Apologies for the roughness of the map. I don’t have proper cartographic software. Dark blue represents a Hillary Clinton majority; light blue represents a Bernie Sanders majority.
The big news here is that Sanders did even better in the city of Chicago than anyone would have expected him to:
- He won every single ward with a Latino majority or a significant Latino minority.
- He won the entire Northwest Side, including wards that one would have expected to hew to machine authority.
- He won the 19th Ward, a politically moderate, middle-class neighborhood that’s about two-thirds white (Beverly, Mount Greenwood) and one-third black (Morgan Park). Morgan Park, incidentally, is one of only two neighborhoods in the city that are both mostly African-American and solidly middle-class, the other one being Calumet Heights in the 8th Ward.
- He won the 10th Ward, a working-class ward comprising the East Side (yes, Chicago has an East Side—it’s not just Lake Michigan) and Hegewisch. This is where Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, a progressive and labor-friendly insurgent, recently defeated party-regular Ald. John Pope in a nailbiter of an election.
- He won the 40th Ward, home of a nasty old piece of work named Patrick O’Connor, one of only two remaining members of the Vrdolyak 29, who nevertheless solidly won reelection last year.
- He won Bridgeport’s 11th Ward, ancestral home of the Daley clan.
Clinton, as expected, won every ward with an African-American majority. But aside from that, the only wards she won were in the affluent white neighborhoods along the lakefront—Rahm Emanuel’s base. And one of those wards, the 48th (Edgewater), she won by only 107 votes. In no ward did Clinton’s share of the vote surpass 69 percent. Sanders drew at least 30 percent of the vote in every majority-black ward.
The final vote tally in the city of Chicago was Clinton 53.6 percent, Sanders 45.4 percent, almost exactly the margin I had predicted for the state as a whole. (I never imagined that Sanders would perform so well in DuPage County, Rockford and Springfield.)
In short, despite narrowly losing the state, Sanders once again defied expectations in ways even his supporters couldn’t have predicted, let alone his detractors.
Chicago proves that “minority voters” are not a unified pro-Clinton, anti-Sanders bloc, and that even areas that have historically been docile and tractable to the will of the party establishment are beginning to get fed up with it.
This campaign is not over. Not by a long shot.