Rahm Emanuel appeared on track to win 55 percent of the vote for mayor Tuesday, scoring a big enough victory to avoid a runoff and establish an indisputable mandate from just about every geographic and ethnic bloc in Chicago.

With 90 percent of precincts reporting, Emanuel had 55 percent of the vote to 24 percent for Gery Chico, and 9 percent each for Miguel del Valle and Carol Moseley Braun. Both Chico and Braun have conceded victory to Emanuel.

“Two things are surreal: the nature of the victory and how fast it got counted. What is this California? I’ve only been gone two years. What happened?” said campaign strategist David Axelrod, who worked together with Emanuel in President Obama’s White House.

Emanuel appeared to garner more black votes than Braun, and his victory, on top of victories by President Obama and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, offer evidence Chicago voters are looking beyond race to what they see as candidates’ qualifications.

“The most important thing for the city was the multi-racial, multi-ethnic nature of this victory. It was truly a citywide victory. To do that in one round is a remarkable feat,” Axelrod said. “There were people who doubted his strength in the African-American community, but it was real. It is much healthier for the city and it will give him the foundation from which to attack the problems of the city.”

Emanuel had a hard-to-beat resume.

“It’s tough to beat somebody who’s worked for two presidents, had experience in Congress and can actually point to things at the national level that everybody is aware of, said Ald. Pat O’Connor (40th), whose North Side ward delivered a 65 percent vote for Emanuel. “He’s also a prodigious fundraiser and a tireless campaigner. That’s a resume and a record that’s hard to match.”

Emanuel rode a $12 million media blitz, a near endorsement from President Obama and the full endorsement of former President Bill Clinton to a one-and-done victory over three major rivals.

“We’ve elected a mayor tonight,” Chico said. He and Emanuel had just spoken on the phone, and Chico offered any help Emanuel would need.

“I want with all of my heart for Rahm Emanuel to be successful as mayor. I again offered my service to him in any capacity he wishes and he couldn’t have been more gracious in the phone call. Our future is very very bright and Rahm will lead us in the right direction. Let’s all work together to get behind the new mayor and make this the best city on the face of the Earth.”

With the election now over, Emanuel can use the millions he has left on the aldermanic runoffs to help shape the new City Council to his liking. If longtime Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke (14th), who supported Chico, does not cut a deal with Emanuel, his days could be numbered.

The sweeping victory left the Emanuel campaign positively giddy.

“The job of mayor is one that people look to for strength, leadership and larger-than-life personalities. Rahm fit the bill. He seems big enough and tough enough and strong enough to lead the city forward,” Axelrod said. “And the effort to throw him off the ballot was incredibly ill-conceived and strengthened him. It was a combination of him running a great campaign and some of the tactics employed against him that propelled his momentum.”

Before the outcome became apparent Emanuel appeared briefly with his wife and kids in a back room at his election headquarters at a near West Side union hall and made only small talk with the media.

“OK, I’ll see you guys at Thanksgiving,” he said smiling, Emanuel, who has the largest campaign war chest in the state, is selling beer, wine, soda and water at his election headquarters at a near West Side union hall. Water is going for $2 a bottle. 312 beer goes for $4 for a draft.

The crowd ramped up as election results are posted on a giant screen in the hall. Cheers erupted at numbers showing Emanuel’s widening lead.

“This is unbelievable,” said Dwight Nash, putting his hands on his head and staring at the numbers that rolled in — early and overwhelmingly in favor of Emanuel.

Nash, a bricklayer, and Patrick Deliberto, an electrician, who both volunteered for the campaign, said they couldn’t believe how quickly the results were coming in for Emanuel.

Daniel Comeaux, an intern with the campaign who helped coordinate some of its phone efforts, said they kicked it into high gear this weekend. Over the past four days, volunteers made 50,000 phone “contacts” with potential voters, he said.

“We were working to get out the vote and apparently it worked,” the University of Chicago student said, motioning back at a giant screen showing Emanuel with 54 percent of the vote with 84 percent of precincts reporting.

Comeaux said volunteers were making calls and knocking on doors until 7 p.m. today.

“I told one woman who was getting her hair done to stop and run out and vote,” he said.

Emanuel himself kept campaigning right up until the last minute, hoping to catch a few voters who still had a chance to hit the polls.

Chico, Moseley Braun and del Valle also were working up until the moment the polls closed.

If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote today, the top two will meet in an April 5 runoff.

A morning snow helped keep voting numbers low in the morning and an expected afternoon surge never happened. So instead of a 50 percent turnout, the low 40s looks more likely.

Who does that help or hurt?

All of the candidates confess they really don’t know but they all are doing their best to find good news in the numbers. Turnout seems higher on the lakefront and Northwest Side and lower in the black wards. That would seem to favor Emanuel, said one Emanuel colleague: “My head tells me he will avoid a runoff. My gut is uncertain. It’s very hard with six candidates to get to 50 percent.”

But with turnout so high on the Southwest and Northwest corners of the city where police and firefighters live, one election official referred to it as “A police and fire election” with turnout as high as 60 percent in the 19th Ward — Beverly — and close to that in the 41st Ward on the Northwest Side.

