Political challenges can hurt even if candidates successfully fight them off

Much is being made of the fact that two of mayoral hopeful Toni Preckwinkle’s political challenges to opposing candidates failed to get the opponents kicked off.

Would like to exchange county seal for city

It’s supposedly exposing Preckwinkle herself to be little better than the political hacks she’d like us all to think she will challenge, should she manage to get herself elected mayor in the upcoming Feb. 26 election (and likely April 2 run-off).

YET I’VE SEEN enough partisan politicking throughout the years to realize there is a strategy to a candidate challenging would-be opponents to try to get them kicked off the ballot.

Yes, it may seem that Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza and former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot WILL be on the ballot for the Feb. 26 election. Voters will have a legitimate option to pick either of them.

Those two are not in the same league as someone like Ja’Mal Green, who did manage to get booted from the ballot for inadequate signatures of support on his nominating petitions.

They’re certainly in a different league as people like Conrein Hykes Clark or Catherine Brown D’Tycoon – whose challenges by the Preckwinkle people are still pending.

BUT NO MATTER how people try to spin it, the Lightfoot and Mendoza mayoral campaigns have taken a blow – one they may not be able to overcome during the next couple of months.

Lightfoot lives to fight another day, … 

The fact is that I’m sure both would have preferred to have used the past few weeks since filing their nominating petitions trying to gain public attention and build support amongst would-be voters.

They would have liked to have talked about themselves and tried to spread the message about why people should seriously consider casting a ballot for their candidacies.

Instead, they have had to spend time in consultation with attorneys who guided them through the legal morass that predominates the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. Election law can be an arcane process – one with a confusing mess of law that really can be vague enough to allow for people to be kicked off the ballot for whatever obscure excuse the political people concoct in their minds.

… as does Mendoza

IN SOME CASES, the petition challenges are filed knowing they may not succeed. But instead may cause enough chaos to knock a campaign from gaining any traction. Meaning the person who might have had a serious shot at prevailing instead flounders.

Which is something that could happen to both Lightfoot and Mendoza – both of whom have their supporters who seriously think the two would make fine public servants.

But that may not be enough, and it could be what causes them to fall behind in such a crammed field of candidates to where they can’t even qualify for a run-off election. For Feb. 26 will be a day in which finishing third won’t be any better than coming in eighth or ninth or however far back amongst the candidate field one can sink.

It’s going to be Numbers One and Two who will make it to the head-to-head challenge against each other – unless, by some political miracle, Number One manages to gain so much support they can take an immediate majority and avoid the need for a run-off.

AN INSTANCE NOT likely to occur.

Who will be Chicago's next mayor?

As for Preckwinkle, I suppose there’s the chance that her challenging tactics will offend so many people that when they cast their ballots for a run-off, they get it in their heads that they’ll vote for Anybody But Toni!

But I can also see how those people would be so un-unified that they won’t be able to agree on anything. It may well be that the eventual winner of the Chicago mayoral election of 2019 will be someone whom a majority of would-be voters right now would feel complete apathy for.

Which means we should start preparing now for the four years of contempt we’re going to feel for our city government – being fueled in part by these endless rounds of challenges to try to keep people from running for office to begin with!

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Down to 21; how few candidates will remain by the time it is all over

The “it” is the process by which we put together the ballot of candidates who we’ll get to choose from come Feb. 26 for who gets to succeed Rahm Emanuel as mayor of the city of Chicago.

Whose face will fill the blank come May inauguration?

Much attention was paid the past week to the candidates who actually came forth with nominating petitions seeking a spot on the mayoral ballot.

THERE ONCE WAS a time when some 40 or so people were talking about running for mayor. The Monday deadline for filing nominating petitions came and went with 21 people actually taking the step forward.

Yet in all honesty, I’ll be shocked if more than a half-dozen of them actually make it all the way to Election Day.

There are bound to be candidates who come to the realization before then that their mayoral aspirations are pure fantasy. Then there also will be those who will wind up feeling crushed – as though the “gods” of politics are conspiring against them to keep us from casting a vote for them.

I don’t doubt that every single one of the 21 who filed nominating petitions is convinced that they’re the only logical choice for mayor, and that everybody else would be doing themselves and the public at-large a whole lot of good if they’d only drop out.

MENDOZA: Could she fall short of backers?

THE PART OF the political process we’re now entering is the “challenges.” As in having their supporters file objections to their opponents – contending they didn’t meet the bare minimum requirement of 12,500 valid signatures of support for their candidacy from Chicago residents who happen to be registered to vote.

The fear of getting knocked off is what causes candidates to go overboard and come up with so many more signatures than necessary. Because invariably, somebody is going to get a signature from a suburban resident who just happened to be in the city at the time a campaign worker got their autograph.

Either that, or someone is going to think it incredibly funny to sign themselves as “Mickey Mouse” or “Donald Trump” or some other nonsense name. Which taints the nominating petition as a whole!

ENYIA: Kicked off ballot just for kicks?

Candidates now are looking for ways to kick their opponents off the ballot so as to boost their own chances of achieving political victory and being the one who takes the oath of office for mayor come May.

I WON’T BE surprised if candidate Amara Enyia winds up finding herself spending significant amounts of time fighting off a challenge. She’s the candidate who has gotten attention and money from rap music entertainers, and who claims she has more than 62,000 signatures of support.

