Tuesday’s suc­cess is big­ger than any one orga­ni­za­tion. What Chicago’s var­i­ous social move­ments have built did not mate­ri­al­ize over the course of one elec­tion cycle and can­not be under­stood as just a set of elec­toral strate­gies, clever tac­tics or shrewd mes­sag­ing. For years, Chica­go has been an epi­cen­ter of mil­i­tant, grass­roots orga­niz­ing that has come to deeply res­onate with work­ing class fam­i­lies. A long-term trans­for­ma­tive vision lies at the heart of this orga­niz­ing, tak­ing aim at oppres­sive sys­tems and cor­po­rate inter­ests that exploit and divide peo­ple along lines of class and race.

On Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 24, Jesús ​“Chuy” Gar­cía shook up Chica­go, and the nation, by forc­ing a key pro-cor­po­rate Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty fig­ure­head and the may­or of the 1%, Rahm Emanuel, into a run-off elec­tion for may­or of Chica­go. The win has unleashed incred­i­ble excite­ment in Chica­go — and more than a few ques­tions about how this runoff was achieved. Many observers’ first instinct might be to ask, ​“What changed in Chica­go?” But for those look­ing for lessons in the grass­roots-pow­ered vic­to­ry, a more instruc­tive ques­tion would be, ​“What was built — and how”?

From the occu­pa­tion of Repub­lic Win­dows and Doors by rank-and-file work­ers to the occu­pa­tion of schools and men­tal health clin­ics closed by Emanuel in black and brown com­mu­ni­ties; from the Chica­go Teach­ers Union strike of 2012 to sus­tained action against the Chica­go Mer­can­tile Exchange and LaSalle Street banks; from rad­i­cal immi­grant youth orga­niz­ing against depor­ta­tions and xeno­pho­bia to the #Black­Lives­Mat­ter move­ment; com­mu­ni­ty and labor orga­niz­ers have been wag­ing a clear, esca­lat­ing fight against the cor­po­rate agen­da. The foun­da­tion for the Feb­ru­ary 24 elec­tion was built over four years of coali­tion work; pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion; big, bold fights; and a clear analy­sis around race and class.

Our move­ment is broad and deep. Here’s how we built it.

Build­ing up elec­toral strength

We have greater elec­toral capac­i­ty than ever before. SEIU Health­care Illi­nois Indi­ana (HCII) drove sig­nif­i­cant resources in 2014 to com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions to reg­is­ter over 100,000 new vot­ers in Cook Coun­ty, most of whom were in Chica­go. When Chica­go Teach­ers Union (CTU) Pres­i­dent Karen Lewis was unable to run for may­or after a brain tumor diag­no­sis, she and her union made a quick endorse­ment of Gar­cía. This gave the instant cred­i­bil­i­ty, pal­pa­ble excite­ment and real boots-on-the-ground capac­i­ty that was need­ed to get over 60,000 peti­tion sig­na­tures for Gar­cía to get on the bal­lot in one month’s time — more sig­na­tures than any oth­er can­di­date, includ­ing Emanuel.

Indeed, Karen Lewis’ role in this moment can­not be under­es­ti­mat­ed. She cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion — and the sup­port — of work­ing and mid­dle class fam­i­lies across the city, because she was such a fierce fight­er for equi­ty and jus­tice. The clar­i­ty of her repeat­ed mes­sage that the moment was about the move­ment, that the grass­roots orga­niz­ing had built up to such a pitch that City Hall was firm­ly with­in reach, was piv­otal. When the CTU and SEIU HCII ful­ly backed Gar­cía, it gave him a base of resources to build upon. With addi­tion­al sup­port from house par­ties in neigh­bor­hoods across the city and small online dona­tions, Gar­cía raised enough mon­ey to cred­i­bly compete.

Coali­tions have power

In Decem­ber 2010, just a few months after six-term may­or Richard M. Daley announced he would not run for re-elec­tion, Grass­roots Col­lab­o­ra­tive orga­nized a may­oral can­di­date forum attend­ed by 2,600 peo­ple, includ­ing mem­bers of more than 30 com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions across the city. The pow­er and excite­ment of that room — a room that reflect­ed the diver­si­ty of Chicago’s neigh­bor­hoods — cre­at­ed a sense of polit­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. The elec­tion of Emanuel a few months lat­er, though dis­ap­point­ing, could not erase a new sense of hope about gov­er­nance of our city.

