Just as Chica­go pun­dits were too facile and wrong when they declared the pro­gres­sive move­ment a fail­ure after last November’s defeat of Gov­er­nor Pat Quinn, so too do pro­gres­sives run the dan­ger of mis­read­ing and mis­judg­ing the results of this week’s may­oral pri­ma­ry. Despite mil­lions of dol­lars spent on May­or Rahm Emanuel’s side, thou­sands of can­vassers field­ed on pro­gres­sive chal­lenger Cook Coun­ty Com­mis­sion­er Jesús ​“Chuy” Gar­cía’s, and five tele­vised debates, no one got to the real ques­tion on everyone’s mind: ​“What should Chicago’s future look like, and how will we get there?”

The candidate who wins will have to go beyond laundry lists of accomplishments or simple complaints about one policy or another. The candidate who wins will have to present a vision of a future of Chicago—and a real strategy of how we can get there.

Yes, it was a mas­sive embar­rass­ment and loss for May­or Emanuel—who, with a wall-to-wall $14 mil­lion media game, end­ed up spend­ing around $66 for each vote that he received. And yes, it was a great accom­plish­ment for Gar­cía—who, with just over $1 mil­lion and a ground force of near­ly 5,000, forced Emanuel into a runoff.

But before plan­ning any inau­gu­ra­tion fes­tiv­i­ties or even the campaign’s next steps, it’s impor­tant to look at the num­bers through plain-hued glass­es and care­ful­ly exam­ine the facts of the elec­tion — and the pos­si­bil­i­ties and chal­lenges ahead.

While thrilling to Chuy’s sup­port­ers and sur­pris­ing to Chicago’s benight­ed polit­i­cal corps, Tuesday’s results were, in the main, not startling.

Vot­ers in the wards that are, by design of the City Coun­cil, pre­dom­i­nant­ly His­pan­ic pro­vid­ed Chuy with his biggest mar­gin. In those wards, he best­ed Emanuel by gar­ner­ing 53.04 per­cent of the vote com­pared to Rahm’s 34.63 percent.

Rahm, on the oth­er hand, best­ed Chuy by a small­er mar­gin in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly white wards, win­ning 51.13 per­cent of the vote to Chuy’s 35.21 — a good show­ing for Chuy and reflec­tive prob­a­bly of a large num­ber of union mem­bers and anger over the issues of which all are aware: school clo­sures, a gen­er­al anti-union stance, red light cam­eras and more.

And in the African-Amer­i­can wards, nei­ther can­di­date broke 50 per­cent, with Emanuel gar­ner­ing 42.65 per­cent of the vote, Chuy 24.74 per­cent and Willie Wil­son around 23 percent.

The talk now among both activists and pun­dits is which can­di­date will cap­ture the near­ly 21 per­cent of the vote that went to Bob Fioret­ti, ​“Dock” Walls and Wil­son, with crys­tal ball pre­dic­tions of what the vote meant and whether it is in fact an ​“any­one but Rahm” vote that will nat­u­ral­ly go to Chuy.

Yet that miss­es the biggest sto­ry of the day — and the biggest prize to be had for the runoff: the absence of vot­ers in Tuesday’s primary.

Over­looked in the week’s cov­er­age by all was the fall in vote totals since the guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tions in Novem­ber. On Tues­day, 97,386 few­er African Amer­i­cans and 90,880 less vot­ers in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly white wards vot­ed than in the governor’s elec­tion. This drop is far greater than any dropoff in the recent past and stands in stark con­trast to the His­pan­ic wards, where the total drop in votes was only 15,432.

The Feb­ru­ary elec­tion rep­re­sent­ed each candidate’s core vot­ers, with the His­pan­ic wards clear­ly the only ones actu­al­ly excit­ed by the elec­tion — a reflec­tion of both the pop­u­lar­i­ty of only the third major His­pan­ic may­oral can­di­date ever in Chica­go and dis­con­tent with how the may­or has gov­erned thus far.

