Bill Daley, pictured here in 2012 when he was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, is one of 14 candidates running for mayor of Chicago
(JIM WATSON)

Chicago (AFP) – Chicago voters headed to the polls Tuesday to choose a new mayor from an unusually crowded field of 14 candidates who want to tackle the city’s persistent problems of high crime and racial inequality.

Among the candidates is a member of a political family dynasty, a former police chief, and a little-known community organizer endorsed by two celebrity rappers.

The crowded ballot was expected to produce no clear winner Tuesday night, with a run-off election in April widely expected among the top two vote-getters.

“It is a very unusual election for Chicago — just the number of candidates that are running and the lack of clear frontrunner status,” said Lawrence Msall, head of The Civic Federation, a Chicago watchdog group. 

Chicago’s current chief executive Rahm Emanuel surprised the political establishment by declining to run for a third term just as an incendiary police shooting trial, exposing tensions between African Americans and the city’s police, was about to begin. 

The sudden political vacuum from Emanuel’s departure brought forth candidates from a broad spectrum of backgrounds.  

The candidate with the highest name recognition is Bill Daley — former chief of staff in the Barack Obama White House — and the son and brother of two previous Chicago mayors who together ran the city for 43 years with mixed results. 

Despite courting African-American voters with a promise to tackle economic inequality, Daley has struggled to definitively break through the pack of candidates. 

Also running is Amara Enyia, a little-known community organizer boosted by an endorsement from Chance the Rapper. She has received campaign contributions from Kanye West as well. 

Enyia has promised to shake up the status quo in city government. 

“The city definitely needs a strong leader,” Msall told AFP, while cautioning that the challenges facing the next mayor were formidable. 

The election comes amid a backdrop of persistent gun violence that has left the city with a staggering murder count. 

More than 550 were killed in 2018 — a higher number than the combined total in Los Angeles and New York.  

The murder in 2014 of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, by a now-imprisoned police officer, exposed deep divisions and distrust of government institutions. 

Also, uneven economic investment has left parts of the city prosperous, while predominantly black communities in the West and South have struggled. 

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