One such parachute journalism aerial assault lit up Twitter early on Election Day, when FiveThirtyEight set out to explain us to the world by mapping “The Four Political Neighborhoods of Chicago.”


Outsiders’ examinations should not automatically be dismissed. Locals tend to take the standard operating procedure as the given state of nature, rather than something to analyze. But such analysis has to do at least two things to be worth bothering with: It has to be accurate and it has to avoid cliché. FiveThirtyEight’s piece does neither.

First, the story clearly does not know what it’s talking about regarding Vallas’ conservatism. It claims some voters think Vallas is really a Republican “based on comments he made in 2009.” It doesn’t mention his guest-hosting on Dan Proft’s hard-right talk radio shows; attending a fundraiser sponsored by the anti-LGBT organization Awake Illinois; and getting the endorsement of Trump cheerleader and Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara, not to mention recent GOP gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey. This all is the last couple of years and months, not some ancient comment resurrected by Johnson’s oppo-research minions.

By Chicago standards, Paul Vallas is a right-wing Republican. 

But the complexities go deeper and are also ignored. That former Chicago alderman and retired U. S. Rep. Bobby Rush, the founder of the Illinois Black Panther Party, also endorsed Vallas shows things here are way more complicated than FiveThirtyEight realizes.

Then there’s the conceit that Chicago could be reduced to four geographic/ideological neighborhoods, belied by the story’s own statistical analysis. While certain patterns of voting over several recent elections were indeed distinct in each of the four areas, each allegedly statistically significant neighborhood was riddled with exceptions. 

The four neighborhoods? “The United Center,” “‘L’ Barrio,” “The Spiritual South Side” and “Boho-Chicago.” More like “Oh-no, not Chicago.”

Each of these labels embraces a cliché — and then undoes itself. The South Side’s Black church spiritualism is interrupted by Hyde Park white liberals. Boho hipster Chicago includes many Latino voters. The United Center is actually the Right Wing Fringe (geographically as well as politically), L Barrio is not all Latino.

FFS, why bother with these categories?

Because it enables FiveThirtyEight to ignore some hard realities fully known by Chicagoans who pay attention. 

While perhaps all Chicago neighborhoods are Democratic in theory, the far Northwest and Southwest sides are really Republican territory. The story doesn’t even deign to mention why we have a “nonpartisan” primary/runoff system, which discourages pols like Vallas from embracing the party label that fits them.

Also: The politics of race informed FiveThirtyEight’s data set in a way they do not acknowledge. In the 2019 mayoral primary Bill Daley, Jerry Joyce and Vallas split the white vote, which helped put Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot into the runoff. Had Daley not entered the race, and had his votes gone to Joyce, or had Joyce bowed out when the scion of Chicago mayoral royalty joined the scrum, the runoff would have looked very different. Vallas was irrelevant in 2019 because he was not the only white guy.

But back to the clichés:

“Chicago politics has more layers than a deep-dish pizza, and you need a more nuanced taxonomy to understand them — so we made one,” writes FiveThirtyEight.

Well, no, they didn’t. 

And if there’s a bigger tell for out-of-town clichéd thinking about this tavern-cut city than “deep-dish pizza,” I don’t know what it would be.

Many publishers nowadays employ sensitivity readers who check manuscripts for unconscious biases that might elude an author or editor. National media outlets should hire Chicago-cliché-sensitivity readers. 

Want a better metaphor for the layers in Chicago politics? Put the deep dish aside and go with Rainbow Cone.

Bill Savage is an English professor at Northwestern University and the editor of books on Chicago literature and history.