Which actually is just more than the 60,000 or so that Toni Preckwinkle gathered for her mayoral bid.

I don’t doubt that the political geeks who specialize in this type of duty would love the chance to show that Enyia’s signatures are so tainted that she deserves to be booted from the ballot.

Even if she does remain through to Election Day, she could wind up spending her time with attorneys her campaign really can’t afford trying to justify her political existence. Which is actually a common tactic for dealing with fringe candidates who might have something serious to say. Neutralize them into oblivion!!!

I’M GOING TO be interesting in seeing how the candidacy of Susana Mendoza turns out. Because she started gathering mayoral petition signatures so late (she had to spend time getting re-elected as Illinois comptroller first), she only submitted some 25,000.

How many petitions do you figure he signed?

Could the same political geeks who pick apart Enyia wind up knocking off enough of Mendoza’s supporters to make her ineligible to run for mayor? Thereby reducing the number of legitimate mayoral candidates on the ballot.

Because the reality is the “law” with regards to ballot access is vague as to what exactly an invalid signature is. Basically, it is whatever the challenger says it is, and it becomes up to the would-be candidate to prove they didn’t do something wrong.

Definitely a process intended to weed out the no-names and bring us down to a manageable number of candidates from whom to vote – even if the end result is that we wind up with the same old names on the ballot every single election cycle.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For now, the ballot (in alphabetical order) includes Catherine Brown D’Tycoon, Dorothy Brown, Gery Chico, William Daley, Amara Enyia, Bob Fioretti, LaShawn Ford, Ja’Mal Green, Conrien Hykes Clark, Jerry Joyce, John Kozlar, Lori Lightfoot, Sandra Mallory, Richard Mayers, Garry McCarthy, Susana Mendoza, Toni Preckwinkle, Neal Sales-Griffin, Paul Vallas, Roger Washington and Willie Wilson.

Ego brought down to Earth – Stroger to seek water district, not county president

Todd Stroger, the one-time state legislator and alderman who will forevermore be remembered for his stint as Cook County Board president and his effort to raise the county portion of the sales tax, will go about thinking to himself that he could have been re-elected to that post – IF ONLY.

STROGER: Water dist., sted of president

Stroger on Facebook this weekend was boasting of the Sunday night campaign event where his nominating petition circulators would gather together the results of their work.

THAT WOULD ALLOW Stroger himself (or more likely some flunk on his behalf) to file the petitions Monday to get him a place on the ballot for county board president come the March 20 Democratic primary.

But instead, Stroger on Monday decided to instead file the nominating petitions he had originally collected to get himself on the ballot for a seat on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

Which under typical circumstances could be considered a government post of some significance – one that would allow Stroger to go around thinking of himself as a government official. Rather than a political has-been – which is what he’s been in recent years.

Stroger aides were honest in admitting he was unable to get enough signatures of support to get himself a place on the ballot with just over 8,200 valid signatures of support. There wasn’t enough time, since he only began his county board president talk just over a week ago.

WHEREAS HE HAD been using the past several months to gather signatures for the ballot slot for the water district.

If Stroger had gone ahead and sought the county board president post, there’s a very good chance that his petitions would have had the appearance of a rush job; as in sloppy and flawed.

It happens, particularly since the rules governing the process are so vague that who’s to say what will ultimately be determined to be a flawed signature.

PRECKWINKLE: One less primary challenger

Meaning it would have been likely that some supporter of incumbent Toni Preckwinkle would have filed a challenge to Stroger – and he likely would have suffered the ignominious embarrassment of being kicked off the ballot!

IT’S MORE LIKELY that his water district petitions are more legally sound and less likely to be challenged.

Although it’s always possible that someone motivated by spite will go ahead and challenge Stroger’s water district candidacy on the grounds that he had a hell of a lot of nerve to think he could run against Preckwinkle.

If that line of logic sounds incredibly petty and absurd, keep in mind we’re talking about electoral politics. It’s all about the egos for these people.

Including for Stroger, who probably has some resentment that voters dumped on him for his sales tax initiative that was meant to stabilize the county government finances – but instead caused resentment because the increase in the county portion of the sales tax caused the overall tax in Chicago to exceed 10 percent.

THEN AGAIN, THERE are others for whom Stroger’s real offense was being picked by his father, the late John Stroger, to succeed him as county board president.

Todd may have been a one-time state legislator and alderman, but the people who were somehow willing to accept all the generations of Daleys, Madigans, Cullertons, Lipinskis, etc., who have been a part of the local government scene were somehow unable to accept it when the Stroger family tried to follow suit.

John Stroger must settle for county hospital named in his honor, rather than being a political family like the Daleys

I don’t doubt that a Stroger candidacy for Cook County Board president would have drawn a certain amount of negative energy. He would have been a long-shot to win, regardless of what he thinks about Preckwinkle and her ‘pop tax’ effort to balance the county budget.

Although I wonder if his couple of weeks as a Preckwinkle challenger will merely elevate Todd’s profile to the point where the people who eight years ago chanted “Don’t Vote for the Son” as their mantra will suddenly take an interest in the water district race to ensure he doesn’t win that seat either.

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