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Tag: lori lightfoot
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Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics
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CNN
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Chicago voters will choose Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner backed by the powerful teachers union, as the city’s next mayor, CNN projects.
Johnson will win Tuesday’s runoff election over Paul Vallas, a moderate former city schools superintendent who had campaigned on a pro-police message in a race where concerns about violent crime were central.
Johnson told supporters his victory had “ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city” and demonstrated a “bold, progressive movement” that he said should be a blueprint for the country.
“Now, Chicago will begin to work for its people – all the people. Because tonight is a gateway to a new future for our city; a city where you can thrive no matter who you love or how much money you have in your bank account,” he said.
Vallas said at his election night event that he had called Johnson to concede the race.
“This campaign I ran to bring the city together would not be a campaign that fulfilled my ambitions if this election is going to divide us more. So it’s critically important that we use this opportunity to come together, and I’ve offered him my full support on his transition,” Vallas said.
Vallas and Johnson were competing to replace Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose bid for a second term ended when she finished third in the nine-candidate February 28 first round – failing to advance to the top-two runoff.
Lightfoot had sparred with two of the most powerful forces in this year’s mayor’s race: the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Vallas, and the Chicago Teachers Union, which backs Johnson – a former teacher and union organizer.
The clash between those two unions is part of a larger battle over how the city handled the Covid-19 pandemic – a period during which violent crime increased and schools were shut down.
Vallas campaigned on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He vowed to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department, and said he would emphasize community policing and place officers on public transit, after a recent violent crime spike at the Chicago Transit Authority’s trains and stations alarmed many commuters.
He also highlighted Johnson’s history of supporting calls to “defund the police” – a message that became popular with progressives in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd but that has since receded amid violent crime increases in Chicago and other cities. Top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have long rejected the slogan.
Johnson said during the campaign that he did not want to slash police spending. He said he would promote 200 new detectives, arguing that solving more crimes would increase Chicago residents’ trust in police and deter crime.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Johnson nodded to his clashes with Vallas over crime and policing. He said he envisions “a city that’s safer for everyone by investing in what actually works to prevent crime. And that means youth employment, mental health centers, ensuring that law enforcement has the resources to solve and prevent crimes.”
Vallas and Johnson spent the weeks leading up to the runoff courting the approximately 45% of the electorate that did not vote for either candidate in February.
They were particularly focused on Black and Latino voters outside of Johnson’s progressive base and Vallas’ support in White ethnic neighborhoods and the northwestern portion of the city.
Vallas featured Black mainstays of Chicago politics, including former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and former US Rep. Bobby Rush, in his closing television advertisement touting his Democratic credentials.
Johnson had argued that Vallas was too conservative for the electorate of a city where 83% of voters backed the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. He highlighted donations Vallas’ campaign received from business interests and Republicans, as well as digital ads paid for by a PAC with ties to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“When you take dollars from Trump supporters and try to pass yourself as a part of the progressive movement – man, sit down,” Johnson said at a rally in Chicago with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders last week.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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NYC mayor says Lori Lightfoot’s loss in Chicago is ‘warning sign for the country’ | CNN Politics
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Washington
CNN
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday brushed aside the suggestion that Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reelection loss was merely a warning sign for Democratic mayors, instead calling it a “warning sign for the country” at large.
“I showed up at crime scenes. I knew what New Yorkers were saying. And I saw it all over the country. I think, if anything, it is really stating that this is what I have been talking about. America, we have to be safe,” Adams told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Adams was elected mayor in 2021 after a campaign focused on public safety and combating rising crime.
Lightfoot, who was first elected in 2019, lost her reelection bid last week, failing to make one of two runoff spots. Chicago is now the third major city in recent years with a mayoral election that has tested attitudes – among a heavily Democratic electorate – toward crime and policing.
Violence in Chicago spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, carjacking, robberies and burglaries – have increased since last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.
“Mayors, we are closer. We’re closest to the problem,” Adams said Sunday, calling public safety a “prerequisite to prosperity” in American cities. “We are focused on public safety because people want to be safe.”
