- Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photos
- Jesus “Chuy” Garcia turned in his nominating petitions on Monday.
I can think of nine million reasons Jesus Garcia can’t beat Rahm Emanuel, a number that grows daily as the gifts to the mayor’s campaign fund roll in. On Monday, Emanuel’s committee reported the arrival of a contribution from billionaire former hedge fund manager (and charter school advocate) John D. Arnold, who lives on Lazy Lane (really) in Houston, but cares enough about the mayor’s race in Chicago to put a hundred grand down on Rahm. Garcia’s following among Lazy Lane billionaires is thought to be smaller.
In 1992, Garcia became the first Mexican-American to be elected to the Illinois state senate. “He’s never been a guy with a big ego, he’s always willing to help other people,” Cook County clerk David Orr told Linda Lutton in 1998, for a Reader story. Orr, who served with Garcia on the City Council, called Garcia “one of the most outstanding elected officials in the state.”
Of the city’s 2.7 million residents, the vast majority (93 percent) are black, white, or Latino. And the split among those groups is fairly even, according to the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (for the years 2008 through 2012):
White: 43 percentAfrican-American: 38 percentLatino: 19 percent
“He’s going to have to make sure African-Americans know his story—that he’s not a Johnny-Come-Lately, that he’s been there with us all along,” says Delmarie Cobb, a veteran Chicago political consultant who’s African-American. Cobb says Garcia also has to find a way to energize younger African-Americans, “because we have a whole generation now that doesn’t even know a coalition once existed between African-Americans and Hispanics.”
