For our Spring fundraising campaign this year, the RoundTable is featuring several conversations with experts on one of the topics we’re most passionate about: journalism and democracy.
Journalist Juan Gonzalez is best known as the long-time co-host of the daily news television program Democracy Now! He’s an award-winning investigative reporter and the author of five books.
What you may not know is this: a year ago, Gonzalez became an Evanstonian, where he continues his role on the program and also is studying participation in elections in Chicago among people of color as a senior research fellow at the UIC Great Cities Institute.
I asked Gonzalez what he’s learning about voting patterns in Chicago, and about the role that the decline of local journalism plays in those trends.
Q: Your research at the Great Cities Institute points toward a startling drop in election turnout in communities of color, specifically Chicago’s Latino and Black communities. What do the numbers show for our recent elections?
A: Our analysis of voter participation in the April 2023 mayoral runoff indicates that overall turnout was slightly higher than in recent decades for a mayoral race – 38.6% of registered voters went to the polls in the runoff that Brandon Johnson narrowly won – and younger voters did participate more than usual. Nonetheless, that overall turnout represented less than half of the historic 82% level that occurred back in 1983 when Harold Washington was elected the city’s first Black mayor. More importantly, we found a startling gap in turnout in this race along racial and ethnic lines. While 61.1% of Chicago’s registered non-Hispanic white voters cast a ballot in the runoff, far higher than the citywide rate, turnout was drastically lower for Black and Latino voters, at 29% and 20.5%, respectively.
In fact, Black turnout was barely a third of the more than 85% rate Harold Washington achieved in the Black community in 1983. And the abysmal turnout among Latinx voters was actually worse than these raw figures indicate. When we factored in the large number of Latino city residents over 18 who are ineligible to vote – either because they are legal permanent residents or undocumented immigrants – we concluded that just 11.3% of Latino adults participated in Chicago’s mayoral election last year. That’s hardly the picture of a community on the road to equity and inclusion in city politics.
Q: Were there noteworthy differences in these turnout patterns between the April 2023 mayoral election and this spring primaries this year?
A: Our preliminary analysis of this year’s presidential primary returns reveals a similar pattern. While turnout citywide was 25.8% in the primary, it was far higher among non-Hispanic white voters (41.8%) than among Black (22.1%) or Latino (10.8%) voters. Moreover, if you factor in immigrants who were ineligible to vote, Latino adult participation plummets to 5.6%. In other words, just one of every 20 Latinx adults voted in this year’s Chicago primary.
Moreover, the contest that attracted the most votes this year was neither the presidential primary, where Joe Biden obviously prevailed, nor the Democratic contest for state’s attorney. Instead, it was Mayor Johnson’s transfer tax referendum that corralled the most votes – 354,382. That’s 21,357 more votes than all the candidates for president received in both the Democratic and Republican primaries! In fact, of 343,215 ballots that the Board of Elections reports being cast in the Democratic presidential primary, Joe Biden received just 263,926, while three minor Biden opponents split another 29,458. That leaves more than 50,000 Democrats (15% of the turnout) who voted but skipped the presidential contest. In all likelihood, they represented a significant anti-Gaza war uncommitted vote that has received no press attention.
Q: What do you see as the implications for local politics if this trend continues?
A: The implications are clear. Despite the mantra of one-person, one-vote, the reality is that white non-Hispanic residents of Chicago continue to exercise a dramatically disproportionate voice in our local elections given that their voter turnout rate is two to three times higher than that of Black and Latino residents. Even in races where progressive candidates of color emerge victorious, it is not necessarily an indication that those candidates have energized and mobilized the masses of Black and Brown residents.
Q: Looking at the research on the decline of local news, there’s evidence that the disappearance of newspapers is most heavily concentrated in struggling communities, according to the Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. To what extent do you think the decline of local news is playing a role in falling voter turnout in Chicago?
A: The decline of local news is a key element, in my opinion, of plummeting voter turnout in municipal elections. This has been a problem for years in most big cities and it keeps getting worse even though voter turnout in national elections has generally increased. Why? Because at the national level, we are exposed to constant coverage of national politics by cable and digital news outlets, as well by the major newspapers and magazines. But at the local and state level, as more news outlets disappear or reduce their staffs, far less information is available to the voters about their school board, city council, state or county elections, or even what officials in those local bodies are doing.
Q: You’ve been in Chicago for about a year now. What’s your evaluation of the quality of journalism covering the communities we’re talking about regarding turnout?
A: I’m still getting to know the Chicago news ecosystem. There do appear to be some excellent online efforts, but it’s not clear to me how broad their audiences are, even for the best of the hyperlocal digital start-ups. It takes years for a news site to develop an audience that is both loyal and large, and that is respected enough for its consistently accurate coverage to exert influence on the public conversation. My sense is that the hyperlocal sites still lack the resources to devote to long-term and in-depth investigative reporting, where they might actually break new ground for the public. Most have trouble just keeping up with reporting on the bare essentials of day-to-day or week-to-week events.
Q: Thinking about the fall elections, any thoughts on the job the national media is doing so far with its coverage?
A: Far too much of national media reporting, especially in the corporate media, is spent doing stenography of what they are fed by “official sources” – whether named or unnamed. Too little time is spent digging up their own original stories, or even providing provocative analyses of the news of the day. And of course, for a world that has become so globalized and interdependent in recent decades, the U.S. news media remain some of the most provincial and chauvinistic on the planet. They act as if the rest of the world and what it thinks and does only becomes important when our own leaders say so. I have little hope our big national media will shed much light on the fall elections. The discerning news consumer would be wise to turn to alternative and international news sites to have any hope of ferreting out the facts. But since the digital world is clearly a jungle of both information and disinformation, we should navigate carefully through that jungle, trusting only those news outlets that have repeatedly demonstrated their accuracy.
The RoundTable’s conversations with experts on democracy and journalism continue next week, featuring conversations with Northwestern University historian Deborah Cohen and Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
As Evanstonians, we are fortunate to have award-winning local news coverage via the nonprofit RoundTable. Our spring donor campaign is a great time to support our work with a contribution. Thank you for your consideration!
Block club Chicago does an excellent job of covering all neighborhoods in Chicago especially the previously under-represented neighborhoods of the west and south sides. BCC has grown in the past 6 years from 6 reporters and editors to over 30. They are being funded by some of the major foundations. Mr Gonzales needs to check them out.
The true reason for the very low turnout for local elections is that these elections are NOT held in November. There is no reason for a general election to occur when voters do not have an increased incentive to take the time to vote. Congressional and Presidential elections draw more voters and that is when all (other than primary) elections should be scheduled.