Poll: Daley not hurt by scandals

October 31, 2006 (WLS) -- Mayor Daley hasn't made it official yet but he almost certainly will run for re-election next February. The hired truck and city hall hiring scandals have dented the mayor's political armor over the last two years. Will that hurt him on Election Day? We have some answers in our exclusive ABC7 - Daily Herald poll.

The mayor's not on the ballot next week but the city election's around the corner so we decided to ask the voters in our poll a couple questions about Rich Daley who was rocked by two years of scandal and controversy at city hall hired trucks, minority contract scams, illegal manipulation of city jobs, and the bulldozing of Meigs Field. But according to our exclusive poll the mayor who was rocked is still rolling along.

Mayor Daley seems to have survived the scandals and controversies of recent years with a minimum of permanent political damage. According to our exclusive news poll, indicating on a scale of 1-to-10, Daley's favorability rating hasn't really changed since the year 2000 long before the avalanche of negative publicity began. In fact he is still at a relatively high 7.0 this year which is comforting news on the eve of a likely re-election campaign against a field of challengers that may include Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.

"When you're a ' '7 ' you're pretty invincible. I'm sure that Jesse Jackson Jr. is going to look very hard at whether he wants to go against somebody with that sort of level of support," said ABC 7 Daily Herald Pollster Richard Day.

Pollster Richard Day says a Daley-Jackson match up is pretty one-sided at this point with the mayor leading by more than two-to-one, 66-25, with 9 percent undecided.

"The city's running well, the city looks clean, people are working and everybody was saying, 'You know, maybe we just ought to leave this guy here'," Day said.

Chicagoan Gayle Paprocki is a Democrat who doesn't like the party's candidates for governor or county board president but she does expect to vote for Daley next year. "Some things I don't like about him but I think overall he's done a pretty good job and it's nice to have stability in there," Paprocki said.

But Pablo Diaz says that he'd vote for Jackson because Daley's midnight demolition of Meigs field was wrong and city development is uneven. "He does some really good things for some parts of the city, for the tourist area, but other parts of the city I don't think he's done anything," Diaz said.

The margin of error in the mayor's race is 8 percent because the sample is relatively small, only 154 people, so it probably won't make or break any campaigns and as we always say it's nothing more than a snapshot at a point in time not the final word.

But Daley's got to be encouraged after so much scandal and controversy in recent years. As for the other candidates, their goal in February is to finish second and hold Daley under 50 percent of the vote so they can face him one-on-one in an April run-off.

You can read more about this poll in The Daily Herald or by visiting their Web site at www.DailyHerald.com.

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