From Outsider To Incumbent Under Siege: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Rocky Road To Reelection

CHICAGO ― On a rainy morning in the historic Bronzeville district earlier this month, and for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2002.

This time, Vallas, who is known as a charter-school proponent unafraid to battle teachers unions, has focused relentlessly on restoring public safety.

HuffPost interviewed Vallas as voters like Andrews, who had come to hear him speak on Feb. 11, were filtering out of the Italian restaurant on the near South Side. Vallas offered a two-fold pitch on policing. He echoes law enforcement complaints about the foot-pursuit policy and other liberal reforms, lamenting the “general lack of support that [police officers] feel from the mayor’s office.”

But he also laid out a multifaceted tactical critique of Lightfoot’s police strategy and controversial police superintendent, David Brown, that candidates with more progressive views share. Vallas wants to replace Brown, return to a community-based policing model and use additional funding to shorten officers’ shifts ― all changes he maintains will “slow the exodus” of cops from the city’s force.

Likewise, he touts his work negotiating the Chicago Police Department’s newest eight-year contract on behalf of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the city’s police union. Lightfoot herself has touted the contract’s new clauses increasing accountability for police misconduct, including an end to the practice of allowing cops to change their testimony about an incident after viewing video of what occurred.

Vallas’ hybrid message ― amplified with the help of deep-pocketed, right-leaning donors ― has helped him assemble a fragile coalition. He has the support of virtually all of the city’s most conservative voters, who are concentrated in largely white, blue-collar areas on the far northwest and far southwest sides, but he has also made inroads with the so-called lakefront liberals on the city’s North Side ― many of whom backed Lightfoot in 2019.

Members of the “lakefront” group ― composed mostly of white, affluent professionals ― share their working-class counterparts’ desire for lower crime, but are more turned off by reactionary rhetoric or the whiff of racism.

Linda Buckley, a retired businesswoman in River North (not, strictly speaking, a lakefront enclave), supported Lightfoot in 2019 and is now choosing between Vallas and García.

She wants the city to take a firmer hand on crime, as Vallas promises, but also told HuffPost she is “a little nervous about an overreaction.”

Vallas’ ties to Chicago’s police union, the FOP, which has endorsed his bid, underscore the precariousness of his political balancing act as he seeks to lock down voters like Buckley. Chicago FOP President John Catanzara is something of a right-wing caricature, with a history of misconduct allegations and racist or reactionary comments. (His rhetorical rap-sheet includes a 2017 Facebook post in which Catanzara said that Muslims are “savages who deserve a bullet” and public apologetics for the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, which he claimed resulted in “very little destruction of property.”)

Asked for his response to Catanzara’s remarks, Vallas initially turned the question around, arguing that he shouldn’t have to answer for Catanzara’s remarks any more than he should have to answer for controversial statements made by Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates.

“You should see some of the stuff that Stacy Davis Gates said. Google it!” he told HuffPost, noting that as mayor, it would be his job to negotiate with public-sector unions regardless of who their elected leaders are. “Despite some of the most outrageous stuff that she has said, I’m going to have to negotiate with her.”

Vallas also noted that Catanzara is up for reelection and thus may not be in charge when the next mayor takes office.

But Vallas’ relationship to Catanzara is fundamentally different from his ties to other union leaders, since Catanzara is a prominent supporter of Vallas’ bid. Davis Gates, who has not been credibly accused of racism, is not. Vallas even spoke alongside Catanzara at an FOP event for retired cops earlier this month.

Pressed to clarify his views on Catanzara’s comments, Vallas affirmed that he disagreed with the bigoted remarks and noted that he had publicly expressed revulsion about the U.S. Capitol riot.

The headaches that the FOP is causing Vallas keep coming. On Feb. 17, after news broke that the Chicago FOP invited Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to speak at a rally with rank-and-file police officers, Vallas condemned the event unequivocally, citing DeSantis’ “record of trying to erase the LGBTQ community” and “banning books on Black history.”

Vallas, who describes himself as a “lifelong Democrat” in TV ads and has a campaign contribution record consistent with that description, has nonetheless given his rivals more than enough material with which to paint him as a closet Republican hoping to prey on the city’s racial demons.

In remarks to supporters in late January, Vallas told supporters that his campaign is about “taking back our city.” When the comments resurfaced recently, Lightfoot accused him of pandering to white racists with the “ultimate dog whistle.”

Vallas’ campaign said in a statement responding to the charge that it would not let Lightfoot “distract” Vallas from his mission to “put crime and public safety first.”

