“(LUIS LUIS,), OH BABY, SAID THE WAY I GO…”

10/12/10

Today’s (i.e., Tuesday, 10/12/10’s) Chicago Sun-Times ran a column by Lynn Sweet headlined “Poll suggests (Congressman Luis Gutierrez) can win.”

According to the column, Gutierrez commissioned a poll of likely voters in the race for mayor of Chicago. The following candidates for mayor received the corresponding percentages of support from the respondents:

Rahm Emanuel 27%
Tom Dart 19%
Carol Moseley Braun 9%
Luis Gutierrez 8%
Danny Davis 6%
James Meeks 5%
Miguel Del Valle 3%
Bob Fioretti 2%
Gerry Chico 2%

I posted the following on Ms. Sweet’s blog in response to the article:


Interesting article today, Lynn…thanks. I’m a bit surprised by some of the numbers, especially by how poorly Gerry Chico and James Meeks did in the poll and, to a somewhat lesser extent, by how well Carol Moseley Braun did. But I don’t see how you conclude that Gutierrez can win based on an also-ran showing in a poll he commissioned. Even if he is “in a strong position to consolidate Hispanic support,” if you take the total vote of the three Hispanic contenders in the poll, you come up with 13% of the vote, still behind the two front-runners, Emanuel and Dart. Gutierrez also has several problems he probably can’t overcome:

--He has very few friends among the powers that be in the city. Those who feign friendship with him are those who need him for something.

--One wonders how he escaped more serious problems in the Calvin Boender business. Ike Carothers, a Daley loyalist, went away while Gutierrez skated for roughly the same type of activity. Either Gutierrez is more clever or has more friends than most people think. In any case, he will have a lot of explaining to do about his dealings with convicted felon Boender.

--He’s Puerto Rican, which doesn’t help with the Mexicans, who are the largest Hispanic voting group in the city. (See my 9/23 post “BANANA SPLIT FOR MY BABY, A GLASS OF PLAIN WATER FOR ME…”) His work on immigration does help in this area, though.

--He’s just a hard guy to like.

What do I think Gutierrez will do? He’ll run for Congress and win (of course) and then make a lot of noise about running for mayor before trying cut some kind of deal with one of the frontrunners for his support, claiming that he can deliver the entire Latino community.

But we’ll see.