In the Chicago mayoral election of 1935, incumbent Interim Mayor Edward J. Kelly (who had been appointed to office of mayor after the assassination of Anton Cermak) defeated Republican Emil C. Wetten and independent candidate Newton Jenkins by a landslide 60% margin of victory. Kelly outperformed the runner-up, Wetten, by a proportion of 5:1. The 631,579 votes which separated Kelly and Wetten broke the record for the largest vote majority that any United States mayoralty had been won by (measured by the raw number of votes separating the winner and runner-up).

Both major parties held primary elections to select their nominees. In the Democratic Party primary, Interim Mayor Kelly won a massive majority over three opponents, winning 88.92% of the overall vote. In the Republican primary, Wetten won a sizable majority against two opponents. Businessman Mortimer B. Flynn was the strongest of his opponents. The second opponent, Grace Gray, was the first woman to ever file as a candidate for mayor of Chicago.

Background Edward J. Kelly (a Democrat was appointed interim mayor in the aftermath of the 1933 assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak (also a Democrat). Cermak had been shot during an appearance alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt (at the time the president-elect of the United States). The assassin, Giuseppe Zangara, likely had intended to shoot Roosevelt, not Cermak. The Chicago City Council had appointed Kelly as interim mayor after the resignation Frank J. Corr, who had initially served as acting mayor after Kelly's assassination.

Entering the 1935 city elections, the city's Democratic machine was at full-strength, with strong patronage and strong electoral performance. It was headed by the Kelly (the Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party and the Illinois member of the Democratic National Committee). Democratic success was widely seen as a continuation of organizational success of the county Democratic party that had been first built during the landslide Democratic performance of the 1932 elections, on the coattails of Franklin D. Roosevelt's success on the presidential ballot.

While the city's Republican Party had in the 1920s controlled the city's politics during the peak of then-mayor William Hale Thompson's political machine, its power had since fallen greatly. The city party had been attempting to distance itself from the specter of the disgraced former mayor who had been unseated by Cermak in the city's previous mayoral election.

Nominations The Democratic and Republican primaries were held in February, coinciding with the first round of the Chicago City Council elections.

Democratic primary Interim mayor Edward J. Kelly ran for election to a full first term.

Democratic primary results Despite a blizzard, a substantial number of Chicago voters participated in the Democratic mayoral primary. Edward J. Kelly won what was the greatest plurality ever in a Chicago mayoral primary.

Republican primary The Republican primary was won by Emil C. Wetten. Wetten was an attorney that had served in such roles as first assistant corporation counsel for the city. His strongest opponent was Mortimer B. Flynn, who had been president of the Pottinger-Flynn Coal Company.Official Reference Book: Press Club of Chicago (page 263)Chicago Tribune 17-Jun-1923 (page 4) The third candidate in the race, Grace A. Gray, was the first woman ever to file as a candidate for mayor of Chicago.

Wetten did not receive the formal support of the local Republican Party organization in his primary, and in previous bids for elected office had also run independent of support from any party establishment. When he filed his candidacy, The New York Times wrote,

Some in the party hoped that Thompson might run again, viewing him as the party's only hope of returning to power in Chicago in 1935. However, Thompson did not run. The New York Times reported that Thompson had recognized that he lacked the needed support he would have needed from the party establishment; and that with the Democratic Party in full control of local political patronage, avenues Thompson he had used in his previous campaigns to secure campaign funds would not be available to him in 1935.

The Republican primary illustrated a collapse in Chicagoans' support for the party. In the previous election, more than five times as many voters had participated in the Republican primary. Kelly received more than five times as many votes in his 1935 primary as the cumulative vote total of all three candidates in the Republican primary. One news report wrote of Wetten's win in the primary,

Republican primary results

Independent candidacy of Newton Jenkins Newton Jenkins, an attorney, ran as an independent candidate. Jenkins promoted himself as a "progressive" candidate.

Jenkins had run for office before. He first ran for alderman of the 27th Ward in 1920. He ran in the Republican primary of the 1924 United States Senate election in Illinois on a Robert La Follette-aligned platform. During the 1930 Illinois U.S. Senate race he had been one of several candidates challenging incumbent Charles S. Deneen for the Republican Party nomination. Ultimately, Ruth Hanna McCormick had received the Republican nomination.. He again ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary of the 1932 United States Senate election in Illinois.

Jenkins' run was supported by the Third Party, an effort to create a new party. The party claimed itself to be spun-off from the progressive Republican movement. The party, which intended to use "U.S., Unite" as its national slogan and utilize the buffalo as its mascot, sought to use Jenkins' candidacy as a national launchpad for the party. This effort ultimately merged into the short-lived Union Party, on which party line Jenkins would go on to run unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 1936.

