Election Day, 7 a.m. Kevin Joyce is preparing for battle against an unseen enemy. He has not slept in two days. His beard looks as though it could shred cabbage. His eyes are red.
He is working in the Daley for Mayor office on North Avenue, a collection of ratty storefronts connected by shabby hallways.
The coffee is in one room, chocolate-covered doughnuts in another. Paper shopping bags full of campaign literature are everywhere.
A few volunteers work the phones. They have been there long enough so all the gloss that used to be on lips of the women has worked its way onto the rims of plastic cups. Those who smoke are smoking, and those who aren’t are pacing, eating gooey doughnuts and waiting to meet the considerable demands of Election Day.
Joyce, 23, is wearing a black nylon jacket and blue jeans. With his big-Irish-kid good looks, he could be waiting for the day to begin on a construction site. But this is Election Day, and the son of Jeremiah Joyce-a Daley confidant legendary for his own Election Day skills-is in charge of the 32nd, 42nd, 43rd and 44th Wards.
These are mostly comfortable places, with high rents and big mortgages. There are lots of high-rise buildings packed full of potential voters. The mayor will do very well in Joyce territory, but it won’t be easy.
By the end of the day, it will be apparent that Mayor Richard Daley has won an overwhelming victory in an election in which the biggest slice of Chicago voters didn’t cast ballots at all.
From the beginning of this campaign, that lack of interest in voting was the genuine enemy, a threat more powerful than Roland Burris or any Republican trying to capitalize on last year’s GOP congressional victories.
The decline in voting participation is a national phenomenon playing out locally, this time in Chicago’s election, where an estimated 41 percent of the potential voters cast ballots, and in the suburbs, where the turnout was generally even smaller.
With the exception of presidential races that offer clear choices and relatively obvious themes, voting seems to be falling into disfavor all over. And the connection to ideology that once defined big-city Democrats and Republicans is disappearing simultaneouly.
The Daley campaign knew all that and crafted a strategy to combat it, a mix of computer analysis, old-time street work and recognition that today’s voters are motivated more by self-interest than by party labels or old loyalties. On Election Day, Joyce would send his little army of volunteers into the field to see how well it worked.
“People vote their pocketbooks, their interests, all the time in these wards,” said Joyce as he lined up his office workers for the 10 a.m. precinct check to collect turnout numbers, put them into a computer and compare them with the turnout in February’s primary.
“They went 88 percent for Daley in the primary, but they weren’t there last November for Dawn Netsch (who was crushed in the gubernatorial race by Republican incumbent Jim Edgar). They are the Reagan Democrats. The connection is not to ideology or to party, it is to the mayor.
“The challenge is getting them out to vote.”
That began weeks ago, said 43rd Ward Alderman Charles Bernardini, one of those who won his job in the primary and faced no opposition on Tuesday. Still, he showed up at a Chicago Housing Authority senior citizens center at 2111 N. Halsted St. to open the 7th Precinct polling place.
There are 540 registered voters in the precinct, and a visit to the CHA facility shows why politicians love the captive audiences of high-rises: Almost 20 percent of the registered voters in the precinct live in the CHA building. All they have to do to vote is take the elevator downstairs.
Bernardini has been working on the “get-them-to-vote” part of this election for about a month, ever since he met with community group leaders and told them that a repeat of the 27 percent turnout in the primary election wasn’t going to do anything to improve the 43rd Ward’s clout, not downtown, not in Springfield and not in Washington.
From that meeting came what the campaign workers refer to as “the non-partisan clout letter,” which mentions no candidate but, under the auspices of the community groups involved, says voting is the pragmatic thing to do. It was sent all over the North Side.
“This show of interest in this election is a mandate that not only applies to the City Council, but your vote has impact on the state legislature as well,” said a letter sent by the River North Association to voters in the 42nd Ward. “If there is a good voter base, an area is more likely to be taken seriously. Even the Washington representatives study these figures.”
It is bad enough, Bernardini said, that Chicago seems cut off politically from Springfield and Washington because of last year’s political changes. The perception that city voters don’t care about their politics won’t do anything to bridge that gap.
At the CHA facility, that translated into a day of stuffing reminders under doors every few hours after checking the lists to see who had not voted. On a much bigger scale, the same thing was happening at Joyce’s command headquarters on North Avenue.
By 11 a.m., it was apparent that everything was not going well. With 43rd Ward Committeeman Peg Roth tabulating the phone-ins against the primary turnout, the conclusion was that voting was up by about 1.5 percent.
“Better,” said Roth. “Not good.”
“That extra point and a half could just have come from the weather,” said Joyce. “It was raining on primary day and it’s clear now.”
He made a command decision that would shape the rest of the day.
“Tell your section people that after 3 p.m. I don’t want anybody at the polling place. Tell them to go out and pull in everyone who hasn’t voted,” Joyce said. “To increase the turnout by 10 percent, you need 50 more votes. Go get them.”
“Now we’ve got a plan,” said Roth, whose anxiety as she pored over the turnout figures was apparent. “Now I can smile.”
The mass of Daley volunteers started arriving in the afternoon. (The timing prompted Joyce and Roth to note separately that these aren’t people coming out because a city patronage job requires it, but genuine volunteers.) By 4 p.m., they were on the streets.
Jimmy Stewart, 45, came all the way from Beverly, joining his friend Bernardini to pass out brochures under the elevated train.
He described himself as a “Bernardini Democrat” and longtime buddy who once lived in the 43rd Ward. He comes north to help on Election Day, he says, because a Daley doesn’t need much help in Beverly, long an Irish Democratic stronghold.
He took up a position on one side of the Fullerton elevated stop while Stan Ryeniewski, huge cigar in place, staked out the other side. In between, the Don Steiernberg Duo, shivering in the cold, played jazz and Dixieland music on a silver cornet and tenor banjo.
Keeping an eye on the nesting pigeons above him, Ryeniewski pushed Daley brochures and cheerily suggested everyone go vote. He offered a brochure to a young woman walking by. She shouted an obscenity at him.
“Don’t quote her,” he said.
At 4:30 p.m., Roth drove up with more brochures, just in time to snag an elderly woman who didn’t know where to vote and a young man who said, with a little nudge from the committeeman, that, yes, he would go vote. She drove them to the polling place.
“The kid in the car with me, after he voted he said he felt good about it, but that young people just don’t vote much,” Roth said.
“I tried working the dorms at DePaul,” agreed a shivering Stewart. “You would talk to the kids and then you would realize they are just not connected to it.
“I mean, I got the job on the garbage truck in the summer. I was drafted. I got the GI bill to send me to college. I feel I owe something in return. But the young people just don’t seem connected.”
By the time the polls closed, Roth and Joyce were able to see what had worked and what hadn’t.
A lot of effort yielded a 2.3 percent to 3 percent increase in turnout overall in the wards. Daley carried the area by 86 percent. The numbers were a lot better in the high-rises, Roth said.
“We worked awfully hard to get that,” she said.
