Greater Chicago Lori Lightfoot lost his bid for a second term on Tuesday after failing to receive one of the top two spots in the city’s nonpartisan mayoral race.
Because none of the nine mayoral candidates won an outright majority in the first round of voting, the top two vote-getters will compete for control of City Hall in an April 4 runoff election.
Paul Vallas, centrist, ex-CEO of Chicago Public Schools and the only white candidate in the field, is now in a strong position to take the top job after finishing in first place on Tuesday.
Lightfoot’s defeat was a blow to supporters who celebrated her victory as the city’s first black woman and openly gay mayor.
The results also reflect the fierce challenges facing big city mayors following the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic, the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, and the increase in gun violence and other forms of crime.
Lightfoot tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade voters that the city had begun to turn the corner under his leadership and that his dismissal would undo progress in uplifting disenfranchised neighborhoods.
“What we have done during the biggest challenge this city has faced since the Great Fire [of 1871] have we continued to move toward equity and inclusion and justice,” he said at a February 9 press conference with Black clergy supporting his re-election. “And we’re not going to back down. We will not give up. We will move forward.”
Lightfoot is the first incumbent Chicago mayor to lose an election since 1989, when Eugene SawyerWHO appointed after the sudden death of Mayor Harold Washington in 1987, he lost his bid for a full term. Jane ByrneChicago’s first female mayor, the city’s newest elected The mayor lost the race when he failed to win a second term in 1983.
With the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, Chicago’s police union, Vallas presents the best alternative to Lightfoot’s leadership for voters concerned about crime and public safety.
He stressed that additional funding and a new mayor believed police could help “slow the exodus” of police from the city and fill the Chicago Police Department’s 1,600-man backlog at 2019 personnel levels.
“This election is about leadership, a crisis of leadership, because every problem the city is facing – from the broken police department, the broken schools, or the property taxes, fines and fees that are increasing – is really the result of bad decisions from the fifth. floor,” he said in the February 9 candidate debate, referring to the floor of Chicago City Hall that the Mayor occupies. “It didn’t start with this mayor, but it’s definitely gotten worse.”
Kamil Krzaczynski via Getty Images
Lightfoot also faces public fatigue as he relishes the personal squabbles that often dominate the headlines. He disagreed with the city’s right-wing police union as well as the progressive teachers’ union, various members of the City Council, and even the owners of the professional football Chicago Bears, who threatened to leave the city.
Indeed, at times, Lightfoot seemed to do so besieged by critics on the ideological left and the ideological right without ties in the middle of the spectrum to anchor him.
“Where is the base anywhere in Chicago?” U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), one of Lightfoot’s challengers, asked HuffPost in a Feb. 9 interview. “It’s not in the Black community where you would think there would be a strong base. It’s not in the more progressive areas of Chicago right now.
Lightfoot’s reputation for acrimony, combined with the persistence of property crime in the city even after the shutdown peak in 2021, has won him support from upper-middle-class white voters who have made his first reform-themed bid in 2019.
Linda Buckley, a retired businesswoman from River North, had supported Lightfoot in the first round of voting in 2019 but told HuffPost in mid-February that she was deciding between Vallas and García.
“I don’t think he works well with people,” Buckley said.
Lightfoot lamented the sexism and racism he perceived as criticism of his style of government. And in the last week of his bid, he continued to work hard rally of Black Chicagoans for his side, warning them of the consequences of missing one of his own at the wheel.
Some residents listened to her calls.
“He has been very clear about his goal to help build and help bring the Black community and those in need to the table, where his predecessors have pushed us away,” Rev. Cy Fields, pastor of a Baptist church on the West Side. , speaking at a February 9 press conference to support Lightfoot’s reelection.
But his task was made harder by the presence of six other Black candidates on the ballot, including Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson. Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer backed by his former employer, joined other progressives in accusing Lightfoot of failing to enact promised changes to the city’s policing, mental health and public schools systems.
“We have a mayor who has … capitulated over and over again to the ultra-rich, to billionaires, and to massive corporations,” Johnson told HuffPost in a mid-February interview. “And look how much despair it has caused!”
Lightfoot offered a road map for other Chicago liberals to beat Vallas in a runoff. In ads and on the stump, Lightfoot called Vallas, a “lifelong Democrat,” a “Republican” whose efforts to appeal to conservative white voters about crime was a “single dog.”
Vallas has some ammunition to refute that claim. He told HuffPost that he only considered running for county office as a Republican in 2009 so he wouldn’t have to contend with the grip of the Chicago machine.
But Vallas’ ties to right-wing groups like the Fraternal Order of Police have proven to be a headache for him. At the end of February, he cursed the union’s decision to host Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to speak to a member.
Vallas’ history as a champion of charter schools and opponent of teachers’ unions, by itself, may have united many Chicago progressives against him.
“Vallas is bad for Chicago,” said Stephanie Gadlin, a former Chicago Teachers Union official who supports García.
Choosing him, Gadlin added, “It’s like hiring Count Dracula to open a blood bank.”