Election could serve as a bellwether for how voters think about public safety as they choose between duelling approaches
There are few issues besides keeping a clean alley that most Chicagoans agree on. Yet, last week, a majority of the city’s voters ousted incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the city’s mayoral primary.
With just under 17% of the vote, Lightfoot became the first mayor to fail to advance to the runoff election since Jane Byrne lost the 1983 primary. But the recent election was not a stunning rebuke of Lightfoot, who commanded third place with a loyal base of mostly Black voters on the city’s South and West Sides, but a demand for a radically different approach toward combating crime amid pandemic recovery, with one candidate focused on law and order and the other hoping to boost the social safety net.
Read the full article: The politics of crime: what Chicago’s mayoral race reveals about the US.
