Instead of writing my usual post mortem blog post on the election results for last week's mayor's race I agreed to work with the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform to perform a somewhat longer and more in-depth election analysis and write a comprehensive report.

One of the elements I found most interesting was that we were able to use US Census data to find a workable definition of the "Two Chicagos" message that the Garcia campaign focused on and one of the more surprising outcomes was that Emanuel did better than I expected among voters in this less affluent, more minority segment of city voters.

A few other interesting observations:

  • The Garcia campaign was able to turnout more Hispanic voters in April, something that is very difficult to do, and voters in Hispanic majority precincts made up a greater raw total of new voters in April than voters in African American majority precincts despite the fact that the Hispanic voting population is far smaller. In April there were almost 26K more voters than February in Hispanic majority precincts compared to just under 23K more voters in African American majority precincts.
  • Despite the impressive increase in voters from majority Hispanic precincts the increase in voters in white majority precincts was even greater. There were about 46K more voters in white majority precincts in April than in February.
  • Also, despite the impressive increase in new voters in Hispanic majority precincts Emanuel maintained roughly the same level of support in these precincts from February to April. In February Emanuel had the support of about 34% of the voters in Hispanic majority precincts and in April that only fell to 33% in Hispanic majority precincts, so despite the increase in enthusiasm and turnout Emanuel still held on to his supporters.

Go read the whole thing, there is a full analysis on this "Two Chicagos" element, plus data on turnout, income, education and race.


© Illinois Electon Data