If their success on Tuesday carries over to the April runoff elections, there could be as many as five card-carrying democratic socialists on the City Council this Spring — which would be the most on the Chicago governing body in more than a century.
Members’ victories in two aldermanic races and ballot success putting them in three runoff contests have already led to talk of an incoming socialist caucus.
RELATED: See all the city election results here
“The oligarchs are shaking in their boots tonight,” Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) told a crowd gathered Tuesday night at Puebla Restaurant to celebrate his re-election against challenger Amanda Yu Dieterich. “Our continued organizing and movement-building over the last four years is paying dividends and it appears to be a total transformation of political power at city hall from the bottom up.”
Rosa is one of the members of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who won outright on Tuesday: New member Daniel La Spata upset Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno in the Near Northwest Side’s 1st Ward.
Socialist Rosanna Rodríguez-Sánchez will head to April’s runoff against incumbent Ald. Deb Mell in the 33rd Ward. Rodríguez-Sánchez broke into tears of joy several times at her watch party at Chief O’Neils in Avondale after hearing she’d earned the most votes in the three-way race.
The success of the group — which is not technically a party but a “political and activist organization” — was proof that the city’s machine politics have been broken, she said.
“Chicago had a way of doing politics and I feel like that died tonight. The city’s dinosaurs are done. I’m very very confident that I’m going to win” in April, she said.
Byron Sigcho-Lopez, who heads the Pilsen Alliance, credited the group for helping him in the race for the seat vacated by retiring Ald. Danny Solis (25th). Sigcho-Lopez will face Alex Acevado in April.
“DSA members were instrumental and I’m thankful to the volunteers who spent hundreds — thousands — of hours campaigning,” he said. “We’ve had a rubber stamp City Council beholden to corporate interests and that’s why the DSA candidates resonated with people tonight. It’s our job to rebuild the trust in public officials.”
Andre Vazquez, who joined the socialists in June, will head to a runoff against 35-year incumbent Pat O’Conner in the 40th Ward. O’Connor took over the powerful Finance Committee after Ald. Ed Burke was charged with trying to extort a Burger King owner in his ward.
Rosa, who turned 30 years old earlier this month, had been DSA’s only elected official in Chicago. Local DSA co-chair Lucie Macías says she is excited that Rosa will have company.
“For the third biggest city in the country to have a DSA caucus is amazing and having members around Carlos will only amplify the causes that working-class Chicago — not the rich — wants,” said Macías.
The news that nearly all of DSA’s council candidates won or will face runoffs set off a raucous celebration at a Chicago socialists watch party at the office of progressive magazine In These Times in Logan Square. By 8 p.m., some of the 75 attendees were celebrating by passing around bottles of Malort and taking generous swigs or whooping when new election results were posted online.
DSA member and Rodriguez-Sanchez campaign volunteer Rachel Johnson said she was “stunned” by the election results.
“This progressive insurgency is absolutely historic,” said Johnson. “We are poised to have three or four new socialists on the City Council and will be positioned to have a socialist [caucus] on the City Council. I’m absolutely elated.”
It’s the most socialist alderman in Chicago since the 1910s when the city elected several aldermen who belonged to the Socialist Party founded by Eugene V. Debs. Debs, an Indiana native who rose to fame (and notoriety) during his role in the Pullman porters strike, ran as his party’s presidential candidate five times, including a 1912 campaign in which he earned 900,000 votes, or 6 percent of the popular vote.
The DSA’s success here mirrors a national surge in membership and political influence since avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and the election of Trump. Sanders, who announced he is running for president in 2020, will speak at Navy Pier Sunday.
After claiming roughly 5,000 members in 2015, there are now about 60,000 card-carrying DSA members nationwide and about 1,300 amongst Chicago’s three chapters.
DSA candidates have a mixed electoral record: at least 30 DSA-endorsed state or local candidates around the country lost their general election races in November. But two of its members, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Rashida Harbi Tlaib, each won high-profile U.S. congressional seats and a handful of other DSA candidates won state legislatures races.
Trump is paying attention to socialism’s recent rise. He declared “America will never be a socialist nation,” in his Feb. 5 State of the Union speech.
