Chicago runoff? Despite big lead, Rahm Emanuel may come up just short.

“There are people like Mr. Emanuel, who grew up in the wealthy North Shore and probably never experienced that,” he said.

Chico may also be benefiting from the missteps of Ms. Braun, who once occupied second place in the polls but whose support has diminished in recent weeks, putting her in third place at 10 percent, 11 percentage points from where she was last month.

Braun’s campaign has suffered from several gaffes, including her initial refusal to release her federal and state tax returns and her demand that the Chicago Sun-Times fire a local columnist she called a “verified drunk and a wife beater” after he wrote a column criticizing her campaign.

The latest took place in late January when, at a community forum, Braun referred to community activist and mayoral candidate Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins as being “strung out on crack.” The accusation was an apparent reference to Ms. Van Pelt-Watkins’s admission that, as a teenager in the 1970s, she abused drugs. After the video went viral and led the local news for days, Braun apologized.

Emanuel leads the polling among black and white voters but not Latinos. Chico, who is half Mexican, is supported by 38 percent of Latino voters to Emanuel’s 34 percent. In the event of a runoff, Chico will likely court the 18 percent of Latinos who support Mr. del Valle, who is of Puerto Rican descent.

Race not prominent in election

Despite those divisions, racial politics are not prominent in this current election cycle. John Mark Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, says Chicago has been “much less racially polarized” under the current Mayor Daley than during the era of his late father, Mayor Richard J. Daley.

The younger Daley is widely credited with helping stabilize the racial conflict between neighborhoods by distributing city services fairly and opening the doors to ethnic groups by giving their leaders prominent roles in his administration. His overtures had a political benefit by diminishing the pool of opponents each election cycle.

Before Daley, “Chicago was always a city that worked but it used to work just for some people,” says Mr. Hansen. “I would anticipate that the first the new mayor is going to do is make sure that continues.”

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