Jenkins was very openly antisemitic. During his campaign, Jenkins published a number of antisemitic pieces. The platform of the Third Party-backed slate of independent candidates in the 1935 Chicago municipal elections was to create a city manager position in the city, to adopt the city commission-style of government in Chicago, to create jobs for the head of family of 100,000 households, to eliminate taxes in the city, and to end "corrupt elections". The Third Party was regarded to be "openly fascist". The July 10, 1935 edition of the American Guardian newspaper wrote that Jenkins had,

Third parties that failed to qualify for ballot inclusion Three further third-parties attempted to run tickets in the 1935 municipal elections, but failed to collect the necessary 56,000 signatures for its petitions to qualify for the ballot.

Socialist Party of America The Socialist Party of America abandoned its effort to run a slate of candidates in 1935 after failing to collect enough signatures.

Douglas-led "Chicago Fusion" ticket University of Chicago professor Paul H. Douglas sought to run for mayor atop a "Chicago Fusion ticket" for which he circulated petitions. By 1935, Douglas held strong local notoriety, as well as some level of national note. Some derided his planned ticket as the "Con-fusion ticket", arguing it would further dilute opposition votes to the advantage of Kelly's chances for re-election. Additionally, some critics of Douglas's politics characterized him as being a radical "campus pink". Douglas's ticket's slogan was to be "militant honesty". For city treasurer, the ticket was to nominate Laurence D. Staplin (the president of the Carbonite Metal Company). For city clerk, the ticket was to nominate Sigfrid L Blomgren (who was also running in the Republican primary for the same office).

Douglas's proposed ticket received support from Chandler Owen, former alderman Wiley Mills, and unsuccessful 1934 Municipal Court candidate David H. Chaplow.

McCutcheon-led ticket Dale D. McCutcheon, a political novice and advertising industry businessman, also sought to run for mayor atop his own third-party slate. McCutcheon's ticket would have nominated income tax expert A. L. Van Winkle for city treasurer and attorney Louis A. Pinderski for city clerk.

General election Wetten framed his campaign against Kelly as a campaign against machine politics.The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, fourth edition by Paul M. Green, Melvin G. Holli SIU Press, Jan 10, 2013 Wetten was a rather weak opponent.

After the result, the United Press wrote,

Both Wetten and Jenkins lacked sizable campaign organizations for their candidacies. The New York Times noted that on election day, its reporters did not see poll watchers from either of Kelly's opponents at voting precinct, while the city's cash-flushed Democratic organization was able to locate between "eight to a dozen workers in every precinct".

Results

Kelly carried of the city's fifty wards. Wetten received less than one-fifth of Kelly's vote total. Kelly led Wetten by a margin of 60.01 points. The massive 631,579 majority that separated Kelly and Wetten was a record at the time for the mayoralty of an American city. This beat the previous record of 497,165 that had been set by Jimmy Walker in the 1929 New York City mayoral election. The majority was far greater than the 194,257 majority which Cermak, as Democratic nominee in 1931, had defeated William Hale Thompson.

Kelly is estimated to have received 84.84% of the Polish-American vote, while Wetten is estimated to have received 8.08%.Kantowicz, Edward. “The Emergence of the Polish-Democratic Vote in Chicago.” Polish American Studies, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 1972, pp. 67–80. JSTOR, JSTOR

In addition to Kelly's victory, other coinciding elections in the city also saw strong Democratic performances, with the United Press the party's performance in the city's elections to be "one of the most decisive election victories in the history of American cities." The New York Times described Kelly and Chicago Democrats as having "ridden to victory," on an "avalanche".

In 1935, Democratic Party-backed candidates performed well in the coinciding Chicago City Council elections. In the first round of the council elections (coinciding with the mayoral primaries) Democrats won 40 of the 50 council seats.

The Democratic nominees for city clerk (Peter J. Brady) and city treasurer (Gustave A. Brand) also won election, with Brand ousting a Republican incumbent (Charles W. Swanson).

The election was only the fourth time that a candidate won more than 70% of the vote in a Chicago mayoral election. The previous instances had been in 1849, 1853, and 1871. Subsequently, Democratic nominees received more than 70% of the vote in seven partisan general elections (1959, 1967, 1971, 1975, 1977, 1979, and 1991); the first rounds of three nonpartisan elections (1999, 2003, and 2007); and the runoffs of one nonpartisan election (2019), with the winners of four of these receiving vote shares in excess of the 75.84% Kelly won in 1935 (1975, 1977, 1959, and 2003).

Wetten's 15.83% vote share (at the time) marked the lowest for any Republican nominee for mayor of Chicago, usurping the previous low of 20.08% in the four-way race of the 1897 election. No nominee of the party would receive a lower vote share until 1987.

Aftermath Democrats celebrated their overwhelming success in the city's elections with impromptu parades and gatherings across the city.

Kelly would go on to win re-election twice. In 1947, he would forgo seeking a fourth term after being urged to step aside by the Cook County Democratic Party, which had been concerned about the prospect of Kelly losing a general election due to scandals which had plagued him during his fourteen years as mayor.World War II Chicago By Paul Michael Green, Melvin G. HolliPacyyga, Dominic, Chicago: A Biography, 2009, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 324