‘The Hollywood of politics’: Chicago in spotlight as Democrats roll into town

As Maria Hadden spoke about the intricacies of political life in Chicago, the 43-year-old alderwoman was sitting in her car near East Rogers Park, watching a stranded garbage truck on the north-south street get towed, backing traffic up on the block. She was contemplating which person to call, because she figured someone was likely to call her.

Hadden’s ward on Chicago’s north-east corner is a little more than 2 sq miles – small enough for her to know every inch of it. As she strategized, one of Hadden’s constituents who was tired of hearing cars honking had taken matters into her own hands. “So she comes out and she’s got two brightly colored poster boards – like [a] 16x24 poster board – and she literally taped to the front and the rear of the stranded garbage truck handwritten signs that say ‘broken’, so that people would just be able to see it’s broken, and don’t come here and don’t honk your horn.”

This is Chicago politics: famously retail, famously local, famously personal.

“Chicago is the Hollywood of politics,” Hadden said. “Because I feel like Chicago politics, there’s, you know, a bit of notoriety, there’s the hint of glamor, there’s power, there’s corruption, there’s all the, like, really interesting elements in the history of Chicago politics.”

This is the city, of course, of Democratic giants Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel and Richard Daley.

As thousands of delegates descend on to the checkerboard streets of the windy city for the Democratic national convention, they will find themselves in a city struggling to reinvent its politics after decades of control by the city’s famous Democratic machine.

That machinery has been breaking down for a generation, starting with the election of Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, in 1983, said Dick Simpson, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former Chicago alderman.

Obama’s ascent is a product not of the Chicago machine, but of Washington’s appeal as a reformer, Simpson said. Obama came to Chicago to work on community issues, seeing a light in the doorway with Washington’s victory over the machine. Obama talked the city into opening an employment training office on Michigan Avenue in Roseland, then a voter registration project, before seeking public office himself.

Once, the political machine served to knit Chicago’s disparate communities together. But a series of court orders in the 70s undercut the use of patronage hires – campaign workers given government jobs as an act of loyalty by a politician – to buy political support at the neighborhood level.

“There’s a remnant of the machine in the Democratic party,” Simpson said. “The Democrats still do have ward committeemen. But their patronage jobs have declined from over 35,000 to less than 5,000. It’s fragmented.”

Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, ambassador to Japan and two-term mayor of Chicago, was probably the last person to wield the full force of the Chicago machine. His withdrawal from a third run opened the door for Lori Lightfoot, who then lost re-election in a bruising third-place finish 18 months ago. Her loss was the first in 40 years for an incumbent mayor.

Reform has become the dominant force in the city’s politics today, Simpson said.

“There are two factions now in Chicago,” Simpson said. “They’re what might be called the moderate Democratic, or pragmatic Democratic faction and the progressive reform faction within the Democratic party.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson, one of those progressive reformers, has been beset by woes left and right since assuming office in 2023. Fallout from the corruption conviction of Ed Burke, a fixture in Chicago politics for six decades and a longtime Democratic party boss, continues to unfold as his co-conspirators’ cases make headlines.

Chicago is also still struggling to absorb migrants sent from southern states in an act of partisan political gamesmanship. Though the number of migrants crossing the Texas border has declined sharply over the last year, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, vowed last month to continue bussing them to Chicago.

Another central issue, both political and personal, is crime. Violence has receded since the start of the pandemic in Chicago. The rolling 28-day average for homicides is at a five-year low right now, according to city statistics . But the city still has an annualized homicide rate of about 21 per 100,000 for 2024, about four times larger than the national average and a source of continuous bad publicity.

And Johnson, a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, is watching contract negotiations with the union break down in acrimony over how to address a huge budget deficit and underfunded schools.

Chicago politics are fractured in ways that wither anyone in the spotlight, said Don Rose, 94, press secretary to Martin Luther King in Chicago and a venerable political consultant. ”Just as they got pissed off at Lori Lightfoot … the current mayor, he probably won’t last a second round either,” Rose said. “He started making rookie mistakes. He made himself unpopular very early, and hasn’t been able to quite recover.”

Republicans live in Chicago too, of course.

“I see red hats everywhere,” said Susan Patel, executive director of the South Asian American Chamber of Commerce of Illinois and a Democratic delegate from Chicago’s Sauganash neighborhood. No more than eight of the city’s wards might elect a Republican, she said.

Gentrification and immigration complicate the city’s politics, she said. Neighborhoods don’t sit still. Change in a city of 2.7 million people is constant. Each ward tends to have political and ethnic conclaves that make neighborhoods distinct.

Complaints about crime, or the quality of policing, or traffic or taxes or anything else are unlikely to change that, she said. Failure to hustle, however, is a political death sentence.

It’s in front of this backdrop that the the DNC will descend, bringing more and more attention, but also more traffic blocks.

Most events at the convention will take place at the United Center in the middle of Chicago in the Near West Side neighborhood. Other events will be held at McCormick Place, south of downtown and just east of the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. Organizers began fencing off the blocks around the convention areas in ways that have already begun to rile up the neighborhoods.

“Chicago. We want the attention and we don’t want the attention,” Hadden said. “I think that’s us.”

• This article was amended on 20 August 2024. Brandon Johnson was elected mayor of Chicago in 2023, not 2022.