For the April runoffs, this means that there is lit­tle room for growth in the His­pan­ic vote but huge amounts of untapped or unde­cid­ed votes in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly African-Amer­i­can and white wards.

The big ques­tion will be not only how Fioretti’s, Walls’s and Wilson’s 97,054 votes break (or if they stay home, dis­sat­is­fied with either present choice), but can one of the can­di­dates con­vince the more mas­sive 204,698 vot­ers who stayed home that they can best lead the city for­ward? The answer to that ques­tion remains far from clear.

Pro­gres­sives have claimed great vic­to­ries in the alder­man­ic races—and some were notable. But in fact, while labor and pro­gres­sives con­tin­ued to demon­strate the strength they showed in Novem­ber, over­all the results were not so clear.

Of the 10 wards where labor and Rahm (through his super PAC Chica­go For­ward) faced off direct­ly, labor/​progressives won (by forc­ing a runoff or win­ning out­right) in five (10, 17, 35, 37 and 33, though whether the last will end up in a runoff or not is still in the air) and lost (their can­di­dates either lost or were not in a runoff) in five (18, 25, 29, 46). In addi­tion, four pro­gres­sive incum­bent alder­men either won out­right (Muñoz and Wagues­pack) or made it to the runoffs (Are­na).

Out­side of the abysmal white and black ward turnouts, there were a few sur­pris­es on Tues­day. For one of the first times I can remem­ber, the pre-elec­tion polling was almost spot-on through­out. Pro­gres­sive and His­pan­ic vot­ers came out strong­ly, build­ing on their far stronger turnout in Novem­ber and their vic­to­ries across the city for the ini­tia­tives (mil­lion­aires’ tax and $15 min­i­mum wage) that they had worked on the bal­lot in November.

Rahm found no such cor­re­spond­ing enthu­si­asm and chose to run a media cam­paign with vir­tu­al­ly no ground game; his el stop vis­its did not real­ly make up for door-to-door, unstruc­tured, real inter­ac­tion with Chicago’s residents.

Rahm ran on his laun­dry list of accom­plish­ments, Chuy and the oth­ers on the real but worn issues of red-light cam­eras, school clo­sures, com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty and neigh­bor­hoods feel­ing left behind.

While good enough to get both can­di­dates into a runoff, nei­ther candidate’s cur­rent strat­e­gy is enough to guar­an­tee a win in April.

There is no ques­tion that there is dis­con­tent — and, more to the point, real fear — in Chica­go about the present and the future. Not only is the city broke, but it has lost hun­dreds of thou­sands of jobs, is becom­ing more divid­ed by income and is becom­ing poor­er. Today, there are only six com­mu­ni­ties out of 78 where the per capi­ta income is greater than $50,000, while there are 38 com­mu­ni­ties where per capi­ta income is $20,000 or less each year (the nation­al pover­ty line being $23,000) and 65 where that num­ber is $35,000 or less.

Unem­ploy­ment has eased, now down to 5.6 per­cent accord­ing to the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. But most new jobs are in the min­i­mum wage service/​retail or health care sec­tors, and unem­ploy­ment in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ties remains at 25% and 12% for Lati­nos.

Not only are these num­bers indi­ca­tions of mis­ery expe­ri­enced by huge num­bers of res­i­dents — this increased pover­ty actu­al­ly threat­ens Chicago’s future, dimin­ish­ing the tax base that is nec­es­sary to fund the city ser­vices, edu­ca­tion and invest­ments that make a city viable and sustainable.

The can­di­date who wins will have to go beyond laun­dry lists of accom­plish­ments or sim­ple com­plaints about one pol­i­cy or anoth­er. The can­di­date who wins will have to present a vision of a future of Chica­go — and a real strat­e­gy of how we can get there.

That’s a chal­lenge that nei­ther can­di­date nor the forces behind them have yet met.

Cor­rec­tion: An ear­li­er ver­sion report­ed that alder­man Sposato (38th) was in a runoff elec­tion. He won his seat outright.