Polls had suggested that Hillary Clinton would trounce Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary in Illinois, but last Tuesday’s contest ended up practically a draw. A poll in mid-February had Clinton beating Sanders by 19 points; a Tribune poll in early March showed Clinton winning by 42 points. Ultimately she snuck by Sanders, 50.5 percent to 48.7 percent. Since delegates in Illinois are awarded in proportion to the vote, Clinton and Sanders will wind up with nearly the same number: according to the latest estimate, Clinton will get 73 and Sanders 70. Clinton won bragging rights, but when you start a 100-yard dash with a 20-yard lead, winning by a nose isn’t much to brag about.
Sanders, on the other hand, won 13 of Chicago’s 14 majority-Latino wards, by a combined 56 percent to 44 percent. (Sanders also prevailed by similar percentages in the predominantly Latino suburbs of Cicero and Berwyn.)
He was gratified by the Latino vote for Sanders, and disappointed by how strongly the black vote went for Clinton: “I still can’t comprehend why the African-American community remains enamored with the Clintons.”
Demographic factors aside from race and ethnicity likely played a role in the gap between black and Latino voters on Clinton-Sanders. Women tend to support Clinton, and there are significantly more of them among voting-aged blacks in Chicago (probably due mainly to the high imprisonment rate and shorter life expectancy of black men). My calculations of census estimates from the years 2010-2014 show that among 18-and-older blacks in Chicago, 57 percent are women. Among Chicago Hispanics of voting age, 48 percent are women; half of adult whites in Chicago are women. There are also smaller proportions of millennials among black Chicagoans of voting age: the proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds among adult blacks here is 24 percent, compared with 29 percent for Latinos and 33 percent for whites.
