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So much for having him being seen as a political whirlwind who’ll easily serve many years as Chicago’s mayor. Rahm Emanuel has hit a political speed-bump. Part of it is due to the blood-fest that descended on Chicago on the 4th of July. And part of it is because no one has ever accused his political style of being endearing or even in power-politics terms utterly irresistible.
But the bottom line is this: one new poll has his political numbers are tanking faster than a new van of pet fish being unloaded at PetCo. And you can tell his side is worried when they respond as partisans almost always do: questioning the methodology of a poll that shows them in a bad light. The Washington Post reports:
The wave of violence that swept across Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend led to 14 deaths and at least 82 people shot. It was an exclamation point on the regular violence of the city, violence that continues to result in many murders — though fewer murders between 2012 and 2013.
For Mayor Rahm Emanuel, it was also a particularly bad moment for city residents to be polled on his reelection. They were. And Emanuel fared badly.
The Chicago Sun-Times poll, conducted by We Ask America on Wednesday, July 9, showed Emanuel trailing two rivals by wide margins. Karen Lewis, head of the city’s teachers’ union, led Emanuel by nine points. The head of the county board, Toni Preckwinkle, led Emanuel by 24 points.
In both cases, Emanuel got the lowest amount of support from blacks, who comprise about 33 percent of the city’s population. Both Lewis and Preckwinkle are black, which may explain some of that support. But it is also the city’s black community that has seen the worst violence; nearly all of those killed over the Fourth of July were black or Hispanic.
And, yes, it is correct that at this stage in the political game it’d be foolish to write him off:
From a raw political perspective, though, the poll is not as bad for Emanuel as it might at first seem, and not only because of the timing. To the Sun-Times, the pollster “cautioned that the results are a snapshot in time,” reinforcing that the moment was particularly bad for the incumbent mayor. The Democratic primary takes place in February 2015, during the winter, when the level of violence in the city will almost certainly have receded. We compiled this graph using data from Redeye Chicago. In both 2013 and 2014, February has been a low in monthly murders.
But that won’t obscure other problems he has had politically.
And here it comes:
Emanuel’s camp — which dismissed the methodology behind the new numbers as “entirely laughable,” (which is a bit of an exaggeration) — can also take heart in the fact that the campaign has not even begun. Neither Lewis nor Preckwinkle has declared her intention to run for the office; in fact, Preckwinkle told reporters last month that she likely wouldn’t. In September 2010, even closer to the election that gave Emanuel his current job, Emanuel got only 7 percent of support from Chicago voters, according to another Sun-Times poll. By the time the campaign swung into gear, Emanuel won handily. (He raises LOTS of money that funds LOTS of TV ads; and he is a savvy political operative in his own right.)
But he is vulnerable.
Partisans on both sides (kindly spare me the scolding from the political equivalency police because I’ll yawn: it is a fact) like clockwork will downplay or try to discredit the results of polls that make their side look awful. The most trite way is to immediately start talking about methodology, which raises the obvious question: would they be complaining about methodology if they poll showed their canidate way ahead? And the obvious answer is: no. They’d be touting it and showing it to reporters far and wide.
This is the Chicago paper’s section on the poll’s methodology and how it should be taken:
The automated poll of 1,037 likely voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.04 percentage points, with 28 percent of those surveys coming over cellphones. The error margin is higher when broken down along racial lines.
The poll was conducted Wednesday, just days after a bloody Fourth of July weekend in which negative news dominated headlines and the airwaves with 71 people shot — 13 of them fatally.
Pollster Gregg Durham said Emanuel shouldn’t raise the white flag yet. He points out that it wasn’t an across-the-board rejection.
The takeaway from those surveyed?
“I might vote for somebody over Rahm Emanuel — but not anybody,” Durham said. “Would Preckwinkle be formidable? Absolutely. Look at the numbers, they jump out at you. That doesn’t mean that Toni Preckwinkle would win.”
He cautioned that these are just snapshots in time and far ahead of the February 2015 mayoral election.
But the gut reaction of partisans — and somehow some in the media still fall for it — is to immediately start harping about a poll’s methodology which you can find few (there is an occasional surprise) instances of partisans questioning in any way a poll’s methodology if their side is ahead.
Martin Longman adds:
… I’d just point out to Team Emanuel that Eric Cantor’s staff isn’t laughing about their challengers’ prospects anymore. He’s out of a job. It could be that Rahm is mayor of Chicago for life. It could be that he is about to get drummed out of office for arrogance and incompetence.
Yes, his problem has been arrogance – and merely dismissing a poll by questioning how it’s conducted could provide proof when voters go to the polls that further arrogance when it comes to the seriousness of your political situation could be hazardous to your political health and long-term political ambitions.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.