Chicago Mayor’s Reelection Seems Certain as One of 3 Foes Quits Race

Months of heated campaigning, name-calling, scheming and horse-trading will end here Tuesday, as Chicagoans eagerly anticipate one of their city’s most pivotal events: the Cubs’ home opener at Wrigley Field.

There also will be an election for mayor, but suspense will be much higher at the old ball park, because Harold Washington is heavily favored to win reelection despite a late-inning reshuffling of the opposition lineup.

Cook County Assessor Thomas C. Hynes, one of three whites running against Washington, who is black, dropped out of the contest Sunday evening. Hynes acknowledged that the mayor was a cinch to win in such a crowded field, and said Washington would be unbeatable unless one of the other candidates--Alderman Edward R. Vrdolyak or Republican Donald Haider--quits the race as well.

Remains on Ballot

Both Vrdolyak and Haider appeared set to stay in the battle and, to confuse matters more, Hynes’ withdrawal came too late for his name to be removed from the ballot.

Hynes’ maneuver lent a chaotic finish to a general election contest tinged with racial overtones. It began last February, after Washington beat Jane M. Byrne, a former mayor, in the Democratic primary. Both Hynes and Vrdolyak are Democrats, but they opted to run as third-party candidates.

Rather than attack the mayor, Hynes and Vrdolyak traded charges of influence-peddling and mob connections as they tried to force each other out of the race.

Too Little Cash

Meanwhile, the Republican challenger, Haider, suffered from the chronic shortages that always hamstring GOP campaigns in this Democratic stronghold--too little cash and too little success at getting attention from the press and public. The highlight of Haider’s campaign came when he paraded around a shopping district on the back of a borrowed circus elephant while his wife pointed out similarities between Haider’s hairless, somewhat wrinkled scalp and that of the beast.

Hynes dropped out after late polls indicated that Washington would probably outpoll all his challengers combined. Indeed, Hynes’ announcement did little to dampen Washington’s confidence.

“We’ve got the votes no matter who drops out,” Washington declared at a rally Sunday night.

If anything, the unusual development demonstrated that Washington at last may be consolidating his grip over the political machinery of the city. In his first term, the once-omnipotent Democratic machine was split along racial lines, and black-white feuding frequently paralyzed the City Council.

Opposition Weakened

Endorsements from some of his foes on the council began to trickle to Washington as the election neared, and prospects for prying him out of City Hall faded. Vrdolyak had long been the ringleader of white opposition forces on the 50-member council, but on Wednesday, nine of his allies deserted him when he tried in vain to force a quick vote on a package of ethics rules for City Hall that could have proved embarrassing to Washington.

Even Byrne, whose primary fight with Washington turned into a snarling, name-calling contest, made a commercial plug for the incumbent in which she calls on Chicagoans to vote for him in the name of unity. When Washington defeated Byrne in the 1983 primary, Byrne refused to toss her support his way in the general election.

On the surface, the campaigns of Washington’s white opponents have defied the demographic realities and conventional wisdom of Chicago politics. The numbers of black and white registered voters are about the same, and citywide elections in recent years have shown that blacks will vote almost exclusively for black candidates and whites will vote in large numbers for white candidates. In the primary against Byrne, Washington got a statistically astounding 97% of the black vote.

Split White Vote

With those kinds of numbers, it is tough enough for a white candidate to win a one-on-one race with a black, as Byrne discovered when Washington beat her in February by 53% to 47%. Three--even two--white candidates would almost surely fragment the white vote and make victory for any one of them impossible.

Most observers thought that Hynes and Vrdolyak, and perhaps Haider too, would have quickly cut a post-primary deal to unite behind one of their candidacies. Instead, they spent most of their time attacking each other’s characters and convictions in a desperate attempt to force each other to drop out.

Vrdolyak accused Hynes of using his clout as the county’s chief tax man to lure clients to his law firm. Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times printed a controversial story quoting Hynes as saying he “believed” that Vrdolyak had met secretly with a Chicago crime syndicate chief and solicited Mafia support for his campaign. Vrdolyak has vehemently denied the story and has filed a libel suit against Hynes and the newspaper.

Mayor Above the Fray

The Hynes-Vrdolyak sideshow has allowed Washington to stay largely above the fray. On occasion, he has even let the word “landslide” to creep into his campaign talks, although his most recent commercials on black-audience radio stations have cautioned supporters against overconfidence.

Still, the mayor, a pugnacious man by nature, kept a busy campaign schedule and got into his share of tiffs. One of the nastiest involved Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), a Chicagoan who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee. Upon learning that Rostenkowski had endorsed Hynes, Washington snapped: “Was he driving when he said that?” It was an obvious reference to Rostenkowski’s conviction for drunk driving in Wisconsin last year. That led Rostenkowski to observe that at least he had never spent time in jail for failure to file income tax returns (as Washington has).