Rahm's Approval Ratings Hit Record Lows

By Mae Rice in News on Feb 1, 2016 5:33PM

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel addresses a special session of the City Council Dec. 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has set a personal worst, according to a recent Tribune poll. Just 27 percent of Chicagoans, a record low, approve of his job performance right now—a statistic closely tied to the botched release of the Laquan McDonald video.

Roughly 75 percent of voters don’t believe the mayor’s story of how and when he learned details of the McDonald shooting, in which officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shot 17-year-old McDonald sixteen times, according to the Tribune. Van Dyke has since been charged with six counts of homicide for the shooting.

Over two-thirds of respondents didn’t think the Emanuel administration was justified in withholding the video of the shooting for as long as it did, either. All told, the video was kept from the public for more than a year.

Run by Research America Inc., the poll consisted of live phone interviews, conducted via landline and cellphone, with 985 registered city voters. It was conducted at the end of January—from January 20 to 28—and had a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.

Though the Tribune argued that the results represented a “crisis in confidence” among Chicagoans, that’s debatable: by a slight majority, respondents didn’t think the mayor should resign.

That’s perhaps because, if he did, it wouldn’t mean a new mayoral election for a while yet. We covered what would happen if Emanuel resigned here.