…from Daily Kos Elections...
• Chicago, IL Mayor: Candidate filing closed Monday for next year’s open-seat race to succeed retiring Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and 21 people turned in petitions to run. All the candidates will run on one ballot on Feb. 26, and in the very likely event that no one won a majority of the vote, there would be an April 2 runoff. The contest is officially nonpartisan, but every major candidate identifies as a Democrat in this very blue city.
Of the 21 candidates who filed, about 10 of them look credible at this early point in the race:
- Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown
- Former Chicago Board of Education President and 2011 candidate Gery Chico
- Former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley
- Attorney Amara Enyia
- State Rep. La Shawn Ford
- Former Chicago Police Board President Lori Lightfoot
- Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy
- State Comptroller Susana Mendoza
- Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle
- Former Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Paul Vallas
The first test for any candidate in Illinois politics is always to make it onto the ballot in the first place. That’s because petition challenges are a way of life here: Barack Obama himself won his state Senate seat in 1996 by getting all his Democratic primary foes—including the incumbent—thrown off the ballot for a lack of sufficient signatures. Petition challenges are due by Dec. 3, and the Chicago Sun- Times writes that the process could last through most of December and could get very expensive for the candidates involved.
Candidates for mayor of Chicago need to submit 12,500 signatures from registered voters, but they always try to turn in a whole lot more than that so they have plenty of room for error in case some of their petitions get thrown out. The Sun-Times writes that candidates try to submit at least three times the minimum number of petitions required—in this case, 37,500 signatures. Most of the candidates hit or exceeded this number, but Brown and Mendoza turned in just about 25,000 signatures each. Both insist that they have enough valid petitions to make the ballot, but we can expect at least some of their rivals to test whether or not that’s true….
image and an in-depth look at the candidates for Chicago Mayor @ Chicago Magazine ….Here.…