Chicago mayoral election

Black women make history in Chicago mayoral election

By STEVEN SHEPARD

Chicago voters will elect the city's first African American woman mayor later this spring, and they won't be returning a Daley to City Hall.

None of the 14 candidates on the ballot came remotely close to winning a majority of the vote in the nonpartisan election on Tuesday, but the results set up a historic matchup in the April 2 runoff between first-time candidate Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle, the president of the Cook County Board.

Bill Daley — the former Obama White House chief of staff and Clinton-era Commerce secretary whose family had won 12 of the past 17 mayoral elections in Chicago — finished a disappointing third, just behind Preckwinkle for the second spot in the runoff.

“Chicago is a part of me,” Daley tweeted. “It always will be. While I may not be its next mayor, I won’t stop fighting to move our city forward.“

Illinois state Comptroller Susana Mendoza, seen as an early contender, flamed out and finished fifth, just behind businessman Willie Wilson, who followed up a losing campaign for mayor in 2015 with a fruitless bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

Tuesday's vote came after a nearly six-month campaign that began in earnest when Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was first elected in 2011, announced in September he would not seek a third term leading the nation's third-largest city.

That led to the most wide-open mayor's race in the city's modern political history. The next occupant of the "fifth floor," a nickname for the mayor's office based on its placement in City Hall, will confront a declining-but-still-high murder rate, recent instances of police misconduct, political corruption and unequal economic growth across the city.

Daley, Preckwinkle and Mendoza were the biggest names to enter the race. Daley, the son and brother of former mayors, raised a staggering $8.3 million for the campaign, more than twice the haul of any other individual candidate.

Preckwinkle brought in $4.6 million, with $2 million coming from Service Employees International Union, the labor union. She was also backed by the city's teachers' union.

Lightfoot, by contrast, raised only $1.5 million, including $267,000 of self-funding.

A late attack from Preckwinkle's campaign — her then-campaign manager, Scott Cisek, used a photo of Nazis on trial at Nuremberg to attack Lightfoot — may have boosted Lightfoot. Preckwinkle fired Cisek, saying the post "was unconscionable and showed insensitivity to the issue of anti-Semitism."

Lightfoot positioned herself as a political outsider in her first-ever campaign, having spent her early years as a federal prosecutor and City Hall aide. But after a decade in private practice, she returned to government after being appointed by Emanuel as a police watchdog, including leading a task force after the murder of Laquan McDonald, who was shot and killed by Jason Van Dyke, a white Chicago police officer.

She leaned into her outsider credentials, saying in her campaign's TV ad that her opponents were "all tied to the same broken Chicago machine." She was endorsed by the Chicago Sun-Times, with the paper's traditionally liberal editorial board calling her "beholden to pretty much nobody — except you."

Preckwinkle will enter the runoff hobbled by a bruising campaign, but not defeated. She was dogged by charges that she mishandled sexual harassment allegations against her then-chief of staff in 2018. Then she fired her campaign manager in the race's final week following the Nuremberg post.

But Preckwinkle remains a powerful political force. In addition to her post as county board chair, she also leads the Cook County Democratic Party. Her union support bolsters a ground game that could be an asset in the April runoff.

Daley's third-place finish, meanwhile, marked a stunning rejection of the scion of Chicago's preeminent political dynasty. While polls showed Daley could struggle to amass an electoral majority in the April runoff, he was widely expected to finish in the top two on Tuesday, thanks for overwhelming name ID and a massive war chest.

Daley's father, Richard J. Daley, was elected six times as mayor before dying in office in 1976. Richard M. Daley, the 2019 candidate's brother, then served six terms, starting in 1989 before leaving office in 2011.

Voters splintered beyond the top five candidates, who combined for roughly two-thirds of the votes cast. In sixth place was Amara Enyia, an activist who had the support of two notable Chicago musicians: Kanye West and Chance the Rapper. Two former Chicago Public Schools chiefs, Gery Chico and Paul Vallas, finished eighth and ninth, respectively. Garry McCarthy, the former city police superintendent fired by Emanuel during the Laquan McDonald scandal, finished tenth.

A Lightfoot-Preckwinkle runoff will produce the city's first black woman mayor. The city has had one woman mayor: Jane Byrne, who served one term from 1979 to 1983.

Byrne was ousted by Harold Washington, who became Chicago's first black mayor in 1983. Eugene Sawyer became the city's second African-American mayor, serving as acting mayor after Washington's death in 1987.