Rahm Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor and most recently the U.S. ambassador to Japan, is not ruling out making another bid for the city’s top job or even seeking the Illinois governorship but stressed both the city and the Democratic Party in which he’s long been a leading voice have a lot of work to do.
Emanuel, who was mayor from 2011 to 2019 after serving two years as chief of staff to President Barack Obama, said Monday that the city will remain his home and that he wants to “take some time to think about what I’m going to do.” But he said he hoped “to be an instrument for the city’s growth and the state’s growth.”
Speaking before the Economic Club of Chicago in a downtown hotel ballroom packed with more than 600 people, Emanuel gave his stock answer to the question of whether he would try to make a mayoral comeback in 2027 amid widespread public disapproval over first-term Mayor Brandon Johnson’s chaotic tenure.
“I’ve said it before. I’m gonna say it again. I’m not done with public service and I hope public service is not done with me,” Emanuel told the moderator, Chris Jones, the editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune. The question received robust applause from an audience representing the city’s business community, which was always a staunch supporter of Emanuel while he was mayor.
Prompted by Jones that Emanuel didn’t say, “no” to running again for mayor, Emanuel responded, “It’s not a yes, either.”
Emanuel said the same answer essentially applied to whether he would seek the Democratic nomination for governor next year if two-term Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker opted not to seek re-election. But, Emanuel added, “JB’s been a great governor. If he seeks re-election I’m going to back him up 100%.” Pritzker has not announced his intentions for 2026.
Previously a powerful Clinton White House aide and then three-term Northwest Side congressman, a well-funded Emanuel was elected outright as mayor in 2011 with 55% of the vote. But he was forced into a runoff four years later before defeating current U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García with 56% of the vote.
Emanuel’s popularity suffered hits over his move to close 50 public schools in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods because of declining enrollments, increasing gun violence and, in the end, his one-year delay in releasing the video of the 2014 fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year Black youth who was shot 16 times. White officer Jason Van Dyke was later convicted of second-degree murder in McDonald’s death.
Always viewed nationally by older Democrats as a political guru, particularly after his tenure as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee when Democrats picked up 30 seats in 2006, the blunt, hard-charging and often profane Emanuel has always held a center-left ideology that has increasing bristled the Democratic left as the party has moved more progressive.
Since his return from Japan in January, he’s become a CNN commentator and has appeared on TV and podcast talk shows. During those appearances, he’s contended that the party and Democratic mayors of big cities have focused too much on “woke” personal identity ideology at the expense of larger all-encompassing working-class issues such as education, housing affordability and health care. He’s said that all contributed to Kamala Harris’ loss to President Donald Trump in 2024.
Emanuel said Trump and his “Make America Great Again” supporters want Democrats to focus on “woke culture discussion” because “you’re missing everything else that’s happening at the kitchen table” and “the data is pretty clear that people think that’s all we care about.”
But Emanuel said it was “a misnomer” to think it’s one election that caused voters to reject Democrats last year. Rather, he said, it is a political process that has played out over the past 30 years.
“Politics is addition, not subtraction and we’ve been doing subtraction really well, really well,” he said. He said the vision of achieving the American Dream “of owning a home, saving for your kid’s education and your retirement” has become “inaccessible, it’s unaffordable. And for the Democratic Party, that’s unacceptable that the American Dream is only allowed for people above $300,000 a year. That’s wrong.”
At the same time, Emanuel said governmental mandates and restrictions implemented during the pandemic put “the coat of the establishment” on Democrats.
Saying “we closed schools, we closed places of worship longer than they had to be,” Emanuel said, “We’ve broken faith with you. There’s nothing that’s working democratically or economically to give people confidence in the establishment.”
Pandemic classroom restrictions “basically consciously, globally, subjugated a generation to failure, and not just in eighth-grade math and eighth-grade reading,” he said. “So therefore we have to ameliorate it, not just to make up for what happened in COVID, to make up so they have a chance.”
In the end, Emanuel said, “Over the last 30 years, both the political and economic system, and we’re all part of it, I’m part of it, we have failed the American people, and they’re pissed off. And guess what? They’re in the right to be pissed off.”
As for Chicago’s future, there was no mention of Johnson, who is scheduled to be on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to answer questions about the city’s sanctuary welcoming ordinance against Republican criticism.
Instead, Emanuel told the audience: “We have our work cut out for us, and it’s all on us. We’ve got to work.”
“We have great strengths and we’ve got to keep building on those strengths to stay a global city, at your airport, cultural institutions and your academic institutions, your global headquarters and companies in your workforce that has the capacity to compete when in the global arena,” he said. “So you gotta invest in that.”
