Last week Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wasn’t able to get the 50 percent plus one vote he needed to avoid a runoff in Chicago’s mayoral election, the first time that’s happened since the city changed its election laws in 1996.



Before the election we mapped every vote he got in 2011 to see where he had the most support and where he might be weak in 2015. We wanted to see how the two campaigns compared, so we ran the same analysis on the 2015 totals to see what changed.

You can get all the data we used here.

A screen grab of our interactive dot map. Click here to see explore it yourself.

We combined both maps into one interactive slider here. You can slide the two years back and forth and zoom into specific areas to compare how Emanuel’s support shifted over his four years in office. Here are a few things to look for:

Turnout

The 2015 mayoral election saw near record lows for turnout. While the same number of people voted against Emanuel in 2011, there was a big drop in people voting for Emanuel.

Overall, more than 100,000 fewer people voted for mayor in 2015 than 2011. Emanuel himself saw his vote total drop from 326,331 to 217,118.

While the total number of mayoral voters dropped 19 percent, Emanuel’s total dropped 33 percent while the number of people voting for other candidates dropped only 2 percent.

You can see the change in Emanuel’s support as fewer dots fill the map, especially on the South and West sides.





Where Emanuel Lost Votes

It was clear in 2011 that Emanuel had the strongest support on the North Side Lakefront, with less in Latino and African American communities on the West and South sides.

This election that proved even more true, as Emanuel lost support in the black community especially. That’s evident when comparing Emanuel’s vote map to runoff opponent Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and third place finisher Willie Wilson.

As we pointed out when we first created these maps, Radical Cartography’s racial dot map matches up pretty well with the vote.

Garcia had his strongest support in the Latino communities in the west and northwest, but overall had a fairly broad base of support. Wilson picked up lots of South Side votes, but was much more limited citywide than the other two candidates.

Over the next month a lot depends on where Wilson’s supporters shift, and if Emanuel’s missing 100,000 voters reappear now that he’s in a real runoff.