Chicago voters ousted Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Tuesday night, making her the first mayor in the city to lose re-election in 40 years.
The defeat was a remarkable reversal from the landslide four years ago that carried Lightfoot, then a political unknown, to City Hall, and made her the first black lesbian to run the third-largest city in the US.
But in a sprawling field of nine candidates, in a race dominated by fears over crime, the mayor was unable to win enough votes to secure a place in a run-off election in April. Lightfoot received 75,000 votes, or 16 per cent of the total cast.
“I will be rooting and praying for our next mayor to deliver in the years to come,” Lightfoot said in her concession speech. “Obviously, we didn’t win the election, but I stand here with my head held high.”
Tuesday’s top vote-getter was Paul Vallas, who was appointed chief executive of Chicago Public Schools in 1995, later holding similar posts in New Orleans and Philadelphia. The only white candidate in the race, Vallas hammered on the theme of public safety and won the backing of the city’s police union. He won 159,000 votes, or 35 per cent of the total.
“Public safety is the fundamental right of every American,” Vallas said to supporters on Tuesday night. “We will make Chicago the safest city in America.”
Vallas’s campaign strategist Joe Trippi noted “if you’re not safe to walk the streets, nothing really matters . . . I didn’t think we’d break 30 [per cent], but we have.”
Brandon Johnson, a commissioner in county government, placed second in the race, with 92,000 votes, or 20 per cent of the total. Johnson, a political progressive backed by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, surged late in the race.
A candidate needs to receive more than 50 per cent of the vote to win outright, so Vallas and Johnson will face each other in an April 4 run-off. It is the only the third such contest in the city’s history, the first coming eight years ago when Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, now a US representative, forced then-mayor Rahm Emanuel into a run-off.
About 32 per cent of registered voters in Chicago cast ballots in the election. The Chicago board of elections will begin counting another 99,000 mail-in ballots on Wednesday.
Lightfoot campaigned as a progressive in 2019, and the former federal prosecutor was swept into office by voters outraged over political corruption in City Hall. Her tenure was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd and a homicide rate that peaked in 2021.
The homicide rate fell again last year, but remains higher than when Lightfoot took office. Other categories of crime, such as carjackings, have risen.
Vallas’s law-and-order campaign message appealed to his political base of white conservative voters. He raised $5.1mn, much from Republican donors, and was backed by the city’s police union, which he represented in contract negotiations.
He did attract some controversy during the race. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that Vallas’s Twitter account had liked posts that used homophobic language to refer to Lightfoot and to praise “stop-and-frisk”, a controversial police tactic that disproportionately targets black people.
Vallas denied sharing the views of the posters and said his account was hacked.
Contributing to his strong showing was the central role crime played in the race, said Delmarie Cobb, a longtime Chicago political operative. The city is one of the most racially segregated in the US, and many black neighbourhoods have suffered for years from criminal activity. But as crime has risen in more affluent and white areas, “now there’s a problem”, Cobb said.
The nine-candidate field was predominantly black. In a city where racial politics have long influenced the mayor’s race, Cobb said that white voters may have been “looking to someone white to be the answer to solving the problem”. Earlier on Tuesday, Vallas was showing high vote counts in wards located on the north-west and south-west sides, which are predominantly white and home to many of the city’s police officers and firefighters.
But Lightfoot also lost allies as she gained a reputation of being difficult to work with. The fact that four years ago she trounced a candidate, Toni Preckwinkle, who was well known in Chicago and had won most of her races, only to lose to Vallas, Cobb said, “just goes to show you it was hers to lose”.
