As you well know if you’ve been keeping up on the news of note, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot was resoundingly turfed out of office by voters last night in her bid for reelection. In an “all-party” race where anyone reaching a numerical majority could have won the mayoralty outright, Lightfoot managed only a comical 17 percent of the vote and a third-place showing in a race with four serious candidates. She will not even make the April runoff, and her evulsion from office by the city electorate in the first round of the 2023 race (after a clean sweep of every ward in the city in the 2019 runoff) is a sad comment on how Chicago doesn’t even want to argue about Lightfoot anymore, it just wants that problem taken care of. (“Oh, Lori? Won’t see her no more . . .”)
Far more worrisome as a civic barometer was the voter turnout for the mayoral race, a dismal 32 percent. We in Chicago are used to low turnout during recent years: In the 2015 race (Rahm Emanuel’s fraught reelection campaign against Chuy Garcia) only 34 percent of the city bothered to vote. In 2019, as Rahm was being chased from office? Thirty-five percent. I was listening to Chicago NPR on Tuesday morning, as the city’s elections PR flak confidently assured the local interviewer that the city would hit a (relative milestone!) 40 percent turnout yesterday. Oh no, not so! Instead, we have somehow managed to find a way to decline from there. We Chicagoans have discovered the magic secret to complete civic disengagement.
There is no way to interpret this depressing lack of interest in voting on the part of Chicago voters as anything other than a veiled sigh of civic resignation, the collective shrug of a city whose voters almost all, for their various (and often wildly opposed) reasons, have become terminally cynical about the “choices” on offer from a local Democratic Party that runs every aspect of the city from top to bottom. I can relate to that feeling, and not just because I’m a Republican — I didn’t bother voting myself, after all.
But I will in April. Because for once Chicago now faces a choice between, if nothing else, just “muddling through” (with Vallas — and I’ll take it), and actual wrack and ruin with Brandon Johnson. I will explain in a future piece how the showdown between these two particular figures sets up a battle royale that throws nearly all of Chicago’s ugliest economic, racial, and ideological divides into sharp relief. But for now, know this: Whether voters have awoken to it yet or not, the future of the city is actually at stake this time. I know the Chicago Teachers Union (of whom Brandon Johnson is a wholly owned subsidiary) and their activist cadres realize that. I hope the rest of the city does as well.