Adams was asked Sunday about criticism from some Democrats, who say his rhetoric on crime hurts the party and helps Republicans.
“The polls were clear. New Yorkers felt unsafe,and the numbers showed that they were unsafe,” he told Bash. “Now, if we want to ignore what the everyday public is stating, then that’s up to them. I’m on the subways. I walk the streets. I speak to everyday working-class people. And they were concerned about safety.”
Adams also addressed the scrutiny that has followed his remarks at an interfaith breakfast last week in which he said, “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”
“What I believe,” he said Sunday, “is that you cannot separate your faith. Government should not interfere with religion, and religion should not interfere with government. But I believe my faith pushes me forward on how I govern and the things that I do.”
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot loses reelection bid: CBS News Flash March 1, 2023
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot loses reelection bid: CBS News Flash March 1, 2023 – CBS News
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot loses reelection bid; challengers advance to runoff
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Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson will meet in a runoff to be the next mayor of Chicago after voters on Tuesday denied incumbent Lori Lightfoot a second term, issuing a rebuke to a leader who made history as head of the nation’s third-largest city.
Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to lead the city, failed in her fight for reelection after four tumultuous years in office.
It was the first time in 40 years that an incumbent Chicago mayor was defeated after one term, when Jane Byrne lost to Harold Washington, CBS Chicago reported.
With about 98% of the vote counted, Vallas was leading with 34% and Johnson was in second place with 20%, the station said. Lightfoot trailed in third place with 17%. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was in fourth with 14%. No other candidate reached double-digits.
Lightfoot, a former prosecutor and head of a city police review board, faced multiple candidates. They hammered her over a spike in crime that began during the COVID-19 pandemic and a leadership style they say is unnecessarily combative.
Speaking to supporters Tuesday night, Lightfoot called being Chicago’s mayor “the honor of a lifetime.”
“Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said. She told her fellow mayors around the country not to fear being bold.
“We were fierce competitors in these last few months, but I will be rooting and praying for our next mayor to deliver for the people of the city for years to come,” Lightfoot said, according to WBBM.
At his victory party, Vallas noted that Lightfoot had called to congratulate him and asked the crowd to give her a round of applause. In a nod to his campaign promises to combat crime, he said that, if elected, he would work to address public safety issues.
“We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” Vallas said.
The April runoff will offer voters starkly contrasting options.
Vallas served as an adviser to what CBS Chicago calls “the right-leaning” Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Lightfoot’s administration. He has called for adding hundreds of police officers to patrol the city, saying crime is out of control and morale among officers has sunk to a new low during Lightfoot’s tenure.
Vallas has said the city needs to “take the handcuffs” off officers by easing restrictions on police foot pursuits and vehicle chases, the station points out.
Johnson, a Cook County commissioner, received about $1 million from the Chicago Teachers Union for his campaign and had support from several other progressive organizations, including United Working Families. The former teacher and union organizer has argued that the answer to addressing crime is not more money for police but more investment in mental health care, education, jobs and affordable housing, and he was accused by rivals such as Lightfoot of wanting to defund the police.
Johnson has avoided the word “defund” during the race, and his campaign says he doesn’t want to cut the number of police officers. But in a 2020 radio interview, Johnson said defunding is not just a slogan but “an actual real political goal,” and he sponsored a nonbinding resolution on the county board to redirect money from policing and jails to social services.
Lightfoot criticized Vallas as too conservative for Chicago and for welcoming support from the police union’s controversial leader, who defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists at the Capitol and equated Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate for city workers to the Holocaust.
During the campaign, Lightfoot touted her record of investing in neighborhoods and supporting workers, such as by increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She also noted that the city had navigated unprecedented challenges, including the pandemic and its economic and public safety fallout, and protests over policing.
“The world is very different than it was four years ago. I believe that I’m still the right person and I think the voters will validate that, but we’ve been through a lot,” Lightfoot said after a rally on the city’s West Side during the final days before the election. “We can’t go back.”