In our coali­tion work, we’ve seen the pow­er of orga­niz­ing not around a sin­gle issue, but around a long-term col­lab­o­ra­tion root­ed in a shared analy­sis. Dozens of orga­ni­za­tions have come togeth­er under the ban­ner of Take Back Chica­go to engage in mul­ti-issue orga­niz­ing for sev­er­al years now. We have done deep polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion with grass­roots lead­ers and have trans­formed the way orga­ni­za­tions across the city think about issue campaigns.

This work goes far beyond rela­tion­ships of paid staff. The rela­tion­ship between CTU and neigh­bor­hood groups like Ken­wood Oak­land Com­mu­ni­ty Orga­ni­za­tion (KOCO) or Brighton Park Neigh­bor­hood Coun­cil (BPNC), for exam­ple, is about the rela­tions — both alliances and ten­sions — that exist between the com­mu­ni­ty groups’ mem­bers who are par­ents or LSC mem­bers and CTU del­e­gates and activists at those schools. For exam­ple, KOCO par­ents who voiced issues of race and democ­ra­cy in edu­ca­tion have pro­found­ly impact­ed teacher activism over the years, includ­ing the cur­rent fight for an elect­ed school board. There’s still more to do here, but mul­ti-scale rela­tion­ships and an inter­sec­tion­al analy­sis play a sig­nif­i­cant role in what has been built.

Ide­ol­o­gy mat­ters

In May 2011, soon after the city elec­tions, Grass­roots Col­lab­o­ra­tive mem­ber orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing group Action Now, BPNC, CTU, SEIU HCII, and sev­er­al oth­er allied unions and com­mu­ni­ty groups, attend­ed a strate­gic plan­ning ses­sion to assess the moment and plan for the future. The con­clu­sion of our dis­cus­sion that day was sharp: Though Emanuel had tremen­dous pow­er and would be mov­ing an agen­da of pri­va­ti­za­tion and aus­ter­i­ty, it was the cor­po­ra­tions behind him that held the real pow­er — and that we need­ed to target.

This analy­sis set forth four years of orga­niz­ing against hun­dreds of mil­lions in sub­si­dies to down­town cor­po­ra­tions and hun­dreds of mil­lions of tax dol­lars siphoned off by Wall Street banks—orga­niz­ing that direct­ly linked Emanuel with the 1% ben­e­fit­ing from his poli­cies. This was a shift for many of our orga­ni­za­tions, with a long his­to­ry of pres­sur­ing elect­ed offi­cials around short-term pol­i­cy vic­to­ries or default­ing to defen­sive cam­paigns attempt­ing to lim­it cuts impact­ing spe­cif­ic pro­grams or constituencies.

Instead, orga­ni­za­tions took on the risks of longer-term cam­paigns focused on sys­temic caus­es, engaged in polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion of our mem­bers and com­mu­ni­ties and politi­cized the debate about bud­get cuts and the sup­posed need for austerity.

But again, more than an ide­ol­o­gy shared by paid orga­niz­ers, what has been most sig­nif­i­cant is the deep pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion work done with rank-and-file lead­ers of our unions and com­mu­ni­ty groups around core issues of race and class. We did­n’t just decide that top lead­ers and cam­paign­ers need­ed to come to the cor­rect pow­er analy­sis, and devel­op the prop­er ide­ol­o­gy, to imple­ment the clever­est cam­paign strat­e­gy. We treat­ed polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion as an essen­tial step that the whole of our orga­ni­za­tions would need to embrace: If we could­n’t win peo­ple to a large, struc­tur­al idea and change what they believe about racism and our econ­o­my, we wouldn’t be able to build a move­ment with any real power.