Lightfoot is “desperately lashing out in every direction to cling to a spot in the runoff, even going as far as to suppress the vote if it helps her politically,” the Vallas campaign added.

When HuffPost asked Vallas in person about a similar accusation that Lightfoot had leveled in mid-February, Vallas touted his commitment to preferential treatment for women- and minority-owned businesses in city contracting, and his history of employing a racially diverse staff. (For example, Cozette Buckney, a Black woman who was Vallas’ chief of staff at Chicago Public Schools and followed him to New Orleans and Bridgeport, remains a friend and adviser.)

Then, on Thursday, the Chicago Tribune reported that Vallas’ campaign Twitter account had liked racist and insensitive tweets, including comments mockingly dubbing the mayor “Larry Lightfoot” and claiming that she had hired the police chief only because he is Black.

In a statement, Vallas attributed the “likes” to staff, claiming he does not run the account himself. He said the tweets’ “abhorrent and vile rhetoric does not represent me or my views.”

Vallas has fewer good answers when pressed to explain his flirtations with the Republican Party. He openly considered running as a Republican for president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2009.

He told HuffPost that he had entertained the idea after being approached by people who wanted him to do it and because the county Democratic Party was an arm of the Chicago-area political machine. Ultimately, though, Vallas found that he had “too many fundamental differences” with the GOP, including his support for abortion rights, the mayoral candidate recalled.

But in a lengthy 2009 TV interview that has become fodder for attack ads, Vallas sounded far less ambivalent about affiliating with the Republican Party, describing himself as “more of a Republican than a Democrat.” He also told the interviewer that he would “probably” register as a Republican.

Lightfoot’s broadsides against Vallas don’t solely aim to polarize the race along partisan lines.

Lacking a clear ideological base on the left and hemorrhaging the upper-middle-class white support that propelled her in 2019, Lightfoot is hoping to ride Black support to a spot in the April runoff.

The presence of six other Black candidates on the ballot presents a critical obstacle to this goal, however. Wilson, in particular, has demonstrated an ability to win votes, not least among more conservative Black voters on the South Side who helped him pick up nearly 11% of the citywide mayoral vote in the first round of voting in 2019.

So Lightfoot has launched a last-minute push to convince Black voters that she is the only Black candidate capable of winning.

“None of those folks who are on the ballot ― they’re never going to see the inside of the mayor’s office unless I invite them in!” Lightfoot told a friendly audience in the predominantly Black, impoverished West Side neighborhood of Austin on Feb. 11.

Then, in remarks that sounded somewhat at odds with her claims to a multiracial, cross-city “base” at the clergy press conference two days earlier, she laid out the stakes of ensuring continued Black control of City Hall.

“Any vote for somebody not named Lightfoot is making sure that Chuy García or Paul Vallas runs your city,” she said. “And you know what’s going to happen if one of those jokers is in charge: They’re never going to see you! They don’t see the West Side.”

During the final candidate debate, Lightfoot also suggested that García is out of touch with Black voters. When García claimed that Lightfoot’s INVEST South/West development money is not reaching its intended targets, she responded by inviting him to tour communities where her signature project is making a difference.

“I know you don’t know Black Chicago that well,” she quipped.

García noted that he lives in “K Town,” a nickname for a cluster of West Side neighborhoods with many Black residents. “Maybe you don’t come there from Logan Square,” he shot back, referencing Lightfoot’s home in a gentrifying, historically Latino neighborhood on the northwest side.

In Chicago, which is roughly evenly divided among Black, Latino and white residents, many voters still believe that one race’s well-being must come at the expense of another’s.

As a result, Lightfoot’s appeals to this zero-sum mentality resonate with some of her supporters.

García will “have to cater to those who put him in office,” Rev. Cy Fields, a Baptist minister and Lightfoot ally, told HuffPost. “He has history with former Mayor Harold Washington, but I think his allegiance will be to the Latino community. And I think that will really change the political power shift for the Black community here in the city.”

García, who immigrated to Chicago from Mexico as a young man in 1965, would be Chicago’s first Latino mayor. But, aware of Black voters’ fears of being pushed aside, he has emphasized his pioneering support for Washington, the city’s first Black mayor in the 1980s, at a time when much of white Chicago was in open revolt against Washington.

That history has made an impression on at least some Black voters, including Scott, the contractor from the Bronzeville neighborhood.

“I think he’s going to take it to another level,” he said of García. “The Hispanics are moving up in the world today. They’re strong people. I work with them all the time.”