Lightfoot was the first mayor of a major U.S. city to face reelection following the pandemic, the recession and the crime wave that’s occurred in many places. Those factors weighed on some voters as they made their decisions Tuesday.
“Lori has had her chance,” said Lonnell Jolly, a 45-year-old customer service representative who lives on the West Side and voted for businessman Willie Wilson. “Since Lori Lightfoot has been in office, it seems like crime has gotten worse.”
Lindsey Hegarty, a 30-year-old paralegal who lives on Chicago’s North Side, said she backed Johnson because “he seemed like the most progressive candidate on issues like policing, mental health” and public transit.
Race also played a factor as candidates courted votes in the highly segregated city, which is closely divided in population among Black, Hispanic and White residents.
Lightfoot has accused Vallas of using “the ultimate dog whistle” by saying his campaign is about “taking back our city,” and of cozying up to the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, whom she calls a racist. A recent Chicago Tribune story also found Vallas’s Twitter account had liked racist tweets and tweets that mocked Lightfoot’s appearance and referred to her as masculine.
Vallas said he wasn’t responsible for the liked tweets, which he called “abhorrent,” and suggested someone had improperly accessed his account.
But Lightfoot and some of her supporters saw some of the criticism of her leadership as motivated by racism, sexism and anti-gay sentiment.
“No other mayor has been asked to change this city within four years,” said city Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin, who is Black, and noted that White mayors like Emanuel and Richard Daley served multiple terms. “When we get in the game, the rules change.”
At a weekend campaign stop, Vallas said he is focused on things like public safety, Chicago’s “demoralized” police department and the number of residents “fleeing” the city’s school district.
“It’s all a product of bad leadership,” Vallas said.
A former city budget director who also led school systems in Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, Vallas lost a 2019 bid for mayor. This time, he has been laser-focused on public safety, saying police officers who left the force under Lightfoot’s administration will return if he’s elected.
It seems to have resonated with voters, such as Antwoin Jackson, who are concerned about an uptick in crime. Jackson said he supported Lightfoot four years ago but cast his ballot for Vallas in Tuesday’s election because he said Lightfoot “did not hold control over the violence in the communities.” Jackson said he feels particularly unsafe when riding public transit.
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Chicago Mayor Lightfoot ousted; Vallas, Johnson in runoff
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CHICAGO (AP) — Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson will meet in a runoff to be the next mayor of Chicago after voters denied incumbent Lori Lightfoot a second term, issuing a rebuke to a leader who made history as head of the nation’s third-largest city.
Vallas, a former schools CEO backed by the police union, and Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, advanced to the April 4 runoff after none of the nine candidates was able to secure over 50% of the vote on Tuesday to win outright.
Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to lead the city, won her first term in 2019 after promising to end decades of corruption and backroom dealing at City Hall. But opponents blamed Lightfoot for an increase in crime that occured in cities across the U.S. during the pandemic and criticized her as being a divisive, overly contentious leader.
She is the first elected Chicago mayor to lose a reelection bid since 1983, when Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor, lost her Democratic primary.
Speaking to supporters Tuesday night, Lightfoot called being Chicago’s mayor “the honor of a lifetime.”
“Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said. She told her fellow mayors around the country not to fear being bold.
At his victory party, Vallas noted that Lightfoot had called to congratulate him and asked the crowd to give her a round of applause. In a nod to his campaign promise to combat crime, he said that, if elected, he would work to address public safety issues.
“We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” Vallas said.
Johnson on Tuesday night noted the improbability that he would make the runoff, considering his low name recognition at the start of the race.
“A few months ago they said they didn’t know who I was. Well, if you didn’t know, now you know,” Johnson said. He thanked the unions that supported him and gave a special shout-out to his wife, telling the crowd, “Chicago, a Black woman will still be in charge.”
Lightfoot’s loss is unusual for mayors in large cities, who have tended to win reelection with relative ease. But it’s also a sign of the turmoil in U.S. cities following the COVID-19 pandemic, with its economic fallout and spikes in violent crime in many places.
