Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Daley

Daley is doing two things at once: announcing a generational shift and quietly absolving the old machine from being the only game in town. Coming from the longtime mayor of Chicago, a city where party labels were once less a preference than a civic climate, the line reads like an exit interview with history. He’s not praising youthful independence so much as conceding that the old transactional order is losing its monopoly.

The “elephants or donkeys” shorthand is deliberate. It reduces party identity to mascots: branding, tribalism, inherited loyalties. By making the symbols feel juvenile, Daley flips the hierarchy. Younger voters aren’t naïve for drifting; the parties are the ones stuck in costume. The subtext is a warning to political professionals: you can’t count on straight-ticket gravity, patronage networks, or even cultural habit to carry you.

His phrasing also hints at a strategic repositioning. “Individual candidates’ philosophy” sounds high-minded, but it’s also a way to legitimize personality-driven politics: the rise of the brand candidate, the platform as vibe, the coalition assembled through charisma as much as precinct work. Daley’s “we better realize that” is not a civics lesson; it’s management talk, a boss telling the organization that the market has moved.

Context matters: Daley’s era bridged the peak and decline of urban party machines, and his tenure overlapped with the internet’s acceleration of politics into constant, individualized media. The quote captures a moment when party loyalty stops being a default identity and becomes a choice that has to be re-earned, candidate by candidate, election by election.