U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García on Wednesday defended his decision to quietly drop his bid for a fifth term in Congress and essentially hand the post to his chief of staff, a move that undermines the Southwest Side progressive’s legacy as a reformer and has opened him up to accusations of hypocrisy by borrowing from the old-school Chicago machine playbook he’s long railed against.
Days after pulling the insider political maneuver, García said in an interview with the Tribune that he didn’t make his decision public until it was too late for others to run for office because of a confluence of quick-moving family and health events.
But by the time it became public Monday evening, the only Democratic Party petitions for the 4th Congressional District seat had been filed for him and his chief of staff, Patty Garcia, whose paperwork was handed in at the literal last minute when the filing period ended at 5 p.m. Monday. The congressman intends to withdraw his petition signatures, leaving Patty Garcia as the only Democratic candidate on the ballot in the heavily blue district.
“The clock was ticking, and I was concerned about having an option,” said García, 69, outlining a series of events last week that included his cardiologist admonishing him to take better care of his health and step away from the stress of Congress. That appointment occurred on Oct. 27, the same day his candidate paperwork was filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections in Springfield, he said.
Then, he said, as he was leaving home the next day to return to Washington, his wife, whose multiple sclerosis has been worsening, urged him not to run again. On Friday, the couple finalized the adoption of their grandson, the 8-year-old child of their daughter, who died in 2023.
“I didn’t want to be forced into going into another term if I would have won, knowing my new urgencies as it relates to my health, my wife’s health and my family responsibilities,” García told the Tribune.
García, who as of Wednesday evening had not formally withdrawn his nominating petitions, said he intended to serve out the remainder of his current term, which ends in January 2027. He said he had no plans to run for public office in the future.
The congressman didn’t go public with his decision, which would have given other potential candidates in a district that stretches from Pilsen to Oak Brook and Franklin Park to Burbank at least a narrow window to collect the 697 valid voter signatures needed to secure a place on the primary ballot. But on Friday, he did call around to allies and supporters, he said, and “all of them expressed very enthusiastic support for Patty” to run in his stead.
Nevertheless, the move drew criticism from opponents and some former allies.
“Chuy coronates his Chief of Staff to replace him using same machine tactics that got him the seat from Luis Gutierrez, denies a true open primary like every other open congressional district race but hey, #NoKings right? #Hypocrites,” Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, a more conservative Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged García in the 2024 primary, wrote in a social media post Monday night.
Paul Vallas, the former Chicago Public Schools chief who ran in the conservative lane in the 2023 mayoral race in which García finished a disappointing fourth in the first round of voting, called the congressman a “phony reformer” in a social media post Tuesday, adding García “orchestrated his decision not to run to make it all but impossible to have his handpicked successor challenged.”
The critiques didn’t all come from former election opponents. Dan Cohen, a Democratic strategist who worked for García’s 2015 mayoral campaign in which García pushed incumbent Rahm Emanuel to a runoff, said that “it takes 15 seconds to say you’ve decided not to (run again), and then allow a democratic process to proceed.”
Maneuvering to quietly install an aide in the seat “in the current political context where Dems are saying that democracy itself is being threatened, makes this move even more outrageously selfish, harmful and dangerously counterproductive,” Cohen said.
García acknowledged that “the criticism is fair,” adding that “some is predictable, and some of it is folks who may have philosophical differences.”
“Given that the window was closing, I wanted to ensure that there was an option for someone in the progressive lane to get on the ballot, not knowing who would wind up filing,” he said. “But I appreciate that people have the right to criticize and to say what’s on their mind.”
The other candidates who filed to run in the 4th District are Republican Lupe Castillo and Ed Hershey of the Working Class Party, both of whom mounted unsuccessful challenges to García in 2024. Late Wednesday, Democratic Socialist Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez said he was exploring making an independent run for the congressional seat and called García’s move an “old machine tactic.”
“At a time like this, where we are criticizing Trump for acting as a wannabe dictator, we cannot allow these anointments,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “It’s important that we put into practice our values as progressives.”
In the long run, García said he hopes that, in evaluating his legacy, “people look at my record over a 40-year period and all the things that we have fought for.”
While García didn’t make an announcement last week, the congressman’s political team hit the streets over the weekend and collected nearly 300 pages of petition signatures on behalf of Patty Garcia, who is not related to the congressman. The top page submitted to the state elections board is a who’s who of the congressman’s acolytes, including Cook County Commissioner Alma Anaya, 22nd Ward Ald. Mike Rodriguez, state Sen. Celina Villanueva, and state Reps. Aaron Ortiz and Norma Hernandez.
García was the beneficiary of a similar handoff when he first ran for Congress in the 2018 election, with his predecessor, U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, announcing just days before the end of the filing period in late 2017 that he was dropping out and backing García, then a member of the Cook County Board. That move also received flak but gave other candidates at least a cursory opportunity to collect signatures.
Asked why he didn’t follow Gutierrez’s lead and make a public announcement, García said he was “pretty confident, though I had not verified and had not received any information, that there were other candidates running.”
“I expected that in other parts of the district, people could be circulating” petitions for other candidates, García said. “During the two days that signatures were collected, I was surprised that nobody called me, given all the doors that people knocked on in the suburban part of the district, in Chicago.”
Patty García, whom the congressman said has resigned from her government job to run for office, did not respond to interview requests. Rep. García said she was expected to make a public announcement of her candidacy in the coming days.
Despite coming up in politics as an ally of Harold Washington, a progressive reformer and Chicago’s first Black mayor, García, in more recent years, had formed a tentative alliance with former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, one of the last vestiges of the political machine once led by Mayor Richard J. Daley.
García is far from alone in deploying the tactics used to give his chief of staff an electoral leg up. Indeed, also on Monday, the chief of staff to state Rep. Marty Moylan, a Des Plaines Democrat, filed petitions to run for Moylan’s northwest suburban seat in the Illinois House. Moylan, who filed his petitions a week earlier, has decided not to seek an eighth term in Springfield.
Chicago Tribune’s Jake Sheridan contributed.