Ramming Rahm down their throats

Emma Graves Fitzsimmons and Monica Davey have an article in The New York Times about the upcoming mayoral race in Chicago:

As Chicagoans prepared to go to the polls, the water-cooler debates here have focused less on whether Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff, would become mayor of this city, than on when.
With polls showing Mr. Emanuel with a wide lead, speculation among political pundits and ordinary voters has come to center on a technical detail: whether Mr. Emanuel could win outright, or would need to compete in a runoff. If someone among the six candidates wins more than fifty percent of the vote on Tuesday, no runoff election will be needed on 5 April.
“It is going to be a landslide,” one resident, Bright Justus, 38, a university instructor, predicted confidently.
Others, including Dick Simpson, a political scientist here, say a runoff seems most likely; polls have shown Mr. Emanuel hovering near the fifty percent mark. But all sorts of factors, including the turnout of the city’s 1.4 million registered voters, could swing that number.
The question of whether Mr. Emanuel might win on Tuesday night or need to wait longer now provides a measure of suspense in an election that once had far more of it, and was billed early on as the biggest free-for-all in decades to choose the city’s mayor.
After all, when Chicago learned last fall that Richard M. Daley, the city’s longest-serving mayor, planned to retire, the prospect of the first race without a sitting mayor on the ballot in 64 years brought candidates rushing in from all sides.
But as the months went on, opponents fell away. Some supporters of Mr. Emanuel’s opponents boasted Monday that their candidates would force a runoff, implicitly conceding that Mr. Emanuel would be the top vote-getter on Tuesday. They suggested that at least a one-on-one runoff might yet create a new political narrative in their favor.
Carol Moseley Braun, who was the first African-American woman elected to the United States Senate, is expected to draw some support from black voters, who make up about a third of the city’s residents.
Miguel del Valle, the city clerk, is popular in some neighborhoods, but Mr. Emanuel’s fund-raising — about $13 million — has dwarfed his and everyone else’s.
Gery J. Chico, a former chief of staff to Mr. Daley, has poked away at Mr. Emanuel’s roots— he spent part of his youth in the well-to-do northern suburbs, not Chicago— while reminding Chicagoans of his own background in an ordinary city neighborhood.
Along the way, perhaps the most serious challenge to Mr. Emanuel was a legal contest over his residency in Chicago and whether he met the requirement that a candidate reside in the city for a year before Election Day, even though he worked at the White House for much of last year. Mr. Emanuel survived the challenge, but not without an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court.
If the entire episode reminded voters of lingering questions about Mr. Emanuel’s legitimacy as a true Chicagoan, it also let Mr. Emanuel cast himself as a bit of an underdog.
Whenever a final winner emerges, on Tuesday or weeks from now, the hardest part will begin. Chicago faces a significant budget deficit, tensions among city workers over their contracts and pensions, and a City Council that will also look significantly different after Election Day.
“The biggest issues are ahead,” said Don Rose, a longtime political consultant here.