CHICAGO Chicago will elect its first African-American woman as its next mayor, after former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle moved on to an April runoff amid a record field of 14 candidates.
With votes scarcer than expected and polls showing a half-dozen or more candidates within striking distance, the goal was to break into the top two and qualify for the April 2 runoff election. That is the result if no candidate collects more than 50 percent of the vote the first time around.
Unofficial results showed Lightfoot with 17.4 percent of the vote, Preckwinkle with 16 percent and Bill Daley with 14.7 percent. By late Tuesday, Lightfoot had declared she had made the runoff, Daley had conceded defeat and Preckwinkle continued to watch votes get tallied.
The race to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who made the surprise announcement after Labor Day that he would not seek a third term, comes at a pivotal time for Chicago and unfolded against the backdrop of an ongoing federal corruption investigation at City Hall.
If Lightfoot were to win the runoff, she would become the citys first openly gay mayor. Both Lighftoot and Preckwinkle are strong advocates for criminal justice and police reform in an era when Chicago politics have been influenced by the fallout of the Laquan McDonald police shooting and the subsequent federal civil rights investigation into the police department.
Preckwinkle and Daley largely were expected to be in the mix for the top two, and the limited reliable polling that had emerged before Tuesday showed the two at the front of the race. The surprise of the night was Lightfoot.
Shortly after 9 p.m. he took the stage with both arms raised in the air and declared that she had qualified for the runoff.
So what do you think of us now? a smiling Lightfoot asked a raucous crowd at her campaign party. This, my friends, is what change looks like!
Lightfoot thanked her supporters for having the courage to stand with our campaign against the machine, and positioned herself clearly as the reform candidate left in the race who had emerged from a pack of establishment figures.
People said that I had some good ideas but couldnt win, said Lightfoot, who grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and moved to Chicago to practice law after graduating from the University of Michigan. Its true that not every day a little black girl in a low-income family from a segregated steel town makes the runoff to be the next mayor of the third largest city in America!
The mood at Daleys election night gathering was much more subdued.
Im here tonight with an outcome none of us wanted. … I congratulate Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot on their victories, Daley said. One of them will have the honor of being the next mayor of Chicago.
Many of the candidates vowed to improve policing and drive down crime while pledging to provide relief from a yearslong succession of tax increases. But most also did not lay out comprehensive plans on how they would deal with the citys pension woes and budget shortfall, instead pointing to hopes for a Chicago casino and a share of revenue from legalized marijuana as panaceas.
During the last six months, the mayoral race had been defined by a series of twists and turns, with none more dominating than the federal probe at City Hall, which led all of the candidates to propose a series of ethics reforms.
The campaign began with a dozen people declaring they would challenge Emanuel, some with ties to the mayor. Eight of them would make the final ballot _ Lightfoot, McCarthy, Vallas, Wilson, Enyia, Joyce, Sales-Griffin and Kozlar.