Public safety has been an issue in other recent elections, including the recall of a San Francisco district attorney who was criticized for progressive policies. The pandemic also may shape elections for mayor in other cities this year, such as Philadelphia and Houston, where incumbents cannot run again due to term limits.
There are clear contrasts between Vallas and Johnson.
Vallas served as an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Lightfoot’s administration. He has called for adding hundreds of police officers to patrol the city, saying crime is out of control and morale among officers sunk to a new low during Lightfoot’s tenure.
Vallas’ opponents have criticized him as too conservative to lead the Democratic stronghold. Lightfoot blasted him for welcoming support from the police union’s controversial leader, who defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists at the Capitol and equated Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate for city workers to the Holocaust.
Johnson received about $1 million from the Chicago Teachers Union for his campaign and had support from several other progressive organizations, including United Working Families. The former teacher and union organizer has argued that the answer to addressing crime is not more money for police but more investment in mental health care, education, jobs and affordable housing, and he was accused by rivals such as Lightfoot of wanting to defund the police.
Johnson has avoided the word “defund” during the race, and his campaign says he does not want to cut the number of police officers. But in a 2020 radio interview, Johnson said defunding is not just a slogan but “an actual real political goal,” and he sponsored a nonbinding resolution on the county board to redirect money from policing and jails to social services.
Crime was an issue that resonated with voters.
Rita DiPietro, who lives downtown, said she supported Lightfoot in 2019. But she voted for Vallas on Tuesday, saying she was impressed by his detailed strategy to address public safety.
“The candidates all talk about what they’d like to do,” she said. “This guy actually has a plan. He knows how he’s going to do it.”
Lindsey Hegarty, a 30-year-old paralegal who lives on Chicago’s North Side, said she backed Johnson because “he seemed like the most progressive candidate on issues like policing, mental health” and public transit.
Race also was a factor as candidates courted votes in the highly segregated city, which is closely divided in population among Black, Hispanic and white residents. Vallas was the only white candidate in the field. Lightfoot, Johnson and five other candidates are Black, though Lightfoot argued she was the only Black candidate who could win. U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was the only Latino in the race.
Lightfoot accused Vallas of using “the ultimate dog whistle” by saying his campaign is about “taking back our city,” and of cozying up to the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, whom she calls a racist. A recent Chicago Tribune story also found Vallas’ Twitter account had liked racist tweets and tweets that mocked Lightfoot’s appearance and referred to her as masculine.
Vallas denied his comments were related to race and says his police union endorsement is from rank-and-file officers. He also said he wasn’t responsible for the liked tweets, which he called “abhorrent,” and suggested someone had improperly accessed his account.
Lightfoot touted her record of investing in neighborhoods and supporting workers, such as by increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She also noted that the city had navigated unprecedented challenges such as the pandemic and its economic and public safety fallout to protests over policing.
Asked if she was treated unfairly because of her race and gender, Lightfoot said: “I’m a black woman in America. Of course.”
Vallas, who has led school systems in Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, lost a 2019 bid for mayor. This time, he was laser-focused on public safety, saying police officers who left the force under Lightfoot’s administration will return if he’s elected.
The other candidates were businessman Willie Wilson, Chicago City Council members Sophia King and Roderick Sawyer, activist Ja’Mal Green and state Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner.
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Associated Press writers Claire Savage and Teresa Crawford in Chicago contributed to this report.
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Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics
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CNN
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is fighting for her political survival, seeking to finish in the top two in Tuesday’s crowded primary and advance to an April runoff in her quest for a second term.
Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first out gay person to serve as mayor of a city often pilloried by conservatives in national debates over violence and gun control, rose to prominence as a pugnacious reformer promising a break from the corruption and clubby governance that had long marked Chicago politics.
But years of contentious brawls over policing, teacher pay and Covid-19 public safety policies, as well as mounting complaints about long waits in Chicago’s public transit system, have left Lightfoot vulnerable, raising the prospect of the Second City ousting its Democratic mayor in the first round of voting.
