The campaigning for the upcoming mayoral primaries in Chicago are drawing to a close. Eleven days from now. As I suggested in an earlier post, right now the battle lines are being drawn along racial lines. There is one white candidate, Paul Vallas, the plurality of whose support is from white voters; one Hispanic candidate, Chuy Garcia, the plurality of whose support is from Hispanic voters, and nine black candidates who divide the plurality of the black vote among themselves.
What a difference four years makes! In the last Chicago mayoral primary election, Lori Lightfoot received the plurality of her support from white voters and ultimately prevailed, largely because she wasn’t Toni Preckwinkle. Her performance as mayor has lost much of that support.
Right now she’s running TV spots, the gist of which is “if you want a black mayor, vote for me—I’m the only black candidate who can win!”. We’ll see if that’s a convincing message.
If no candidate wins the majority of the vote in the primaries, there will be a run-off between the two top finishing candidates in the primary. NBC News reports that a recent poll suggests that Mayor Lightfoot might not even make it to the general election:
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot finds herself bunched together in a crowded field ahead of this month’s mayoral race, raising the specter of her possibly missing out on the likely runoff.
The new poll sponsored by Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, as well as a handful of other non-profits, finds Lightfoot in third place with 14% support from registered Chicago voters (when those who say they are leaning one way are included).
That puts the incumbent mayor behind former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas (19%) and Democratic Rep. Chuy GarcÃa (17%), and in front of businessman Willie Wilson (12%) and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson (9%), as well as others in the field. But 12% say they’re undecided (even after being pushed to pick the candidate they’re leaning toward supporting), and the poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9%, which means the race is a jump ball.
Garcia is pulling support from 40% of Latino voters (the only other candidate in double digits is Vallas with support from 13%); Lightfoot is winning the plurality of Black voters (23%); and Vallas has support from the plurality of white voters (25%).
I honestly think that none of the candidates would make a particularly good mayor. Lightfoot is objectively the worst mayor in Chicago history. Vallas is a bland apparatchik. IMO Chuy Garcia is an empty suit. Brandon Johnson has the shortcoming of believing that every problem can be solved by throwing money at it. Willie Wilson has never held elective office—I’m afraid that the career pols and permanent bureaucracy will tie him up in knots.
From wirepoints.org:
“Chicago’s 67,000 reported major crimes last year [2022, ed.] were 41 percent higher than in 2021 and already this year they’re up 58 percent. For the 11th-year running, Chicago led the nation in murders in 2022 – with 697. Crime on public transit is also badly out of hand. Making things worse, major crime arrest rates in Chicago averaged just 5 percent. And 400,000 times in 2021 there were no police to respond to high-priority 911 calls. Time and again Chicago under Mayor Lori Lightfoot has resembled the Wild West. It’s no wonder people are protecting themselves forcefully.”
https://wirepoints.org/chicagoans-are-shooting-back-and-its-not-going-to-stop-until-leaders-lead-wirepoints/?fbclid=IwAR0tPuyJmNUUFyVR2rOAvhAaMy6pp41QWGWAS4QYfvrnlkyOeS-v_8LgR6M
Note the 41% increase in reported major crimes from 2021 to 2022, and the accelerating increase of 58% ytd for 2023. 400,000 911 police no shows.
These increases are entirely the result of the policies followed by Mayor Lightfoot and DA Foxx and your cesspool of a city council.
You are living in a city in free fall into barbarity and savagery. Many neighborhoods are already there. You are a city of frogs in heating water.
Chicago is beyond elections and democracy. What you need is a bloody-minded dictatorship that is willing to use brute force and street justice to impose order. I will not say “law,” because Chicago is beyond law.
I think the opposite. I think it needs law. City Hall, the City Council, the CPD, the Cook County States Attorney, and judges all need to be aligned. It does no good for a police officer to arrest a lawbreaker only to have the lawbreaker released by the States Attorney or the charges dismissed by a judge.
What we know to be the case is that one party rule is no guarantee those different actors will work in alignment. They’re all Democrats.
I will agree with you to the extent that what I think is emerging is what we think of as “the Wild West”. That’s a result of just what I said above which amounts to lawlessness. Since police officers average six figure salaries, the Cook County States Attorney $198K, and a Cook County judge $187K, we have expensive lawlessness.
Duartes is out of work.
https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/u-s-marshals-service-arrests-62-suspects-in-kansas-city-in-nationwide-operation-to-combat-violent-crime?_amp=true
I noticed Chicago didn’t participate in this.
Chicago isn’t one of the cities with the highest per capita homicide rates. However, the city of my birth is and it didn’t participate either.