Indeed, no orga­ni­za­tion bet­ter reflect­ed this truth than South­side Togeth­er Orga­niz­ing for Pow­er (STOP). When Emanuel announced his plan to close half of the city’s pub­lic men­tal health clin­ics in his first bud­get, grass­roots lead­ers of STOP took bold, relent­less action. They sat-in out­side Emanuel’s office, marched on his home, camped out­side a clin­ic for days and occu­pied one of the closed clin­ics until forcibly removed by police. They set the tone for the anti-aus­ter­i­ty fights to come.

Mil­i­tant, demo­c­ra­t­ic unionism

The rise of the Chica­go Teach­ers Union hit a high point in Sep­tem­ber 2012, when 25,000 teach­ers and para­pro­fes­sion­als walked out of their schools, strik­ing over class sizes, a vast­ly unequal pub­lic school sys­tem (160 schools in Chica­go don’t have a library, for exam­ple, with 140 of them south of North Ave, a divid­ing line between Chicago’s wealth­i­er and whiter north side and the pre­dom­i­nant­ly Black and Lati­no west and south sides), the dra­mat­ic loss of black teach­ers in CPS, and schools with class­rooms hit­ting 100 degrees with­out air con­di­tion­ing.

For nine days, thou­sands of par­ents and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers expressed their strong sup­port of teach­ers and their union, led by Pres­i­dent Karen Lewis, against Emanuel, an out-of-touch bul­ly whose edu­ca­tion poli­cies were increas­ing­ly seen as racist and aligned with the cor­po­rate prof­it motive, not the needs of stu­dents. The streets of Chica­go were swarmed with strik­ing teach­ers and sup­port­ers clad in the CTU’s sig­na­ture red shirts. In a poll tak­en in August 2014, almost two years after the strike, 62% of vot­ers said they agree with the CTU, not Emanuel, on edu­ca­tion.

An elec­tion that saw 89% of vot­ers express move­ment-lev­el sup­port for an elect­ed school board, and that saw Emanuel, despite his $30 mil­lion war chest, fail to win the vote of a major­i­ty of Chicagoans, stands as tes­ta­ment to vot­ers’ desire for democ­ra­cy and account­abil­i­ty around pub­lic edu­ca­tion. Indeed, par­ent sup­port and mil­i­tant union­ism aren’t sep­a­rate phe­nom­e­na: a cer­tain kind of mil­i­tant union­ism has actu­al­ly helped change Chicagoans’ views on these issues rather than alien­at­ing them. City res­i­dents have grown tired of the may­or tak­ing extreme action on edu­ca­tion, and the com­plete lack of democ­ra­cy in edu­ca­tion. Clos­ing 50 schools in major­i­ty black com­mu­ni­ties, despite wide­spread protest, con­tin­ues to define this elec­tion.

Chang­ing the con­ver­sa­tion around income and race inequality

Much orga­niz­ing across the city dur­ing this peri­od took on the direct ways that Emanuel’s actions were hurt­ing work­ing fam­i­lies in Chica­go. The down­town recip­i­ents of tax incre­ment financ­ing funds (TIFs), a scheme that diverts hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in prop­er­ty tax mon­ey from schools, parks and oth­er city ser­vices to pri­mar­i­ly fund major cor­po­ra­tions like Unit­ed Air­lines and the Chica­go Mer­can­tile Exchange, were the site of numer­ous cre­ative actions that ulti­mate­ly led to the return of $130 mil­lion in TIF funds from wealthy cor­po­ra­tions and the TIF slush fund, with mil­lions more in years to come.

A report by Grass­roots Col­lab­o­ra­tive in 2013 made the star­tling find­ing that of 52,404 jobs cre­at­ed in down­town, only 1 in 4 actu­al­ly went to Chicagoans. Among the Chicagoans who did receive those jobs, most went to white-major­i­ty zip codes, with work­ers in Black and Lati­no-major­i­ty zip codes suf­fer­ing huge job loss­es in that same peri­od. The report dis­rupt­ed Rahm’s nar­ra­tive of a boom­ing econ­o­my through­out the entire city of Chica­go, and themes of strong down­town devel­op­ment ver­sus neigh­bor­hood neglect became cen­tral to the may­oral and alder­man­ic cam­paigns. This work helped inform the analy­sis of many orga­ni­za­tions, help­ing to link the spe­cif­ic issues of their con­stituen­cies to a big­ger pic­ture of inequal­i­ty in the city’s economy.

