Daley Easily Wins Race for Chicago Mayor

Richard M. Daley easily won election as mayor Tuesday, reclaiming the seat his father held for 21 years and ending six years of black leadership at City Hall.

The vote was overwhelmingly split along racial lines, yet the campaign was largely free of the racial antagonism that has marred Chicago elections in the recent past.

With 99% of the 2,911 precincts reporting, unofficial results gave Democrat Daley 575,337 votes, or 56%, to 412,514 votes, or 40%, for his chief rival, Timothy C. Evans, a black running as an independent on the Harold Washington Party ticket. Republican Edward R. Vrdolyak had 36,100 votes, or 4%.

In his victory speech, a beaming Daley declared that his victory meant Chicago was ready to move beyond division and acrimony. He said his administration will look to the future, not the past.

“Let no one mistake the meaning of today’s vote,” he told a cheering audience of about 6,000 at the Hyatt Hotel downtown. “The people of Chicago want to move forward, not back. They want a government that is fair and open and representative of every community, and so do I.”

Daley indicated Tuesday, as he has throughout the campaign, that he intends to reach out to blacks as well as whites when he takes office. Even so, black leaders said Daley’s victory dealt a serious blow to the black political empowerment movement that gathered strength here early this decade.

Some predicted that it might take longer than a decade for blacks to mend the divisions that erupted after the death in November, 1987, of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Many blame those divisions for Daley’s victory.

“We’ll have a hard time getting that seat back,” said Lu Palmer, a black political organizer who helped elect Washington.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spearheaded the mayoral campaign of Evans, expressed optimism, however, that the divisions can be healed. “In many ways tonight will be the beginning of the 1991 campaign,” he said.

Jackson acknowledged, though, that there was much anxiety in the black community over whether Daley’s administration will be like that of his father, Richard J. Daley, which many blacks perceived as being unfair and insensitive to them.

Daley addressed that point in his speech. “The late Mayor Harold Washington opened city government to many citizens who felt excluded and ignored,” he said. “As long as I am mayor those doors will remain open to all our citizens.”

Tuesday’s election was ordered by the state Supreme Court to fill the two years remaining in Washington’s second term.

A CBS exit poll predicted Daley the winner at 7 p.m. as the polls were closing. According to the exit poll, Daley won 89% of the white vote but only 7% of the black vote. Evans won only 6% of the white vote but 92% of the black vote. Vrdolyak, a former chairman of the Democratic Party who has not won an election since he switched parties in 1987, had 5% of the white vote, the poll indicated.

Vrdolyak was first to concede to Daley, saying: “Let’s all give this man a chance for the next two years.”

The victory by Daley, who defeated Mayor Eugene Sawyer in February’s Democratic primary, makes Chicago by far the largest city in the nation to replace a black mayor with a white.

Daley will become mayor of a city that has changed dramatically from the days when his father dominated city politics with his patronage-fed Democratic machine.

For one thing, court decisions have drastically reduced the number of patronage positions in city government. But also, black voters, who docilely supported the elder Daley during much of his reign, have become much more aggressive in their quest for power.

Even before the polls closed, Evans hinted in interviews that, should he lose, he would run again in the next election in 1991.

He gave no indication of that in his concession speech, however. “This race has never been about one individual,” he said. “It has been about a struggle that was before us long before this particular race was even on the drawing boards. I want you to know this struggle continues and will never stop.”

As the crowd chanted “Ninety-one! Ninety-one!” Evans said: “I don’t want you to be discouraged. . . . I want you to know we will be there.”

Tom Leach, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections, said the board’s latest estimate was that 68% of the city’s 1.56 million registered voters had turned out.

Daley, 46, is a three-term Cook County state’s attorney. Evans, 45, is a Democratic South Side alderman. Vrdolyak, 51, is a former Democratic alderman who entered the race by winning an unprecedented write-in campaign during the Republican primary. He was never able to rise above single digits in the polls.

Daley did not campaign Tuesday. After he and his wife voted, they visited the graves of Daley’s father and son, who died at the age of 2.

Evans, on the other hand, campaigned throughout the day, trying to get out the vote. He trailed Daley in opinion surveys taken last weekend by 14 to 21 percentage points, but he contended that a strong black turnout could sweep him into office.

He spent the last weeks of the campaign trying to generate what Jackson called “street heat,” a surge of grass-roots excitement to counter Daley’s more heavily financed campaign.

But while Daley benefited from a strong turnout in the predominantly white wards, turnout in Evans’ black strongholds on the South and West sides lagged as many as 10 percentage points behind, according to a city elections official who declined to be identified.

This was the fifth Chicago mayoral election since the death of the elder Daley in 1976.

Richard M. Daley sought to capitalize on voter frustration over the instability and the rancor that has marked Chicago politics in recent years. By avoiding debates and relying on an expensive media campaign, he presented the image of a tough professional manager who was above petty politics.

“People are tired of the bickering and the name-calling,” he said again and again.

He was referring both to the black factionalism that erupted after Washington’s death and to the so-called “council wars,” in which white aldermen led by Vrdolyak successfully blocked Washington’s initiatives for much of his first term.

Evans argued that Daley, then Cook County state’s attorney, had the political influence to end the fighting and return the city to normalcy but chose not to. But that criticism, like all the others lobbed at Daley during the primary and general election, seemed to roll off his back.

In the end, the most potent weapon Evans had against Daley was his name and the widespread feeling in the black community that Daley’s father had been unfair and insensitive to blacks.

After Washington’s death, Sawyer defeated Evans in a City Council vote to serve as acting mayor. Daley easily defeated Sawyer in the primary, which was marked by a pronounced racial split in the vote and low black turnout.

The poor showing was attributed to the factionalism that resulted from the battle between Sawyer and Evans.

Whites make up about 48% of the registered voters, blacks about 42% and Latinos about 7%.

In the closing days of the election, Evans’ supporters were accused of using intimidation tactics to browbeat prominent blacks who were considering throwing their support to Daley.

On Saturday, the Rev. Wilbur N. Daniel, who had announced his support of Daley earlier in the week, changed his mind at an Operation PUSH meeting being conducted by Jackson after black leaders threatened to picket his church on Sunday morning.

“I came here to set the record straight,” he said. “I’m in support of Timothy Evans.”

Daniel then delivered a fiery declaration of support and black solidarity. He said the planned picketing did not influence his decision.

At the urging of Jackson--who decried what he called the curtailment of Daniel’s First Amendment rights--the protest leaders called off the demonstration Saturday morning, shortly before Daniel announced his change of heart.

Among other prominent blacks faced with strong pressure to back Evans was publisher John Johnson, who called off a planned breakfast for Daley and instead announced at a press conference that he would support Evans.

The U.S. attorney’s office assigned about 60 assistant U.S. attorneys to monitor the election. Past Chicago elections have been marred by charges of voter fraud, but John Farrell, an assistant U.S. attorney, said the number of complaints filed throughout the day were even fewer than in the primary, which was one of the calmest elections in recent city history.

Last week, the chairwoman of the Chicago Board of Elections traveled to Washington to ask the U.S. Justice Department to seek a court order postponing the election. The request was turned down.

Nikki Zollar, the elections board chairwoman, sought the federal intervention after her authority to hire and fire employees was curtailed by the other two board members, who charged that she was supporting Evans in the campaign and that she was using her job to build a patronage army.

Times researcher Tracy Shryer in Chicago contributed to this story.