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 putting to an end the six-year period of black leadership at City Hall.

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

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.

With 50% of the 2,911 precincts reporting, unofficial results gave Democrat Daley 339,842 votes, or 65%, to 160,280 votes, or 31%, for his chief rival, Timothy C. Evans, a black running as an independent on the Harold Washington Party ticket. Republican Edward R. Vrdolyak had 20,361 votes, or 4%.

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 had 5% of the white vote.

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.

The election was ordered by the courts to fill the two years remaining in the second term of Harold Washington, who died of a heart attack in November, 1987.

Daley will become mayor of a city that has changed dramatically from the days when his father, Richard J. Daley, 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.

Evans May Run Again

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

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

Daley, 46, is a three-term Cook County state’s attorney. Evans, 45, is a Democratic South Side alderman who skipped the primary to run on the Harold Washington ticket. Vrdolyak, 51, is a former Democratic alderman who has not won elected office since his party switch in 1987.

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

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 one of his major supporters, the Rev. Jesse 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 sixth Chicago mayoral election since the death of the elder Daley in 1976. The office comes up for election again in 1991, and the campaign for that race officially begins today.

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 in 1987 and to the so-called “Council Wars,” in which white aldermen 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.