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“Chicago's incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her re-election bid on Tuesday, with vote totals showing that two of her rivals will face each other in an April runoff ballot… Paul Vallas, the former public schools chief in Chicago and Philadelphia who ran unsuccessfully for Chicago mayor in 2019, secured the top spot, taking 34.9% of the vote… Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, secured the other spot in the runoff race, taking 20.2% of votes.” Reuters
“The voters made one thing abundantly clear: they wanted to see the back of Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor. She had come into office on a landslide in 2019, winning some three-quarters of the vote against a well-known, well-liked opponent. Four years later, all that support was gone…
“Lightfoot couldn’t deliver what voters wanted most, what they still want, what they consider essential from their local government. Whatever their race or income, they want safe streets, decent schools, well-maintained streets and other basic services. They don’t want to pay more for any of them, since they already pay sky-high taxes.”
Charles Lipson, Spectator World
“Lightfoot's biggest problem was not her race or gender. It was her weak performance on several issues, most of all crime, which Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet referred to as the No. 1, 2, and 3 issues in the campaign. Theft is up 33% in Chicago since 2018, the last year completely free of Lightfoot. Motor vehicle theft has actually doubled since 2018. In 2022, there were 695 homicides in Chicago, almost 40% higher than the 500 killings in the year Lightfoot first took office…
“Yet, Lightfoot spent most of her mayoralty making the police the enemy. That's not to say that Chicago police are a choir of angels, but Lightfoot's tenure has been exceptional in this regard, precipitating a mass exodus from the city police force. Chicago PD lost a net 1,458 officers out of 7,660 over her time in office. The effects of this will be felt for years.”
David Freddoso, Washington Examiner
“The real-estate firm Redfin says Chicago is among the top five metro areas in the country that people are trying to leave… Mr. Vallas’s vow to stop the city-wide crime wave and fix broken schools resonated with voters. In 2022 Chicago’s homicide rate was five times higher than New York City’s and two and a half times higher than in Los Angeles. Those numbers don’t include the other felonies such as carjacking and theft that now plague the city’s streets…
“About four-fifths of high-school students in Chicago Public Schools are not performing at grade level, but the system keeps graduating them. The union resists reform while using the threat of walkouts and strikes to extort higher salaries and bigger pensions. It resisted reopening schools for months during the pandemic—despite pleas from Ms. Lightfoot. No wonder Chicago has seen public-school enrollment fall by more than 80,000 students in the last decade.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Lightfoot was smart, quick and always spoiling for fight, defending the city against its detractors – from former President Donald Trump to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas – and anyone else who unfairly caricatured her city as an urban dystopia. She stood up for immigrants and worked to refocus resources to impoverished neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides…
“Confronted with an unprecedented public health crisis within her first year in office, she generally won decent marks for her handling of it. But one element of that crisis – the scourge of rampant violence that spiked during the pandemic – contributed greatly to her repudiation at the polls on Tuesday.”
David Axelrod, CNN
“Progressives never forgave her for shutting down the subway during the George Floyd protests and even raising the city’s drawbridges, giving the Chicago River the look of a medieval moat. The teachers union soured on her after a vicious fight over keeping schools open in 2021. But those moves earned her little quarter on the right, where voters are furious about the 2020 looting, rising crime, and a broader sense that the city has lost its way…
“[Mayors face] the increasingly fraught politics of policing, the sense of a downtown in decline, neglected public services. This may signify the dawn of a more volatile period in mayoral politics. Mayors are tied to the fates of their cities, and—between crime, high housing costs, falling populations, and impending budget crises—America’s cities are not in a good way right now. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
Henry Grabar, Slate
“Johnson’s stated priorities include increasing funding to neighborhood schools, year-round youth employment programs, reopening the city’s public mental health clinics shuttered by former mayor Rahm Emanuel, reducing fares on public transit, investing in new affordable housing, and instituting a ‘Chicago Green New Deal’ to boost environmental protections…
“Johnson’s ascent sets up a stark choice for Chicago voters, who will decide in April whether to embrace a progressive approach to urban politics or return to the neoliberal model that created many of the problems now plaguing the city. Crime, in particular, will be central to the campaign, making the runoff a test case of whether Johnson’s anti-carceral, pro–social services approach can defeat a traditional law-and-order, reactionary appeal by Vallas.”
Miles Kampf-Lassin, Jacobin
