Salon.com: Rahm Emanuel’s “huge embarrassment”: What it means for liberals — and America [View all]

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/25/rahm_emanuels_huge_embarrassment_what_it_means_for_liberals_and_america/

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The liberal wing of the Democratic Party can be susceptible to the “moral victory” fallacy, which in its most degraded form considers a righteous loser preferable to a compromised winner. All the same, it’s hard not to interpret Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Pyrrhic victory on Tuesday as a major win for the party’s economically populist wing. After all, this is Chicago we’re talking about; incumbent mayors expect to be crowned, not subjected to the indignity of actually campaigning for reelection.

Before I take another guess at the result’s implications, though, here’s a quick recap of Chicago’s unusually competitive mayoral campaign. If you look at the final results, you’ll see that Emanuel was far and away the most popular single candidate, logging 45 percent of the vote. That’s more than 10 percentage points higher than Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the relatively unknown Cook County commissioner who came in second. But a key thing to understand about this campaign is that Emanuel’s securing a plurality was never in doubt. He never trailed in the polls, in fact.
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