Mayor Lori Lightfoot has just conceded after only 1 term. First time in decades to have someone elected to the office serve only one term. For someone who took office just 4 years ago among much excitement she has dropped like a rock in popularity. The pandemic, higher crime rates and how she dealt with those issues pretty much made her popularity crater.
It appears we will be having a runoff between Paul Vallas (older white guy accused by a lot of progressives of being a secret Republican) and Brandon Johnson (younger African-American supported by the teacher’s union and the more progressive types).
Vallas has not done himself a lot of favors in my opinion by courting the FOP and some other missteps but I see him as the favorite at this point. Crime is a big issue in Chicago as in many cities so his tough on crime stance definitely appeals to a lot of voters. I also doubt he is a Republican but he is definitely a moderate Democrat at best.
Johnson stands a chance in my opinion as a more left of center option but previous “defund the police” statements, from which he has now backed off, are likely to cause him serious problems in the runoff.
It should be an interesting time until April 4.
This article from the NYT(gift link) discusses why this election is not just relevant locally but a sign of possible serious issues for a lot of cities.
I think she may be taking a lot of Kim Foxx’s heat. (County States Attorney for you out of towners.) From high profile cases to neighborhood ones, she decided not to prosecute things that always made the news.
I’m trying to think of things that Lightfoot actively fucked up, and all I can come up with is the Bears probable move out of town.
Yeah, I forgot that but Kim Foxx has definitely been an anchor around her neck.
And Lightfoot definitely accomplished some positive things. Frankly, she was dealt a nearly impossible hand to play well. Without the pandemic she might has been able to hang on. But honestly, even I’m weary of the status quo and ready for a change, almost any change.
Mr. Vallas, 69, enters the next stage of the race as the clear front-runner, but a candidate who has at times been dogged by ideological inconsistencies. He said in a television interview in 2009 that he considered himself more of a Republican than a Democrat, a strike against Mr. Vallas in the eyes of many voters in overwhelmingly liberal Chicago. Last week, The Chicago Tribune reported that Mr. Vallas’s Twitter account had liked a series of tweets that used insulting and racist language; Mr. Vallas suggested that hackers were to blame.
(Granted, with the swing the GOP has had, someone calling themselves a moderate Republican in 2009 might not currently identify with the party as a whole)
I don’t know if you can really call him a front runner. Pretty much all the way up to the election he polled mid 30 percent, while the rest of the group all jostled around for 2nd. But, that implies that he’s close to his ceiling, and you can expect everyone who voted for someone else to vote for Johnson (especially the Lightfoot voters).
Not that I really want to defend the guy but yeah, I know about that interview but that ad takes it a bit out of context. Vallas has said he took that position because of the charter school issue and he didn’t want to be beholden to the Cook County Democratic machine. And that was in 2009, so a different time. Granted it was a dumb thing to say but he’s always been for a woman’s right to choose and supports gay marriage and other non-GOP issues.
Having said that, I’m not doing back flips for either him or Johnson. Vallas is definitely too cozy with the FOP and has his policing priorities out of sync with what I think they should be (retraining, more mental health intervention, holding officers accountable for their actions, etc.) but at the same time Johnson has gone too far the other way in the past with his defund/abolish the police nonsense so I have difficulty being excited about him. Oddly Lightfoot was the only one to hit Johnson hard for that position.
The runoff will be interesting. Willie Wilson was even more pro-police than Vallas so I think some of his voters are likely to go to him. The Lightfoot and Garcia supporters are not as clear to me. I’m thinking this will end up being close and will depend on turnout. There are a lot of progressive folks who aren’t comfortable with Vallas, like me, but are fed up with crime. It isn’t really clear which way to go on this. Maybe Johnson is the person but I know this is a huge job and I’m not convinced he has the experience yet.
Chicago’s challenges are so massive and longstanding, I can’t imagine why anyone would want the job. I have a hard time imagining what can be done about crime and education that will not piss off huge portions of the electorate. To some extent, Lightfoot had the misfortune of being mayor during the pandemic. I’m not quite sure why folk turned to be so opposed to her.
I’ve long had a favorable opinion of Vallas, since he headed CPS, but it seems for some time he has been a perennial unsuccessful candidate. By this point I wonder why he never gained more success. And I see the appeal of not electing just another white guy (provided anyone else is reasonably comparably qualified.)
But, tho I was born and raised near Belmont and Central, by this point I’m a longtime suburbanite, so not my concern.
IMHO, the two most arrogant and polarizing unions in Chicago are the FOP (police) and the CTU (public school teachers).
