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| can't wait to stir things up here |
A total of five democratic socialists, and possibly a sixth, won races for alderman either in February or in Tuesday’s runoff elections.
That sixth candidate, Rosanna Rodriguez-Sanchez is trailing longtime Ald. Deb Mell by only a few dozen votes. Mell, whose family has represented the 33rd Ward for more than 40 years, is hoping that mail ballots will help her maintain her seat.
Two members backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won in the first round in February.
Carlos Ramirez Rosa won re-election in the 35th Ward. In the 1st Ward, Daniel La Spata defeated veteran Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno.
Three more DSA-supported candidates won in the runoff.
On Tuesday, Andre Vasquez beat Ald. Patrick O’Connor, who was Mayor Emanuel’s floor leader. O’Connor also was named chairman of the powerful Finance Committee after Ald. Ed Burke was indicted on federal corruption charges. That race, and Burke’s fall from power, are all signals of a decline in the old-guard Democratic Machine on the City Council.
In the 20th Ward, Jeanette Tayor, who was also endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, easily won her runoff. She succeeds Ald. Willie Cochran, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of wire fraud for misusing his campaign funds for gambling and other personal expenses, including tuition for his daughter.
Finally, Byron Sigcho-Lopez won his runoff in the 25th Ward. Incumbent Ald. Danny Solis, who has reportedly been cooperating with federal investigators in their ongoing City Hall corruption probe, did not seek another term.
To chants of “Andre, Andre,” Vasquez declared victory around 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
“Take a look around the room, we did this!” he said. “Every person who knocked on a door and made a phone call … that’s what got us the win tonight.
Sigcho-Lopez, currently on a leave of absence from the Pilsen Alliance, bills himself as an educator and public policy researcher at UIC. He had been endorsed by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Their wins mirror a trend nationally, mostly notably the election of democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York.
There are many new faces at City Hall now. About half of the alderman were either elected or appointed after 2015 or won their seats for the first time this year.
Alexandria Ocasio-Kotex is my bay-bay!
ReplyDeleteBy the time the 35th Ward Alderman took the stage at Rosanna Rodríguez-Sánchez’s election-night party at Chief O’Neill’s in Avondale, Chicago had experienced the biggest electoral victory for socialists in modern American history. Members of the group now control one-tenth of the City Council’s 50 seats.
ReplyDelete“We know for certain that we have a five-member democratic socialist caucus in the Chicago City Council, and we’re so close to six,” Rosa told about a crowd of about 200 supporters. “You guys should be proud. No one thought we’d be at this point.”
Three members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won their runoff elections on Tuesday: Andre Vasquez (40th), Jeanette Taylor (20th) and Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th). They join DSA members Rosa and newcomer Daniel LaSpata (1st), who won their council races outright in February.
Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) is narrowly leading Ald. Deb Mell by a few hundred votes, or less than 1 percent of the votes cast in a tight race that will likely be decided after the counting of mail-in ballots. If Rodríguez-Sánchez earns a City Council seat, it means that six socialists will ascend to power in city government.
“We won’t know if we’ll win for a few days, but no matter what happens we have several socialists who made it into City Council and we’re going to transform this city,” said Rodríguez-Sánchez.
Even with the 33rd Ward race still too close to call, five socialists is the most in Chicago since the 1910s, a decade in which the city was a hub of the radical left in America. Before the Red Scare of 1919, a dozen socialist newspapers were published in the city, and the city elected several aldermen who belonged to the Cook County Socialist Party, founded in 1896 as a response to the Pullman strike in Chicago.
ReplyDeleteNearly a century after it declined in popularity, democratic socialism has enjoyed a significant boost by Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns and the mercurial rise of DSA member and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. National membership in the group — which considers itself a “political and activist organization” but not an official political party — has multiplied by more than seven times since 2015, from 8,000 to 60,000.
“It helps that we have Bernie running and we have AOC popularizing our ideas on a national stage,” said local DSA co-chair Lucie Macías. “It’s a great time to be a democratic socialist in Chicago and the United States.”
Volunteers for Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez’s campaign and members of the Democratic Socialists of America celebrate on Tuesday night. | Photo by Lenny Gilmore
It’s a great time to be a leftist in Chicago in general, said Emma Tai, executive director of United Working Families, a Chicago organization that endorsed three of the socialist candidates.
In terms of joining a caucus, some of the incoming class of councilman have advocated for moving the council’s progressive caucus to the left (“We could have a 12 or 15 member progressive caucus if we act strategically and with real discipline,” said LaSpata) while Rosa calls for a socialist caucus within the progressives.
“Rahm Emanuel said he was a progressive — it’s a label that is losing its meaning,” said Rosa. “Over the last several years, we’ve seen voters demand an alternative to the Democratic status quo, where we’re told that our public dollars need to go to projects like Lincoln Yards and millions in TIF funds to go to private pockets.”
“And so I think it’s incumbent on the democratic socialists to form a coalition in the City Council that fights for the redistribution of wealth, and moves the conversation to the left and fighting for the policies that are going to uplift the working class and improve our lives.”
“I have been doing work that aligned with their values for years — before I knew what democratic socialism was,” he said. “For me, it was finding an organization that aligned with my values, I just didn’t know it was called democratic socialism.”
Taylor, a longtime activist and community organizer on the South Side who participated in a 34-day hunger strike to protest the closing of Dyett High School in 2015, only joined the organization in March, after she made it into the runoff.
“They’ve been on the right track on the issues but it’s important that they hear from everyday people impacted by these policies, from people who are hungry in the richest country in the world, who struggle to pay their rent,” said Taylor, who won the race in the 20th Ward with 60 percent of the vote. “I am looking forward to building a coalition of the many.”
COMMUNIST
ReplyDeleteIf they say they are liberal they are socialists. If they say they are socialists they are communists. Remember in communist ideology there are no absolutes. 2 + 2 = 4. UNLESS it would advance communist goals then in which case it is a lie. They lie, they cheat, they steal, they conquer, they kill. The only good one is a dead one.
ReplyDelete