It Ain't Over Yet

Still five outstanding aldercreature elections up in the air:

• Just six votes stand in the way of a North Side alderman’s fight to hold her City Council seat.
  
  Election night may be over, but candidates in five wards are still holding their breath, awaiting absentee ballots before declaring victory – or conceding defeat.
  
  Out of 18 aldermanic runoff races, five were too close to call Tuesday night: the 10th, 16th, 21st, 31st and 43rd wards.

But Rahm has a pretty heavy winning percentage already:

• More than two-thirds of City Council candidates backed in this year’s elections by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s campaign fund or a pro-Emanuel political action committee won office, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found.
  
  While the mayor raised and spent tens of millions of dollars to ensure his own re-election, he and his allies also shelled out a total of more than $1.3 million trying to influence City Council races in 39 wards, state election records show.
  
  Twenty-seven candidates backed by the mayor or the pro-Emanuel Chicago Forward “super PAC” won in either the Feb. 24 election or Tuesday’s runoff races. Their aldermanic campaigns received a total of more than $800,000 in aid from the Chicago for Rahm Emanuel campaign committee and Chicago Forward.

Although one of the largest "opposition" blocs in recent memory, still too small to have any meaningful impact on business as usual. And you can be sure Rahm and his minions are working overtime to find a pry-bar to leverage those opposition aldercreatures into his column if need be - equipment, scheduled cleaning, maintenance, adding/subtracting enforcement cameras, etc.