Voters on Tuesday will sort through the nine-candidate field – including eight Democrats and one independent. No candidate is expected to top 50% of the vote, which would mean the top two finishers will advance to an April 4 runoff.
Campaigns and Chicago political observers describe the contest as wide open, with four candidates emerging at the top: Lightfoot; progressive US Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García; Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson; and Paul Vallas, a law-and-order candidate and a onetime head of schools in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans.
If the outcome is close, it could take days to determine the top two finishers, as mail-in votes postmarked by election day get delivered.
Powerful interests with which Lightfoot has at times brawled are split among her major challengers. Conservatives and the police have aligned behind one rival. Teachers have backed another. And many progressives are backing a third major contender.
Above all else, concerns about crime and public safety have rattled Chicago. 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.
Lightfoot and her rivals have placed the issue at the forefront of their campaigns.
“We absolutely need to hire more officers,” Lightfoot said at a WTTW mayoral forum earlier this month. “This is one of the toughest times in the country to recruit, and mayors all over the country are experiencing the difficulty.”
Chicago’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, which means all voters – Democrats, Republicans and independents – can participate. However, Chicago is an overwhelmingly blue city, and all the major contenders say they are Democrats.
Vallas, however, has attracted support from conservatives, and has described the Democratic Party as moving away from him in recent years on certain issues. Lightfoot, in an email to supporters, said Vallas “has so strongly aligned himself with Republican views that he can’t even be considered a moderate Democrat.”
Vallas, who unsuccessfully ran for Illinois governor as a Democrat in 2002 and was the losing Democratic lieutenant governor nominee in 2014, was endorsed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the same organization that hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in nearby Elmhurst earlier this week.
“I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” Vallas told CNN in an interview.
Johnson, meanwhile, has floated the idea in the past of diverting some funds from the police budget to alternate sources, saying he wants to “invest in people.”
He has the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union, a powerful organization that has repeatedly clashed with Lightfoot – including over teachers’ pay and class sizes in 2019 that led to an 11-day strike and then last year as Lightfoot pushed teachers to return to classrooms at a time of rising Covid-19 cases.
“The reason we don’t have enough police officers is because we are asking them to be social workers, therapists and marriage counselors,” Johnson said at the WTTW forum. “I’m actually investing in actually having social workers, therapists to show up on the front line, to actually free up law enforcement to deal with the more severe crime that happens in the city of Chicago.”
García – a former Cook County commissioner who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff – has sounded similar themes.
“Hiring more civilians to free up more police officers with their guns and badges to walk the walk, to talk to people, rebuild trust is the most important. The other important element is investing in communities and investing in violence prevention programs,” he told CNN.
Vallas, whose message has revolved around a tough-on-crime message, said Chicago needs more police on “L” station platforms and on trains as part of a push to place more officers on local beats.
He said combating violent crime is the “first, second and third priority” of his campaign.
“Everything becomes undermined if you can’t provide public security,” Vallas told CNN.
Lightfoot in recent days has lambasted Vallas after he told a crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”
The mayor told reporters that Vallas was “blowing the ultimate dog whistle.”
“Take our city back, meaning what? To what time? And take our city back from whom?” she said.
When pressed by CNN, Vallas said he was referring to criminals in his remark that Lightfoot has criticized.
“I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” he said.
For her part, Lightfoot has touted Chicago’s lawsuit against an Indiana gun store – part of an effort to demonstrate that the influx of firearms into the city isn’t a result of Chicago’s gun policies, but rather neighboring states with more lax laws.
She has also touted her administration’s efforts to hire nearly 1,000 additional police officers, put privatized, unarmed security on public transit and create teams and task forces focused on car-jacking, halting the flow of guns into the city and more.
The Chicago Tribune, the city’s largest newspaper, has endorsed Vallas. The newspaper’s editorial board credited Lightfoot’s financial management of the city and her navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic and said it hopes the mayor will advance to face Vallas one-on-one in the runoff.
“Vallas has the ear of rank-and-file police officers on the street. We will expect him to use that trust to improve police conduct and the abysmal clearance rate for violent offenses,” the editorial board said.
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