In 2007, the munic­i­pal elec­tions were defined by a com­mu­ni­ty-labor cam­paign that demand­ed that big-box stores like Wal­mart pay a liv­ing wage in Chica­go. Six anti-liv­ing wage alder­men were defeat­ed, replaced by a cohort of liv­ing wage sup­port­ers. Some of these alder­men have remained staunch allies, while oth­ers have left our coali­tion and joined Rahm’s agen­da over time. Last week’s munic­i­pal elec­tions were dif­fer­ent. It was not about a sin­gle issue, but instead about mul­ti­ple issues con­nect­ed to a cor­po­rate agen­da; edu­ca­tion, hous­ing, a $15 min­i­mum wage. It was about income inequal­i­ty and a desire to have local elect­ed lead­ers with a com­mit­ment to work­ing fam­i­lies, not just the 1%.

Since the 2007 elec­tion, we have also suc­ceed­ed in build­ing inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions with a long-term vision and a clear analy­sis of what has been hap­pen­ing to our city. Grass­roots Illi­nois Action, our sis­ter polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, endorsed Gar­cía for may­or, along with 23 pro­gres­sive alder­man­ic can­di­dates. We built two ward com­mit­tees in work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties of col­or around a work­ing fam­i­lies agen­da of a $15 min­i­mum wage, an Elect­ed Rep­re­sen­ta­tive School Board and qual­i­ty afford­able housing.

One of our endorsed can­di­dates is in a run-off against a machine-backed can­di­date. Though the oth­er lost her race to the runoff by 145 votes, GIA’s 26th Ward Com­mit­tee of par­ents, teach­ers, and ten­ants are ener­gized and already engaged in con­tin­ued orga­niz­ing, with a com­mit­ment to stay engaged over the long haul. Reclaim Chica­go, a new 501©4 coali­tion, also dug deep on two alder­man­ic races, win­ning one race out­right and help­ing get anoth­er to a run-off.

Unit­ed Work­ing Fam­i­lies, found­ed by Action Now, CTU, SEIU HCII and GIA, holds the great­est poten­tial for a city­wide inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion — and holds the poten­tial to become a third par­ty (or in Chicago’s case, a sec­ond par­ty to the left of the cor­po­rate-con­trolled Democrats).

UWF trained dozens of alder­man­ic can­di­dates, endorsed 16, won sev­en races out­right and got six more in runoffs. Just as impor­tant­ly, we helped to recruit thou­sands of peo­ple to engage in inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal action, out­side the Demo­c­ra­t­ic machine, as part of a plan to win pow­er for work­ing class communities.

So what was built to make Tuesday’s elec­tion vic­to­ries hap­pen? Orga­ni­za­tions with a clear polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy and a will­ing­ness to take real risks helped grow a grass­roots move­ment for change, and long-term coali­tions built around a shared analy­sis (rather than a sin­gle issue or short-term cam­paign) encour­aged orga­ni­za­tions to feel account­able to a broad­er movement.

We mea­sured progress against a vision of win­ning pow­er for work­ing class and oppressed com­mu­ni­ties, and pushed back against the nar­row-mind­ed focus that often plagues social jus­tice orga­ni­za­tions. We under­stood the impor­tance of con­duct­ing polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion and lead­er­ship devel­op­ment for thou­sands of rank-and-file activists while run­ning smart cam­paigns that pro­duced real wins. Gar­cía stepped into that moment that we had cre­at­ed, draft­ed by move­ment lead­ers after Karen Lewis was forced to leave the race, and work­ing fam­i­lies in Chica­go responded.

What hap­pens next will be a real fight for demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance for all Chicagoans — an idea rebirthed four years ago after years of ced­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty dur­ing decades of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Machine rule. Our broad move­ment under the ban­ner of Take Back Chica­go is less than six weeks away from anoth­er major step for­ward in doing just that — tak­ing Chica­go back.