In 2019, Lori Lightfoot took the stage in a downtown ballroom and promised to usher in “one Chicago, indivisible and united for all.” She had just won the runoff in a landslide, taking all 50 wards to become the first Black woman and openly gay person to lead America’s third largest city. Lightfoot, who had never held elected office until then, had not only vowed to usher in police reform in a city still reeling from the murder of Laquan McDonald and the handling of it by her predecessor; she'd promised to “remake” the city’s infamous machine-style politics. “Together, we can and will finally put the interests of our people — all of our people — ahead of the interests of a powerful few,” she said after defeating Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. “I really hope that Lori can be the light for this city,” one supporter told me during Lightfoot’s jubilant victory party.
On Tuesday night, Lightfoot had to give a very different speech.
After four tumultuous years in office, Lightfoot became the first Chicago mayor in four decades to fail to win reelection. “It’s been the honor of a lifetime to be mayor,” Lightfoot said in an emotional speech Tuesday night, conceding to Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson, who will square off in a runoff election in April. “Obviously, we didn’t win the election today," she added, "but I stand here with my head held high and a heart full of gratitude.”
Her rapid downfall—from a landslide victory in 2019 to a third-place finish with less than 20 percent of the vote—can be partly attributed to her proclivity for big, messy political fights: The acrimonious battles with City Council and the Chicago Teachers Union; the hostilities with the press; the notorious scrap over a Christopher Columbus statue that, according to a lawsuit last year, allegedly boiled over with the mayor berating staff with this line:
But her loss Tuesday also reflects the undercurrent of strife and anxiety that has run through big cities like Chicago in the wake of the pandemic and the social unrest of 2020. Though Lightfoot certainly faced criticism for her handling of COVID and the 2020 racial justice protests—including the city’s aggressive police response to the demonstrations—polls through 2020 generally showed broad approval for her leadership. But support fizzled through 2021, amid a spike in violent crime, and continued to plummet through 2022, despite improvements in some public safety metrics that she cited during her reelection campaign in an effort to combat attacks from her opponents.
As I reported earlier this week, those attacks proved especially potent for Vallas, a former Chicago Public Schools CEO who has run on a conservative, “tough-on-crime” platform that echoes Eric Adams’ winning bid for New York mayor a little more than a year ago. “We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” Vallas said in a primary victory speech Tuesday. But public safety has also proved a powerful message for Johnson, the crowded field’s most progressive candidate, who has argued that Lightfoot failed to deliver on her promise of police reform and has called for a more holistic approach to crime reduction that includes more investment in historically neglected neighborhoods on the South and West sides. “We get to turn the page on the politics of old,” Johnson told supporters Tuesday night. “We’re going to finally retire this tale of two cities.” Needless to say, the Vallas-Johnson race will be a study in stark contrasts: a candidate who boasts the support of the right-wing Fraternal Order of Police versus another candidate who has spoken in favor defunding the police.
Whereas Lightfoot four years ago promised a united Chicago, voters here now appear sharply divided between her opponents' competing visions for the city: With about 34 percent of the vote, Vallas led the initial round Tuesday—to cheers from Darren Bailey, the MAGA Republican whose failed 2022 challenge to Governor JB Pritzker hinged, in part, on the idea that Democratic leadership had turned Chicago into a “hell hole.” “God Bless Chicago!” Bailey tweeted Tuesday night. “You are finally figuring it out!!!” Should Vallas receive in the runoff the roughly 10 percent of votes garnered by the race’s other conservative—perennial candidate Willie Wilson—he’d have about 45 percent. Meanwhile, Johnson, who took about 20 percent of Tuesday’s vote, would get to about 40, if voters from the race’s other more progressive candidates—United States Congressman Chuy Garcia, 27-year-old activist Ja’Mal Green, State Representative Kam Buckner, and Alds. Sophia King and Roderick Sawyer—were to shift to him in April.
That means the race for City Hall could come down to the 17 percent of voters who voted for Lightfoot, who didn’t run as far to the right as Vallas but not as far to the left as Johnson. Where her middle ultimately goes could be as potent a symbol for national attitudes on issues of public safety as her loss itself. It’s unclear if Lightfoot herself will make an endorsement or which of her two rivals she’d back, but on Tuesday she called each to congratulate them on making the runoff, and said she’d be “rooting and praying” for the city’s next mayor.
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