Union workers from across the city gather every day at the steelworkers’ hall on Archer Avenue to get their campaign marching orders.
They fan out across the 12th Ward to tell voters about the young woman who is challenging Ald. George Cardenas–a loyal ally of Mayor Richard Daley–in Tuesday’s election.
“It’s not about voting for me. It’s about voting for the working families,” the challenger, Carina Sanchez, told scores of volunteers before they walked out into the single-digit cold for her on a recent Saturday morning.
The unions are trying to give Sanchez the kind of boost that Cardenas got four years ago from the Hispanic Democratic Organization, a powerful pro-Daley political group built with city workers.
The ongoing federal corruption probe into illegal hiring at City Hall appears to have scattered the mayor’s campaign street armies. The 12th Ward race on the Southwest Side will test how much political muscle HDO has left and whether unions angry with Daley can fill the power vacuum.
While Daley’s campaign says it is not providing troops to incumbents, similar skirmishes are playing out around the city as hundreds of union workers support aldermanic candidates they think will be friendlier to their interests.
Last weekend, at least 630 volunteers canvassed neighborhoods or manned phone banks for labor’s candidates in the 3rd, 7th, 12th, 15th, 16th, 42nd and 50th Wards, according to the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Service Employees International Union.
Almost 300 of those workers supplemented the tens of thousands of dollars that labor is spending to provide Sanchez with campaign mail, staff, polling data and opposition research.
The unions targeted Cardenas after he changed his position on an ordinance that would have raised the minimum wages and benefits for workers at Wal-Mart and other “big-box” retail stores. Cardenas voted for the proposal, but Daley persuaded him to change his position and provide a crucial vote to uphold the mayor’s veto.
“It’s totally ludicrous what these union people are doing,” said Cardenas, 40. “The mailers are raining down. It boggles my mind they would waste all this money from their members over an ordinance that wasn’t good for the community.”
Major HDO support
The unions also are focusing on the 12th Ward because they view Cardenas as dependent on HDO.
Cardenas was completely new to politics and to the 12th Ward when he challenged incumbent Ray Frias in the 2003 election. Shortly before announcing his candidacy, Cardenas changed his voting address from the Northwest Side to the 12th Ward, which includes heavily Mexican sections of the Brighton Park, McKinley Park, Back of the Yards and Little Village neighborhoods.
At the time, HDO was the most powerful of the patronage armies loyal to Daley and had dominated Latino politics in Chicago for a decade, helping elect state legislators and council members such as Cardenas.
HDO carried Cardenas to victory with ground support, more than $70,000 in campaign donations–and the promise of city services to entice voters.
A Tribune investigation found that the 12th Ward ranked first in the city in services provided by the Streets and Sanitation Department in the weeks before that election. HDO leader Al Sanchez used his power as Daley’s Streets and Sanitation commissioner to have many healthy trees in the 12th Ward chopped down at the request of voters, the Tribune found.
Since Cardenas’ election, prosecutors have won prison sentences against mayoral aides who rigged the city’s hiring process to favor campaign workers for HDO and other pro-Daley groups.
Prosecutors say Al Sanchez and HDO chairman Victor Reyes were “co-schemers” in city hiring fraud. Although they haven’t been charged, the investigation continues.
Mayor joins incumbent
Facing the union onslaught, Cardenas acknowledges that he does not have as much campaign help as he enjoyed in 2003 and that his loyalists are outnumbered.
The mayor recently made a campaign appearance with Cardenas, and the alderman’s campaign is getting help from a firm owned by Daley’s former campaign manager Greg Goldner.
Cardenas is receiving some support from HDO. At least 18 of the 46 people who circulated nominating petitions for the incumbent once worked for HDO, public records show.
Reyes’ sister, Virginia, notarized many pages of nominating signatures for Cardenas, whose campaign has received contributions from Reyes’ law and lobbying firms.
“The people I’m associated with haven’t been indicted,” Cardenas said. “I’m pretty comfortable with who they are and what they’ve done for the community.”
He noted that Daley defended Reyes, his former top aide, as an excellent public servant.
“Everybody has high esteem for Al Sanchez,” Cardenas said of the commissioner who resigned in 2005, weeks after the hiring scandal broke. “When we’re out to lunch, people still call him `Commissioner.’ He did a great job for the city.”
Carina Sanchez and other 12th Ward challengers frequently point to Cardenas’ close ties to the HDO. Alberto Bocanegra Jr., 27, quipped that the group’s acronym should stand for “Helping Daley Only.”
“HDO empowered very few Hispanics, just those who have ties to Daley,” said another candidate, lawyer Jesus Salazar, 43.
Also running are Jesse Iniguez, 25, and Alan Mercado, 48.
Labor buoys challenger
Sanchez, 28, boasts far more backing than the other challengers combined because of labor’s endorsement.
Her volunteers come to the union hall on Archer every weekday afternoon and for two Saturday shifts, starting at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Before walking their precincts recently, a group of machinists and painters ate doughnuts, sipped coffee and heard brief pep talks from Federation of Labor coordinator Ramon Becerra and Sanchez.
Becerra told the volunteers that Cardenas is the city’s worst alderman, and he sought to underscore the race’s importance in labor’s political push. “This is life or death for the unions,” Becerra said.
Sanchez worked as an aide to Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and later moved to a $60,000-a-year job in the state’s Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. After she filed to run against Cardenas, state officials fired her, saying she couldn’t stay in that job if she was a candidate.
She said she would be a full-time alderman, unlike Cardenas, who owns a money-transfer business. His company, QuickDinero Inc., paid a $5,000 fine for operating without a license in Idaho in 2005.
Cardenas now makes the same accusation that his foes directed against him during the last aldermanic campaign.
“Nobody knows her in the area,” Cardenas said of Sanchez. “She is a creation of the people who are backing her.”
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dmihalopoulos@tribune.com
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IN THE WEB EDITION: Find the Chicago aldermanic contest in your ward and your polling place at chicagotribune.com/politics
