Chicago was the political base for presidential nominees Stephen Douglas (1860), Adlai Stevenson II (1952 and 1956), and Barack Obama, who was nominated and elected in 2008.
[1][full citation needed] The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated home-state candidate Abraham Lincoln.
[2] The Republicans had their own machine operations, typified by the "blonde boss" William Lorimer, who was unseated by the U.S. Senate in 1912 because of his corrupt election methods.
Before the 1930s, the Democratic Party in Chicago was divided along ethnic lines - the Irish, Polish, Italian, and other groups each controlled politics in their neighborhoods.
The New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s gave the Democratic Party access to new funds and programs for housing, slum clearance, urban renewal, and education, through which to dispense patronage and maintain control of the city.
[9] Home-town columnist Mike Royko wrote satirically that Chicago's motto (Urbs in Horto or "City in a Garden") should instead be Ubi est mea, or "Where's Mine?