Lightfoot got crap from the FOP for making even the slightest efforts at, or paying lip service to, police reform. Also for daring to expect civil servants who routinely physically contact the public to be vaccinated.
Lightfoot also got crap from the CTU because (IMO) it generally wants to run the Chicago Public Schools (School board? Schmule board!) with little regard for where the $ comes from, and during Covid didn’t want to reopen schools until (rhetorical exaggeration) it could get ironclad guarantees no students or teachers would get Covid.
Vallas is endorsed by FOP, and Johnson by CTU. As the barkeep in a western says, picks your poison!
Wilson was the furtherest to the right of all the candidates as well, so I’m not sure who he appealed to. Plus he’s become the Harold Stassen of Chicago politics so few really take him seriously.
Wilson is just…odd. He somehow got away with giving away free gasoline at various Chicago gas stations on several occasions, while he was an announced candidate for mayor (which, to me, comes across an awful lot like trying to buy votes).
I heard an interview with him a few weeks ago, on WBBM (Chicago’s all-news radio station), in which his platform seemed to be:
Cutting taxes, because those are too high, and making it hard for Chicagoans to afford living here
Increasing spending on government services (build new housing, job creation), because people need the help
The guy’s apparently a self-made millionaire, but the math on the two platforms above doesn’t seem to add up.
Also, he styles himself as “Dr. Willie Wilson” – he has two honorary doctorates, and that comes across to me as at least a little misleading.
I call him the furtherest to the right because he said he would flood the city with police officers and pretty much let them do what they wanted. At least that’s how his ads came off to me.
He definitely was something of a populist as well. The free gas was just part of it.
AFAICT Wilson appeals mainly to grumpy old Black guys like himself and people who think that owning a bunch of McDonalds franchises is a stellar qualification for public office. But he does seem to have his 10% base. I agree that he is the only other candidate whose voters are likely to go mostly for Vallas.
I must confess to not having paid enough attention to this election. I voted for Chuy Garcia and didn’t look too closely at Brandon Johnson, dismissing him as the “teachers union guy”. But now that I’ve looked closer I am very enthusiastic about voting for him in the runoff.
He’s got an excellent progressive platform, a list of endorsers that goes well beyond the CTU, and an impressive, albeit brief, record in elected office (he was just re-elected for his second term on the County Board) as well as previous experience as a union organizer.
I expect a brutal campaign with nasty racial overtones, but I think Johnson can win this.
Well, it seems she is not working to make much better.
For example, the city’s infrastructure seems to be getting worse. Potholes and generally crummy roads almost everywhere. The CTA (busses and subway/elevated) are a mess. Most trains reek of pot smoke. Beggars and homeless abound on the trains and busses and overall safety is down.
“The practical reality is we are a car city and people have to drive to get to work, to get to school to get to church, go to the groceries and we’ve got to figure out a way that we can do our part to really provide some relief,” Lightfoot said by way of justifying the tax holiday, according to an ABC Chicago report. ~SOURCE
“It’s particularly bad when you run on that issue and then you don’t do anything to fix it. She has not been personally invested in it at all … It’s just intolerable to have the government violating the law … I’m not aware of anyone in the city government treating this as a problem,” Topic said.
And Lightfoot, a black, gay woman, has said things like this:
The lawsuit also claims the mayor used obscene language and called the lawyers “d—-.” The mayor allegedly made the following statement:
“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians, what you are doing, you are out there measuring your d—- with the Italians seeing whose got the biggest d—, you are out there stroking your d—- over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago Police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot.
The lawsuit claims she then went on to say, “My d— is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d— in Chicago.” ~SOURCE
This sounds like the city as it is, and has been forever. except for the pervasive pot smoke, which I’ll take your word for. (Keeping in mind that pot was “legalized” while she was in office. I sometimes smell it driving down the freaking highway.)
Let’s make sure to check back in here after the next administration for a springtime pothole report.
I think potholes are a common complaint in most big cities.
The thing is, I used to see work crews repairing streets almost all of the time.
Now, I never see them and the streets do seem universally worse.
I also used to see police on a walking patrol. Just walking in busy areas. No more.
I used to see police directing traffic. Gone.
Police on horses? Gone.
And while the subway or bus was never luxury travel and always had some beggars on them they are worse. The train stations are seriously run-down (most of them).
And yeah, the pot smell is sometimes overwhelming. I don’t care if people smoke pot but it is pungent. There seem to be no police or security on the trains and (as linked above) crime has risen on the trains.
I do not blame Lightfoot for pot being legalized (something I support anyway) but she seems to have not cared about any of the above at all.
