1935 Chicago mayoral election
In the Chicago mayoral election of 1935, incumbent Interim Mayor Edward J. Kelly defeated Republican Emil C. Wetten and independent candidate Newton Jenkins by a landslide 60% margin of victory. Kelly outperformed the runner-up, Wetten, by a proportion of 5:1. The 631,579 votes which separated Kelly and Wetten broke the record for the largest vote majority that any United States mayoralty had been won by.
Both major parties held primary elections to select their nominees. In the Democratic Party primary, Interim Mayor Kelly won a massive majority over three opponents, winning 88.92% of the overall vote. In the Republican primary, Wetten won a sizable majority against two opponents. Businessman Mortimer B. Flynn was the strongest of his opponents. The second opponent, Grace Gray, was the first woman to ever file as a candidate for mayor of Chicago.
Background
Edward J. Kelly. Cermak had been shot during an appearance alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt. The assassin, Giuseppe Zangara, likely had intended to shoot Roosevelt, not Cermak. The Chicago City Council had appointed Kelly as interim mayor after the resignation Frank J. Corr, who had initially served as acting mayor after Kelly's assassination.Entering the 1935 city elections, the city's Democratic machine was at full-strength, with strong patronage and strong electoral performance. It was headed by the Kelly. Democratic success was widely seen as a continuation of organizational success of the county Democratic party that had been first built during the landslide Democratic performance of the 1932 elections, on the coattails of Franklin D. Roosevelt's success on the presidential ballot.
While the city's Republican Party had in the 1920s controlled the city's politics during the peak of then-mayor William Hale Thompson's political machine, its power had since fallen greatly. The city party had been attempting to distance itself from the specter of the disgraced former mayor who had been unseated by Cermak in the city's previous mayoral election.
Nominations
The Democratic and Republican primaries were held in February, coinciding with the first round of the Chicago City Council elections.Democratic primary
Interim mayor Edward J. Kelly ran for election to a full first term.Democratic primary results
Despite a blizzard, a substantial number of Chicago voters participated in the Democratic mayoral primary. Edward J. Kelly won what was the greatest plurality ever in a Chicago mayoral primary.Republican primary
The Republican primary was won by Emil C. Wetten. Wetten was an attorney that had served in such roles as first assistant corporation counsel for the city. His strongest opponent was Mortimer B. Flynn, who had been president of the Pottinger-Flynn Coal Company. The third candidate in the race, Grace A. Gray, was the first woman ever to file as a candidate for mayor of Chicago.Wetten did not receive the formal support of the local Republican Party organization in his primary, and in previous bids for elected office had also run independent of support from any party establishment. When he filed his candidacy, The New York Times wrote,
Some in the party hoped that Thompson might run again, viewing him as the party's only hope of returning to power in Chicago in 1935. However, Thompson did not run. The New York Times reported that Thompson had recognized that he lacked the needed support he would have needed from the party establishment; and that with the Democratic Party in full control of local political patronage, avenues Thompson he had used in his previous campaigns to secure campaign funds would not be available to him in 1935.
The Republican primary illustrated a collapse in Chicagoans' support for the party. In the previous election, more than five times as many voters had participated in the Republican primary. Kelly received more than five times as many votes in his 1935 primary as the cumulative vote total of all three candidates in the Republican primary. One news report wrote of Wetten's win in the primary,
Independent candidacy of Newton Jenkins
Newton Jenkins, an attorney, ran as an independent candidate. Jenkins promoted himself as a "progressive" candidate.Jenkins had run for office before. He first ran for alderman of the 27th Ward in 1920. He ran in the Republican primary of the 1924 United States Senate election in Illinois on a Robert La Follette-aligned platform. During the 1930 Illinois U.S. Senate race he had been one of several candidates challenging incumbent Charles S. Deneen for the Republican Party nomination. Ultimately, Ruth Hanna McCormick had received the Republican nomination. He again ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary of the 1932 United States Senate election in Illinois.
Jenkins' run was supported by the Third Party, an effort to create a new party. The party claimed itself to be spun-off from the progressive Republican movement. The party, which intended to use "U.S., Unite" as its national slogan and utilize the buffalo as its mascot, sought to use Jenkins' candidacy as a national launchpad for the party. This effort ultimately merged into the short-lived Union Party, on which party line Jenkins would go on to run unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 1936.
