Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Falls Short In Bid For Second Term

Chicago Mayor by critics on her ideological left and ideological right without the relationships in the middle of the spectrum to anchor her.

“Where is her base anywhere in Chicago?” U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), one of Lightfoot’s challengers, asked HuffPost in a Feb. 9 interview. “It’s not in the Black community where you would think there would be a strong base. It’s not in the more progressive parts of Chicago today.”

Lightfoot’s reputation for acrimony, combined with the persistence of property crime in the city even after murders peaked in 2021, cost her the support of upper-middle-class white voters who had powered her first, reform-themed bid in 2019.

Linda Buckley, a retired businesswoman from River North, had supported Lightfoot in the first round of voting in 2019 but told HuffPost in mid-February that she was deciding between Vallas and García.

“I don’t think she works well with people,” Buckley said.

Lightfoot lamented the sexism and racism that she believes marked this kind of criticism of her governing style. And in the final weeks of her bid, she sought relentlessly to rally Black Chicagoans to her side, warning them of the consequences of losing one of their own at the helm.

Some residents heeded her call.

“She has been very clear of her intent to help build and help bring Black communities and those who are in need to the table, where her predecessors have boxed us out,” Rev. Cy Fields, pastor of a Baptist church on the West Side, said at the Feb. 9 press conference in support of Lightfoot’s reelection.

But her task was made harder by the presence of six other Black candidates on the ballot, including Johnson.

Johnson, a former schoolteacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer backed generously by his union, joined other progressives in accusing Lightfoot of failing to deliver on promised changes to the city’s policing, mental health and public school systems.

“We’ve had mayors who have … capitulated over and over again to the ultra-rich, to billionaires, and to massive corporations,” Johnson told HuffPost in a mid-February interview. “And look how much despair it has caused!”

García, the left’s candidate against then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015, initially led Johnson in the polls.

But García got into the race in November, after much of the institutional left had begun coalescing behind Johnson. Progressive voters flocked to Johnson, who was running on a more ambitious, left-wing platform. And García actively alienated them with endorsements and other moves designed to mollify moderate voters.

“Chuy has been an important leader at the national level,” said Jane Jordan, a food policy advocate from Logan Square who was supporting Johnson. “He has failed to kind of articulate a comprehensive platform in the way that people like Brandon Johnson have.”

Jordan had come to hear Johnson, Vallas and a handful of other candidates speak at a “food justice” mayoral forum at the University of Illinois Chicago on Feb. 10.

Johndrea Holt, a small-business owner from the West Side who was there, also said she was leaning toward voting for Johnson, who is raising his family in the troubled Austin neighborhood near where she lives.

“Johnson is very relatable because of my own personal experience ― some of the places he’s lived, some of the experiences he’s had,” Holt said.

Johnson ran on imposing a series of new taxes targeting the rich and corporations to generate $1 billion in new revenue while sparing homeowners a property tax hike.

Unlike his opponents, he insisted that it would be unrealistic to fill the Chicago Police Department’s 1,600-person backlog in the near term and instead proposed using efficiency savings to add 200 detectives through internal promotion. He would also use new funds to invest in improved mental health care, expanded youth summer job programs and non-police alternatives to violence prevention.

Seizing on Johnson’s sponsorship of a resolution in July 2020 calling for Cook County to “redirect” resources from law enforcement and incarceration to social programs, Lightfoot accused him of wanting to “defund the police.” She even featured Johnson’s comments on a radio show in which he appeared to embrace the slogan in a digital attack ad.

But Lightfoot’s efforts to reduce Johnson’s favorability, particularly with Black voters, likely came too late. She waited until the final two weeks of the race to attack Johnson in paid advertising after spending months trying to cut García down to size.

Although Johnson has promised not to reduce police funding as mayor, Vallas is likely to pick up where Lightfoot left off and depict him as a left-wing radical hostile to traditional policing and hellbent on soaking the city’s taxpayers.

Lightfoot did offer Johnson and his allies a road map for attacking Vallas in the runoff. In advertisements and on the stump, Lightfoot dubbed Vallas, a self-described “life-long Democrat,” a “Republican” whose efforts to appeal to conservative white voters’ fears of crime were the “ultimate dog-whistle.”

Vallas has some ammunition with which to push back on those claims. He told HuffPost that he only ever considered running for a county office as a Republican in 2009 so he would not have to contend with the grip of the Chicago machine.

But Vallas’ ties to right-wing groups like the Fraternal Order of Police have already proven to be a headache for him. In late February, he denounced the union’s decision to host Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for a speech to its members.

Vallas’ history as a champion of charter schools and foe of teachers unions is, on its own, likely enough to unite much of progressive Chicago against him.

“Vallas is bad for Chicago,” said Stephanie Gadlin, a former Chicago Teachers Union official who supported García.

Electing him, Gadlin added, “Would be the equivalent of hiring Count Dracula to run the blood bank.”