian Timuel Black sang her praises.

Braun — the first Black female U.S. senator — sought to beat Rahm Emanuel in his first run for mayor. She lost. But implicit on that Sunday afternoon gathering and in the race was that she was the Black consensus candidate.

In 2018, when Emanuel announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, an intergenerational group gathered at Rainbow PUSH to extol the need to support a Black consensus candidate. But that didn’t happen. The two Black women who would face off in the runoff — Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot — got there without winning the Black vote the first time around. Lightfoot would go on to win in a landslide.

Contrast those scenes to the one earlier this month in which seven Black candidates running for mayor sparred on stage. At that forum, the candidates debated whose Blackness made them more in touch with the people to run for mayor.

With that many candidates vying to run Chicago, the discourse that once ran through Black Chicago for decades about unity around a Black consensus candidate has waned like the once powerful Democratic precinct captain system.

Forty years ago, a multiracial coalition elected Harold Washington as the city’s first Black mayor. He disrupted the Democratic machine, and the city has never seen voter turnout reach 80% since. His 1987 death led to the fight between two Black aldermen — Eugene Sawyer and Timothy Evans — vying to carry Washington’s mantle in the 1989 special election. Instead, disunity and ego carried the day, and Evans was ultimately thrown off the ballot for the Democratic primary. Then, Richard M. Daley was elected by defeating Evans in the general election.

Since then, Black Chicago politically fractured so severely that the ghost of Washington has long haunted the city. And the lesson bandied by pundits and politicos was a cautionary tale: A consensus candidate is needed to ensure the Black vote does not split.

Black folk have never been a monolith, despite them being lumped as one community. In this mayoral race, ideas are varied. Candidates are different. Black voters have stark choices when they go to the polls on Feb. 28. The commonality is that they all paint themselves as different from incumbent Lori Lightfoot. The gospel of businessman Willie Wilson contrasts from young activist Ja’Mal Green. The politically active Chicago Teachers Union backs Brandon Johnson. State Rep. Kam Buckner centers the CTA in his platform. Sophia King and Roderick Sawyer — son of Eugene Sawyer — are giving up their city council seats to run for mayor.

In the past, coalescing around a consensus candidate was less about identity politics and more about articulating the best vision for Black Chicagoans. Black voters don’t always vote for the Black candidate. Rahm Emanuel’s election in 2011 and his reelection in 2015 were due, in part, to Black voters. In both of those campaigns, Emanuel was the leading vote-getter in all Black wards. In 2011, Moseley-Braun got just 9% of the overall vote. In addition, Black voters overwhelmingly supported Daley during his reelection campaigns in 2003 and 2007, choosing the long-term incumbent over Black challengers.

So while Black Chicagoans don’t always prefer a particular Black candidate for mayor, the question remains: Do they need to?

A WBEZ analysis of mayoral election results over the past 40 years shows that the support for Black candidates plummets outside of Black wards on the city’s South and West sides.

Washington’s historic victories in 1983 — first in the Democratic primary and then in the general election — were built largely on overwhelming support from Black voters.

Harold Washington photo in Chicago
Museum goers look at an exhibit about former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center on the South Side, July 22, 2022. Pat Nabong / Chicago Sun-Times

In the February 1983 primary, Washington won at least 75% of the vote in most of the city’s Black wards. In the April 1983 general election, he topped 90% in most Black wards — even surpassing 99% in half a dozen wards. And he needed that level of support from Black voters to offset his dismal performances — with percentages in the single digits — in several wards on the Northwest and Southwest sides.

Lightfoot’s landslide victory in the April 2019 runoff came against another Black female candidate, Preckwinkle. However, in the February 2019 general election, Lightfoot and Preckwinkle were just two candidates in a field of 14 people — six Black, six white and two Latino — vying to take the open seat. Collectively, the six Black candidates captured 76% of the vote in Black wards and just 43% of the vote elsewhere in the city.

Between Washington’s reelection in 1987 and Lightfoot’s victory in 2019, Chicago’s mayoral elections featured a Mount Rushmore of Black candidates — including Eugene Sawyer; Timothy Evans; former Ald. and now-Congressman Danny Davis; state Appellate Court Judge R. Eugene Pincham; former U.S. Senator, former state Attorney General and former state Comptroller Roland Burris; former Ald. and Congressman Bobby Rush; former County Clerk of the Circuit Court Dorothy Brown; and Carol Moseley Braun. 

They all lost in elections that featured, with a few exceptions, just one white candidate — either Daley or Emanuel. And the exceptions — which include former Ald. Ed Vrdolyak in the 1989 general election; former Mayor Jane Byrne, in the 1991 Democratic primary; and former Ald. Bob Fioretti, in the 2015 general election — were never serious contenders as none captured more than 8% of the citywide vote.

Effectively, Chicago’s mayoral elections featured a consensus white candidate for decades in the space between the historic runs of Washington and Lightfoot. And each time, Black candidates — whether they were a consensus candidate or not — came up short.

In addition to seven Black candidates, next week’s mayoral election also features one Latino candidate, Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García, and a lone white candidate, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas.

In recent weeks, Vallas’ rhetoric has appeared eerily similar to Bernie Epton — the Democrat turned Republican, who lost to Washington in the polarizing 1983 general election. Epton’s slogan shrieked like a dog whistle: Vote for him before “it’s too late.”

Meanwhile, after Vallas urged voters to support him to “take back our city,” Lightfoot criticized him and likened the comment to that of Epton’s plea for support. Epton’s campaign slogan became an infamous symbol of Chicago’s racialized politics and the fears some held of the city electing its first Black mayor.

For sure, it’s 2023 and not 1983.

Still, when the dust settles after next week’s election, if there is no Black candidate in the top two spots, there will be many who will ask whether a consensus Black candidate would have changed that. And we may once again ponder whether race remains as much of a dividing wedge in Chicago as it did 40 years ago.

But maybe the armchair pundits and political operatives will conclude something else — that there has always been a consensus candidate in Chicago.

They have just usually been white.

Natalie Moore is interim editor of WBEZ’s Race, Class and Communities desk.  Alden Loury is WBEZ’s data projects editor.