Chicago’s mayoral election on Tuesday night was a seismic shift in politics. For the first time in 32 years, an incumbent mayor was denied re-election. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the first Black woman and openly gay person to lead America’s third-biggest city, failed to advance to an April 4 runoff after carrying each of the city’s 50 wards in the 2019 election.
The result was shocking, and a clear sign that Lightfoot had misread the city’s sentiment and failed to grasp that even the weary voters of deep-blue Chicago will put up with persistent upticks in crime for so long, and that the realities of a pandemic and racial justice protests have clashed with the city’s self-image.
Lightfoot’s term was not without unique challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic and the upheaval that rocked small towns and metropolises alike about policing practices and racial justice opened very necessary conversations in Chicago. Meanwhile, a vaccine mandate for those policing the city cleaved her from the support of her city’s public safety teams. And a crime wave that never seemed to go to low tide prompted Lightfoot’s administration to test a tactic usually reserved for fantasy novels or comic book-based movies: she literally raised the bridges to quarantine parts of the city from its neighbors.
Lightfoot’s tough negotiating style—the one that gave her credibility as a corruption-busting outsider—left her with fewer allies than she realized. Several of her nominal pals on City Council ended up endorsing her opponents, and prompted the city’s polar opposite police unions and teacher unions alike to separately decide it was time to test what Chicago looks like in a post-Lightfoot era. The isolated Lightfoot seemed more in danger by the day, with conservative media personalities using her as a reliable punching bag.
The election of Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson to replace Lightfoot is a reminder of the seismic shifts in politics that can sometimes pass us by. It has long been taken as an article of faith that Chicago is a Democratic stronghold, the place where John F. Kennedy is alleged to have stuffed ballot boxes to win the White House in 1960. Lightfoot’s loss shows that even in a Democratic stronghold, the realities of a pandemic, racial justice protests, and crime can overpower even the longest-standing political machines.
Lightfoot’s legacy is one that will be debated in poli sci seminars for years. Her wins will be muted by her Tuesday-night loss, but there will always be a well-funded think tank or fundraising machine that can use Lightfoot’s biography and sharp elbows.
Lightfoot’s loss may serve as a hint that we haven’t yet fully appreciated the historic moment we just lived through. Politicians in Washington and elsewhere should consider the warnings incumbent with Lightfoot: what had long been assumed to be a safe run turned perilous and then temporary in short order. Engaging in fights—and winning, in some cases—with powerful unions is seldom a winning strategy for Democratic leaders, but it proved riskier than expected. And crime, and how it is perceived, may have far more power than strategists have come to respect.
The lesson from the Chicago mayoral election is that the urgent often overtakes the important. Headlines can sometimes catch audiences by surprise, giving them a jolt and sparking the all-too-common question from the Trump Era: Did that just happen? In this case, yes. It did.