That would bode well for Chico, who has the strong backing of the police and fire unions, afraid that Emanuel will cut their pensions.

Del Valle hit “L” stop after “L” stop trying to defy the odds up until the very last minute

“The low turnout could work for us or against us, we don’t know, it depends where it is,” del Valle said.

Emanuel, shaking hands with his son, Zach, 13, at the Merchandise Mart, said he couldn’t read the tea leaves either.

“Like you, I’ll be waiting to see. There’s nothing I can do about that,” he said.

Emanuel will be greeting supporters Tuesday night at the Plumbers Hall on the Near West Side. The plumbers were one of the few unions that endorsed Emanuel.

Braun is watching the results at the Parkway Ballroom in Bronzeville.

Chico is downtown at The Westin and del Valle will gather with supporters at the Revolution Brewing Company in Logan Square.

Mayor Daley touched off the political sweepstakes with his stunning, Sept. 7 decision to choose political retirement over a seventh term.

“Simply put, it’s time. Time for me. And time for Chicago to move on…It just feels right,” Daley, 68, said on that fateful day.

“I have always believed that every person — especially public officials — must understand when it is time to move on. For me, that time is now.”

From the moment Daley uttered those words, Emanuel was the frontrunner, a status that was only reinforced after Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart took a pass on the mayor’s race.

Emanuel had gotten a running start nearly five months earlier when he declared his intention to run for mayor of Chicago if Daley didn’t.

The remark was so calculating and out of the blue, some political observers wondered whether Emanuel had gotten a heads-up on the mayor’s decision.

Conspiracy theories were put to rest by a decision that Emanuel made a few days before the mayor announced his retirement. Emanuel had renewed the lease of the tenant who rented Emanuel’s Ravenswood home when the North Side congressman agreed to become President Obama’s chief-of-staff.

That set the stage for a residency challenge that dominated much of the campaign.

The hearings attracted national attention, in part because of the spectacle of having a former White House chief-of-staff who once dictated negotiating terms to Congressional leaders and auto industry executives sitting in the basement of the Cook County administration building answering questions from private citizens for nearly 12 hours.

Emanuel got a four-day scare in late January, when the Illinois Appellate Court temporarily knocked him off the ballot. But by the time the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously reversed that ruling, it was abundantly clear that the entire episode had backfired.

Not only did the residency challenge suck the air out of a debate that should have focused throughout on the serious issues facing Chicago, it turned Emanuel into a sympathetic figure. That’s not easy to do to a politician known for his cut-throat, take-no-prisoners style.

When the residency fight ended, two polls—one by WLS-TV Channel 7, the other by the Illinois Retail Merchants Association—showed Emanuel avoiding a run-off with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

It just might turn out to be what the Emanuel campaign likes to call a “sugar high.”

Black voters who initially sympathized with Emanuel could cast enough of their votes for Braun to keep Emanuel under the magic, 50 percent-plus-one benchmark he needs to avoid a run-off.

The race for second place, if there is one, is likely to go to Gery Chico, the former Daley chief-of-staff and school board president who was outspent by Emanuel by a 3-to-1 margin.

Braun’s inability to light a fire with black voters was the surprise of the campaign.

She had come rolling into the new year as the consensus black candidate for mayor after Congressman Danny Davis (D-Ill.) and State Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) bowed out after talks brokered by the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.

Braun had convinced the other two that she and she alone had the backing from black business leaders needed to raise at least $1.5 million and compete with the big boys on TV.

But, a series of missteps prevented Braun from raising more than $500,000. She initially refused to release her federal income tax returns because, “I don’t want to,” only to suffer through a week of embarrassing revelations about her personal and business finances.

Even more damaging was Braun’s surprise attack against nominal rival Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins.

It happened after Watkins dared to say that Braun “hasn’t been around for 20 years” and that Watkins “did not even know the woman lived in the city” because she hadn’t heard Braun’s “voice out there on the street.”

“Patricia, the reason you do not know where I was for the last 20 years is because you were strung out on crack,” Braun said.

Watkins demanded an apology and got it a few days later. Although she has admitted to a drug problem that lasted until she was 21, she insisted she has never seen crack, let alone used it.

Despite the unprecedented fundraising — $12 million for Emanuel and $3.6 million for Chico—the campaign generally avoided the ugly racial and ethnic pitfalls that have characterized past mayoral campaigns.

An exception was when a labor leader backing Chico denounced Emanuel as a “Wall Street Judas” who sold out union jobs for “bags of silver” when he muscled NAFTA through Congress.

Daley denounced the remark by Jim Sweeney, business manager for Operating Engineers Local 150, as an anti-Semitic “disgrace.”

Chico initially defended the remark, then apologized to anyone, including Emanuel, who might have been offended.

Emanuel’s NAFTA history and his threat to reduce the pension benefits of existing city employees have prompted a majority of the city’s unions, including police and fire, to line up behind Chico.

Chico and Emanuel have both offered to at least consider lifting the city’s residency requirement.

At Emanuel’s insistence, debates between the four major candidates were scheduled late in the campaign to minimize their impact.

They turned into “gang up on Rahm” affairs that saw del Valle try and portray Emanuel and Chico as “cut from the same cloth” after using their public positions for personal financial gain.