Lori Lightfoot rode into the Chicago mayor’s office in 2019 as a reform candidate, offering a break from the city’s clubby political scene while making history as the first Black woman and first out gay person to hold the office as she won all 50 wards.
Four years later, the Second City’s voters demonstrated how drastically its political dynamics have shifted when Lightfoot on Tuesday failed to finish in the top two and advance to the April runoff. Chicago is now the third major city in recent years with a mayoral election that will test attitudes – among a heavily Democratic electorate – toward crime and policing.
Lightfoot had clashed with police and teachers’ unions, while developing frosty relationships with city aldermen and Illinois’ Democratic governor – leaving her with few influential allies. Voters, too, were uneasy: Violent crime spiked on Lightfoot’s watch. Chicago’s public transportation system remains saddled with service gaps and delays. And though Lightfoot’s management of the coronavirus pandemic was popular, the city’s economic rebound has been sluggish.
The result was a municipal election in which Lightfoot finished third in the nine-person field, with the support of only about one-in-six Chicago voters. She is the first full-term incumbent Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose reelection.
The outcome especially underscored the electorate’s focus on public safety. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – have increased since last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.
Paul Vallas, a former schools chief who campaigned on a tough-on-crime message, and Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner with the backing of the influential teachers’…
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