Bundled up against the miserable cold on the first day of March, 38-year-old Lloyd Beans was thinking about buying a pair of gloves, not about being part of a footnote in Chicago political history.
Like most Chicagoans, Beans decided to stay home instead of voting in Tuesday’s primary. Thus, he became one of many who did their part by contributing to what city officials say is the lowest voter turnout in almost 50 years of city mayoral primary elections.
He also had the distinction of living in one of the city’s lowest-voting wards in Tuesday’s tally, the South Side’s 16th, where only 21 percent of the registered voters cast ballots in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Beans spoke for many of his neighbors as he declared from deep within a big winter coat: “A lot of people have been disappointed for so long, they just don’t care to vote.”
Voting-trend experts saw two opposite forces at work at the same time in the Chicago election-and the nation as a whole: Despair and contentment.
If Beans was the picture of despair, a man who feels that no politican will improve his lot, then North Sider Diane Virgilio, 54, a waitress at the Loop’s Market Inn, embodied contentment-one who didn’t need to vote because she knew what the outcome would be, and it made her happy.
“I would have voted for Daley,” the resident of the lakefront’s 49th Ward said cavalierly. But she added, “He won even without my help.”
Indeed, it was a landslide, as predicted for weeks before anyone cast a ballot.
Chicago election officials said they had to go all the way back to 1947 to find a time when city primary voting was lower than the estimated 40 percent tallied Tuesday. (A few lagging precincts were holding up the official vote count and turnout.) Forty-eight years ago, it was 38.5 percent, officials said.
Even if Tuesday’s turnout sounds low, especially for a city that loves its politics almost as much as its sports teams, it’s only mirroring a long-standing national trend.
Voting experts say particpation in national elections in non-presidential years generally has been declining since the 1960s, when a new generation of voting-age Americans started taking elections less seriously than their parents.
“The single largest problem with voter turnout is the new generation of voters, under 50, who no longer feel an obligation to vote come hell or high water,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press. “Older generations feel strongly it is their civic duty.”
Along with age, voters’ income levels play a role in whether they vote, said Sandy Horwitt, director of the First Vote Project, a national voter registration effort aimed at young people.
“Lower income voters, including African-Americans and Hispanics, are discouraged by the choices and the direction of policies both at the local and national level,” Horwitt said. “There’s a lot of demoralization through a big part of the electorate.”
Tuesday, voting was low in Chicago’s predominantly black and Hispanic wards. Moises Velez, a 31-year-old printer, was typical of Humboldt Park residents-and many voters across the country, according to experts-who feel disconnected from the political system.
Velez, speaking in Spanish, said he thinks politicians are powerless to solve problems. Voting, said Velez, “is not worth it. Whatever comes, comes. Nobody can do anything about it. The problems will remain.”
Among the city’s 50 wards, the 16th may win the distinction of having the single lowest percentage of registered voters casting ballots in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Only about one in five registered voters cast a ballot in that contest.
But turnout was almost as low in the mostly white “Lakefront Liberal” 43rd Ward on the North Side. Only about 22 percent of the registered voters there cast a ballot in the Democratic mayoral primary, a number that the ward’s alderman found astonishing.
But again, this is where relative contentment comes in.
“The polling we did showed people are pretty satisfied,” said Ald. Charles Bernardini, who had been appointed to the job but, by winning more than 50 percent of the vote Tuesday, was elected to a full term.
“We had a study that showed people in this area thought our city services were the best in the city,” said Bernardini.
But perhaps the most obvious contributor to the lousy turnout was the conclusion of many who stayed home that Mayor Richard Daley was going to wallop his opponent, Joseph Gardner. So their votes wouldn’t matter anyhow.
With Daley winning by a 2-to-1n ratio, those stay-at-homes like Debora Williams were right.
Williams, 38, who works at Rally’s Hamburgers at West Garfield Boulevard and South Ashland Avenue, said, “I think people felt the Daley machine has it all covered. So why bother?”
Besides, Williams worked an 11 1/2-hour shift that left her no time to get to the polling place.
Robert Wheatly, a postal worker registered to vote in the 16th Ward, didn’t have his job as an excuse for not voting. He spent much of the day channel-surfing from the couch of a friend.
“The man I knew was going to win did,” he said.
Tom Leach, a spokesman for the city’s Board of Election Commissioners, blamed much of the low turnout on fear of gang violence, though no one interviewed in low-turnout wards in all parts of the city said that was a factor in keeping them away from the polling places.
Leach pointed out that Tuesday’s voting-or lack of it-should come as no surprise, considering that just about the same low city voter turnout (40.69 percent) was tallied in last March’s primary for governor and other offices.
But, Leach noted, when voters are electrified by a hot race, such as the 1983 mayoral primary of Jane Byrne versus Daley versus Harold Washington, voter turnout soars. More than 77 percent of eligible Chicagoans went to the polls that day.
“The difference with the Boomer generation is that they don’t feel it’s their obligation to vote, and you get these fluctuations,” said Kohut of the Times Mirror Center.
“When people are all exercised, as they were in 1992, voter turnout will go up. When they’re satisfied, though, turnout will go down.”
But, there are civic-minded exceptions to this scientific finding, and South Sider Ed Williams, 48, is one eloquent example.
Williams, a musician and marketing consultant who lives in the largely African-American South Side 8th Ward, said he cast his ballot Tuesday. He offered this impassioned explanation:
“I’ve been voting ever since I’ve been old enough to. It’s one of my rights. It’s something people fought for, especially blacks. It’s something my parents, my grandparents fought for. There was a time when they couldn’t vote.
“The last thing I would want to do is give up something that churches got blown up for, homes got blown up for, people got killed for. People gave their lives for that right.”
