Chicago mayor is finding out the hard way that the Democratic base is

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party can be susceptible to the “moral victory” fallacy, which in its most degraded form considers a righteous loser preferable to a compromised winner. All the same, it’s hard not to interpret Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Pyrrhic victory on Tuesday as a major win for the party’s economically populist wing. After all, this is Chicago we’re talking about; incumbent mayors expect to be coronated, not subjected to the indignity of actually campaigning for reelection.

Before I take another guess at the result’s implications, though, here’s a quick recap of Chicago’s unusually competitive mayoral campaign. If you look at the final results, you’ll see that Emanuel was far and away the most popular single candidate, logging 45 percent of the vote. That’s more than 10 percentage points higher than Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the relatively unknown Cook County commissioner who came in second. But a key thing to understand about this campaign is that Emanuel’s securing a plurality was never in doubt. He never trailed in the polls, in fact.

The real question, instead, was whether he’d be able to win more than 50 percent of the vote, and thus avoid an April runoff election. Historically, this is something Chicago’s mayor has almost always accomplished with relative ease; it’s even more perfunctory than when an incumbent president “runs” in his party’s primary before the general election. Yet despite his national profile, the backing of the city’s formidable Democratic machine, an ungodly sum of money, and the support of his former boss (and fellow Chicagoan) President Obama, Emanuel fell short. Experts on Chicago politics described his failure as “a huge embarrassment.”