Can Typhoon Vallas Save the Windy City?
Should New Yorkers take heart from the defeat of incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in Chicago? Are blue-city voters finally fed up with crazy policies that encourage crime and discourage economic prosperity?
From the first-round voting in the mayoral race that just cost Mayor Lightfoot her job, it’s unclear just what kind of typhoon had just struck the Windy City. Or whether voters have shaken off the progressive plague.
Paul Vallas, a tough-on-crime candidate and proven school reformer who was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, won 33.7 percent of the vote, while Brandon Johnson, a former organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, received 20.3 percent and Ms. Lightfoot took 17.1 percent.
Illinois Representative Jesús “Chuy” García, another progressive in the race, captured 13.7 percent of the vote. Overall, then, far-left politics continued to dominate the field. Yes, Lightfoot lost, but she was a terrible mayor — out of touch and incompetent — and she did nothing to curb her city’s downward descent.
Chicago, like New York, has ranked among the top cities in the United States in terms of population loss in recent years, and the Windy City, like the Big Apple, has suffered an appalling crime spike. Already this year, Chicago has seen 70 murders.
Ms. Lightfoot shamefully blamed her defeat on bias against Black women, apparently forgetting that when she was first elected in 2019, with an astounding 74 percent of the vote, she was also a Black female.
Chicago’s population is 33 percent white, 29 percent Black and 29 percent Hispanic. In the upcoming run-off to elect Chicago’s next mayor, voters will choose between Mr. Vallas, who is white, and Brandon Johnson, who is Black.
Read more at… https://www.nysun.com/article/can-typhoon-vallas-save-the-windy-city
Published in The New York Sun