Jenkins was very openly antisemitic. During his campaign, Jenkins published a number of antisemitic pieces. The platform of the Third Party-backed slate of independent candidates in the 1935 Chicago municipal elections was to create a city manager position in the city, to adopt the city commission-style of government in Chicago, to create jobs for the head of family of 100,000 households, to eliminate taxes in the city, and to end "corrupt elections". The Third Party was regarded to be "openly fascist". The July 10, 1935 edition of the American Guardian newspaper wrote that Jenkins had,
General election
Wetten framed his campaign against Kelly as a campaign against machine politics. Wetten was a rather weak opponent.After the result, the United Press wrote,
Both Wetten and Jenkins lacked sizable campaign organizations for their candidacies. The New York Times noted that on election day, its reporters did not see poll watchers from either of Kelly's opponents at voting precinct, while the city's cash-flushed Democratic organization was able to locate between "eight to a dozen workers in every precinct".
Results
Kelly carried of the city's fifty wards. Wetten received less than one-fifth of Kelly's vote total. Kelly led Wetten by a margin of 60.01 points. The massive 631,579 majority that separated Kelly and Wetten was a record at the time for the mayoralty of an American city. This beat the previous record of 497,165 that had been set by Jimmy Walker in the 1929 New York City mayoral election. The majority was far greater than the 194,257 majority which Cermak, as Democratic nominee in 1931, had defeated William Hale Thompson.Kelly is estimated to have received 84.84% of the Polish-American vote, while Wetten is estimated to have received 8.08%.
In addition to Kelly's victory, other coinciding elections in the city also saw strong Democratic performances, with the United Press the party's performance in the city's elections to be "one of the most decisive election victories in the history of American cities." The New York Times described Kelly and Chicago Democrats as having "ridden to victory," on an "avalanche".
In 1935, Democratic Party-backed candidates performed well in the coinciding Chicago City Council elections. In the first round of the council elections Democrats won 40 of the 50 council seats.
The Democratic nominees for city clerk and city treasurer also won election, with Brand ousting a Republican incumbent.
The election was only the fourth time that a candidate won more than 70% of the vote in a Chicago mayoral election. The previous instances had been in 1849, 1853, and 1871. Subsequently Democratic nominees received more than 70% of the vote in seven partisan general elections ; the first rounds of three nonpartisan elections ; and the runoffs of one nonpartisan election, with the winners of four of these receiving vote shares in excess of the 75.84% Kelly won in 1935.
Aftermath
Democrats celebrated their overwhelming success in the city's elections with impromptu parades and gatherings across the city.Kelly would go on to win re-election twice. In 1947, he would forgo seeking a fourth term after being urged to step aside by the Cook County Democratic Party, which had been concerned about the prospect of Kelly losing a general election due to scandals which had plagued him during his fourteen years as mayor.
This was the first Chicago mayoral election won by a candidate hailing from the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago. Over the subsequent decades, Bridgeport would come to generate several additional mayors, with Martin Kennelly, Richard J. Daley, Michael A. Bilandic, and Richard M. Daley all hailing from the neighborhood.
After his massive defeat, Wetten remarked, "the Republican party is completely disintegrated –there is no local Republican party." However, local Republican Party leaders voiced disagreement with notions that the result marked the party's death in the city.
The New York Times predicted,
The New York Times also observed that the disastrous Republican result was likely to exacerbate infighting in the Chicago Republican Party between elements seeking to excise the specter of disgraced former mayor Thompson from the city party, and loyal Thompson associates seeking to re-enter the fold of the party's politics, writing,
Within days of the result, Robert E. Crowe announced that he planned to establish a Cook County Republican Club. The New York Times reported that this announcement was not taken serious by most in Chicagos political community. Frederick Lundin, once a Thompson ally turned adversary of Thompson during his late mayoralty, began talking about ideas of how to rehabilitate the party's image amongst Chicagoans. Thompson himself would unsuccessfully seek to make a mayoral comeback four years later, losing the 1939 Republican primary to Dwight H. Green. No Republican nominee would again be elected mayor. Chicago ceased holding partisan mayoral elections after 1995.
Chicago mayoral elections would not see a comparably broad share of votes separating the winner and runner-up until forty years later in 1975 when Richard J. Daley won with a 57.73-point margin between him and runner-up John J. Hoellen Jr. While the 60.01-point percentage lead of 1935 has since been surpassed in Chicago mayoral elections by the 66-point margin of 1979 and the 64.44-point margin of 2003 the raw vote pluralities in those elections were less than the 631,579 of the 1935 result.
After 1935, the subsequent four mayoral elections saw Republican nominees run far more organized campaigns in far more competitive races. Democratic nominees won those elections by margins of between 10 and 18 points. The next six elections after that saw Democrat Richard J. Daley defeat Republican nominees with margins as close as 10 points and 12 points, and as broad as lopsided as 40 points 42 points, 48 points and 58.