Lori Lightfoot Loses Reelection Bid for Mayor

Gary Bai
By Gary Bai
March 1, 2023Chicago
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot will lose her reelection bid, The Associated Press projects.

Lightfoot, a Democrat, lost the race to former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, who will be headed to a runoff election on April 4 after no candidates received a majority of votes.

The race was officially nonpartisan, which means Republican, Democrat, and Independent voters could all vote.

With 93 percent of votes counted at 10:33 p.m. Eastern Time, Vallas garnered 33.9 percent of the vote, Johnson 20.3 percent, and Lightfoot 16.9 percent, The New York Times reported.

Speaking to supporters Tuesday night, Lightfoot said she called Vallas and Johnson to congratulate them.

“Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights, and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said.

Light 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.

As a then-outsider to politics, Lightfoot ran for mayor in 2019 promising to end government corruption, and won, becoming the first black Chicago mayor in America’s history. But the ethics of her reelection campaign came into question when it was found that the campaign attempted to recruit students at Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges in exchange for school credit. She later apologized, saying it was a “bad mistake” made by a young staffer in her campaign, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Lightfoot’s four-year term was plagued by a long strike by the teachers union, clashes with the police union, and soaring violent homicide rates in a city with some of the most stringent gun laws in the country.

She said that external circumstances made it difficult for her to govern.

“I think no sane person wants to try to govern through, hopefully, a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, an economic meltdown, a civic unrest following the murder of George Floyd and an increase in crime across the city,” she said in a Feb. 21 interview with The New Yorker.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

From The Epoch Times

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