How did Hillary win key city wards?

BOSSES | Pledges for Obama fall short: Clinton, Alvarez 'were just very popular with Latinos and women'

Cook County's Democratic ward bosses said they were backing Barack Obama for president and Northwest Side Ald. Tom Allen (38th) for state's attorney.

And yet many of them failed to deliver their wards for either candidate.

Does that mean the ward bosses have lost their power to carry their wards?

Did they cut secret deals to back Hillary Clinton for president and Anita Alvarez for state's attorney?

Or was it just another "Year of the Woman," in which women and Hispanics voted their preferences instead of those of their ward bosses?

"A lot of women wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton," said mayoral brother John Daley, whose 11th Ward -- the ancestral home of the publicly pro-Obama Daley clan -- went for Clinton and Alvarez.

Obama's name was on the palm cards Daley's precinct captains passed out, Daley said. But while voters may take the party's recommendations on lower offices they don't know much about, it's tougher at the top of the ticket where people have seen news and commercials.

While some Northwest and Southwest Side aldermen backed Allen, Daley's ward was officially neutral in the state's attorney race. Daley now says that by the end of the race, he thought Alvarez might pull it off.

"She came off so positive on her commercials," Daley said. "I think a lot of people were put off by the negativity of the other candidates' ads."

Illinois Democratic Party leader Mike Madigan's 13th Ward on the Southwest Side went the same way. Aldermen Ed Burke (14th) and Dick Mell (33rd) both backed Obama and Allen, but voters in their wards did not.

"Clearly on the Southwest Side, the emerging force of the Latino vote -- [Clinton and Alvarez] were just very popular with Latinos and women," Burke said.

Both Burke's and Mell's wards are heavily Hispanic, and Obama has lower support among Latinos than from African-American or white voters, exit polls have shown.

Twenty years after the city voted along starkly racial lines in Mayor Harold Washington's first election, Obama surprised some skeptics by winning Northwest Side and Southwest Side white wards in his 2004 Democratic primary election against State Comptroller Dan Hynes and Maria Pappas -- among other white opponents.

But on Tuesday, most of those same white voters on the Northwest and Southwest Sides voted for Clinton over their own senator. The white lakefront wards went for Obama and for Larry Suffredin in the state's attorney race. African-American wards went for Obama and Ald. Howard Brookins in the state's attorney race.

Latino elected officials have long waited for Hispanics' voting strength to catch up with their share of the population. In a severely splintered race, they may finally have achieved it. Alvarez squeaked by with 26 percent of the vote in a crowded field.