Chicago has become the second major city to face a mayoral test over crime
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“We have to be bold in looking at long entrenched problems, particularly on poverty and systemic inequality,” Ms. Lightfoot said. We have to break down some of the barriers that have stopped our residents from realizing their talent, and we have to fight those who are in the picture.
Mr. Adams was an advocate of police brutality after he was beaten as a teenager.
Ms. Bass played a leading role in promoting anti-bias training for police officers after the death of George Floyd. The House of Representatives approved it, but the Senate did not, so some of it went to President Biden for his approval.
The police chief, David Brown, she recruited from Dallas, seemed overmatched in the city and the department was often impenetrable to outsiders. And Lightfoot’s unwillingness to dismiss her police chief, who often seemed isolated from his officers and the community, left voters with little hope for change. (Brown announced his resignation on Wednesday following Lightfoot’s election loss.)
In Chicago and New York, Ms. Lightfoot and Mr. Adams have pushed for police spending increases and have flooded the subway with officers. Criminal justice advocates do not think the departments have moved quickly enough to reform.
“As a city, we have to have a police department that is successful,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “And to me, successful is defined by making sure that they’re the best trained police department, that they understand that the legitimacy in the eyes of the public is the most important tool that they have, and that we also support our officers — it’s a really hard and dangerous job.”
It was the first time in more than three decades that Chicago didn’t have a mayor. Lightfoot could not overcome years of fights with the police and teachers’ unions, a spike in violent crime during her administration and Chicago’s slow recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paul Vallas, a long-time public schools chief who ran on a tough-on-crime message, and Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner backed by progressives and the Chicago Teachers Union, will advance to the April runoff, CNN projects.
Vallas built his campaign around a pro-police, tough-on-crime message – one he highlighted in celebratory remarks after Lightfoot had called Vallas and Johnson to concede.
In a city where almost a third of the votes in the 2020 presidential election went to the Democratic ticket, Vallas needs to convince voters that his conservatism is a must if he wants to win.
Johnson, in his speech Tuesday night, showed the first signs that he will seek to consolidate liberals who supported other candidates in the nine-person field. He cited each candidate by name.
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Because no candidate is on course to top 50% in Tuesday’s election, the top two of the nine candidates on the ballot are moving on to the April 4 runoff.
Most importantly, the pugnacious Lightfoot brawled with teacher and police unions before and during the Covid-19 pandemic – battles that ultimately led both groups to back rivals in the 2023 mayor’s race.
The police and teachers unions clashed with Lightfoot, and she had few allies. Voters, too, were uneasy: Violent crime spiked on Lightfoot’s watch. Chicago’s public transportation has service gaps and delays. And though Lightfoot’s management of the coronavirus pandemic was popular, the city’s economic rebound has been sluggish.
A host of powerful interests were against her in her bid for a second term. The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Vallas. The Chicago Teachers Union supported Johnson. J.B. Pritzker and Lightfoot have differing views on homosexuality, but the governor stayed out of the race.
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More than 507,000 ballots had been cast by the time polls closed Tuesday, Chicago elections officials said. As they arrive, more Votes will be added to the total.
The electorate had a 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.
The dynamics have been similar to those of other big city mayor’s elections. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams won with a pro-police, tough-on-crime message in 2021. But in Los Angeles, voters elected Rep. Karen Bass last year over billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who had pumped $100 million into a campaign in which he had focused on a pitch for law and order.
Johnson, meanwhile, ate away at Lightfoot’s support among progressives. He once advocated decreasing police funding, but has backtracked from that stance recently because he said he wants to increase funds for mental health treatment.
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David Axerod was a senior adviser to the former President and his chief strategist for the 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns. He worked for the Chicago Tribune as a reporter and later was the media strategist for several successful Chicago mayoral campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinions on it.
“Obviously, we didn’t win the election today, but I stand here with my head held high and a heart full of gratitude,” Lightfoot told her supporters after the polls closed.
Confronted with an unprecedented public health crisis within her first year in office, she generally won decent marks for her handling of it. She lost her seat at the polls on Tuesday due to the violence that spiked around the time of the epidemic.
But Lightfoot’s fall is a more complicated story that goes to a clenched-fist, go-it-alone style of leadership that made consensus hard to build and drove many who should have been her allies away.
Deeply suspicious of the motives of other politicians, she systematically alienated Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Democrat-led state legislature and the Cook County leadership, all of whom are fellow Democrats.
As a result, she lost key legislative battles, including a law that over the next three years will shift control of the Chicago public schools from mayoral appointees to an elected 21-member school board, far larger than what she had wanted and the largest by far in the country.
She ran on limiting the prerogatives of City Council members, then humiliated them in her inaugural speech and alienated them in the job, prompting one of her once-allies Alderman Susan Sadlowski-Garza to say, “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with. Police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing.”
The exodus of some high-profile businesses – and the likely, unthinkable departure to the suburbs of the city’s beloved Chicago Bears – contributed to a sense of a city backsliding.
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Johnson, who is Black, was unknown to a lot of the city before he was put forth by the Chicago Teacher’s Union. Once a vocal supporter of defunding police, Johnson alone among the major candidates has eschewed promises of more cops.
The mayor waged a weeks of advertising that hammered out the fourth candidate, US Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Rodriguez, only to be defeated in the runoff by Johnson.
Vallas is the most conservative candidate and said he would take on crime by hiring more police officers, whereas Johnson has focused his crime message on addressing its root causes.
The city’s slow economic recovery from the pandemic is also connected to crime. Chris Kempczinski, the president and CEO of Mcdonalds, told The Economic Club of Chicago in October that his chain was struggling to recruit people to relocate to its West loop headquarters.
He said that it shows up in many different ways. “Crime becomes pervasive in peoples’ psyche, and it affects us. Ultimately it is holding all of us back.”
Four years after she promised to end the way police are supervised and disciplined, the focus of the race has been on crime and public safety.
The result of the first round of the race was an indicator of what is to come as Lightfoot tries to keep her job.
A 2019 fight with the Chicago Teachers Union over pay and class size as Lightfoot sought to curb spending led to an 11-day strike. There were disagreements between the two as Lightfoot pushed for teachers to return to class despite rising Covid-19 cases.
After Tuesday’s election results, the union president said that the city is ready to break with the politics of the past.
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In a fight over overtime pay last year, she said officers had too many time off and that her department was struggling to retain and recruit new officers. It was an ugly chapter in the long-running tension between the police and the administration of Lightfoot.
Vallas said that he wants to be the mayor of Chicago because public safety is a human right and people in every neighborhood deserve to feel safe.
His tough-on-crime pitch made him popular with more conservative voters. Chicago is a diverse, overwhelmingly blue city, with 83% of the electorate backing the Democratic ticket in the 2020 presidential election. But in such a fractured field, any foothold of support is critical.
The next mayor will be able to install new leadership at the police department after David Brown retires in March.
Bass defeated Caruso by offering her own plans to increase the number of police officers on the streets and declare a state of emergency to address a crisis of homelessness.
While Vallas and Johnson had the strongest areas to the north and west of the city, Lightfoot had her strongest areas to the south and west.
Those results underscore the extent to which the runoff is poised to become a battle for Black voters’ support – and one in which the contrasting visions of Vallas and Johnson over policing are likely to take center stage.
He said he would fight for public safety across the city, as well as “a city where the trains actually run on time and the public schools are fully resourced.”
