Skokie changing with election of new Mayor Tennes

ANALYSIS & OPINION BY RUSS STEWART

Democrats seem to cling to the term “progressive,” which means moving onward and forward and making improvements. Sounds good. But then some Democrats want the power to make all those decisions. Doesn’t sound so good.

The antonym is “regressive,” which means going back or returning to some point in the past. Well, if the present is crappy, then that also sounds good.

That’s called “retrogression.” It was an idea banned by the 1965 Voting Rights Act that suggested that once a minority-majority leans a certain way then it must remain that way until a 2013 law challenged that.

SKOKIE: It does not apply to the nation, states or cities but non-retrogression is always percolating somewhere, like in Skokie this year. The north suburban village was a magnet for the displaced Chicago West Side Jewish population in the 1950s who fled the influx of African-Americans. Skokie’s Jewish population topped 60 percent in the 1960s but has now dwindled to about 25 percent. But the Jewish vote, as a percent of the registered voters, still remains about half – and that is why outgoing 26-year mayor George Van Dusen and his Democratic allies thought they could hand off his job to David “Azi” Lifsics this year. They miscalculated. And so did I. I called it for Lifsics in a previous column.

The new mayor is Ann Tennes, a longtime village communications director, who is not Jewish. “It was a progressive wave,” lamented one source connected to the Lifsics campaign, noting that turnout on April 1 was 12,559 and Tennes won with 49.9 percent, getting 6,218 votes to 4,741 for Lifsics and 1,498 for Charles Isho, an Assyrian-American, adding that it was just 4,394 in 2021 in Skokie, with a current population of 67,824, and 46,554 RVs of which 26.9 percent voted for mayor.

The village is ethnically polyglot but politically tranquil, having had just three mayors over the past 60 years – Al Smith (1965-89), Jacqueline Gorrell (1989-99) and Van Dusen (1999-2025).  Smith was a co-founder of the Caucus Party which was a power-sharing ploy that split offices among self-serving party leaders, eliminating messy contested elections. It was a political honey pot. A recent township referendum, however, eliminated party labels for every in-township office – and brought about the April 1st result. Nobody knew how to run a real campaign. Except, of course, for Tennes, who won in a blowout.

Van Dusen is a political icon in the village and was a trustee when Gorrell quit in 1999; he was elected by the other trustees as mayor, won a contested 2001 race, and was unopposed in the next five elections. Van Dusen, now age 82, was congressman Sid Yates’ (D-9)  field staffer for 26 years (1972-98) before becoming mayor and he, along with county commissioner Josina Morita, the Niles Township Democratic committeeperson, handpicked Lifsics to run and figured their endorsement, along with state senator Laura Fine and congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-9) plus three trustees, would suffice.

“It (the election) was not about ideology or theology,” said Van Dusen, “it was about change,” adding that Tennes’ campaign theme was about “transparency” and “reform” with no criticism of him. Lifsics made rats an issue, demanding more trash tote (cart) pickups, while Isho, said Van Dusen, uttered “just platitudes.”

But the keys were (1) gender identity, in that Tennes was running against two men; and (2) her backing by trustee James Johnson, who has a base in the village and mayoral ambitions. That got her half the turnout and 12 percent of the RVs. Such are mayors made. She also had great name recognition, being entwined in the Skokie administration for decades.

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