Progressive Chicago Mayor’s Resounding Defeat Sends Nationwide Politicians a Message, Mayor Adams said

By Yehudit Garmaise

Are progressive mayors in America being shown the door by big-city voters?

Just four years after Ultra-Progressive Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was easily elected in 2019, last Tuesday, she earned only 17% of the city’s vote and failed to qualify for a runoff that will take place on April 4. 

When Mayor Eric Adams was asked on CNN how he interpreted Lightfoot’s humiliating defeat, Adams said Lightfoot’s loss is “a warning sign for the country.”

What Adams meant was that while Lightfoot was easily elected on a far-left platform that was appealing to many big-city Democrats in 2019, when Donald Trump was president, four years later, those same progressive policies have created disastrous results in many American big cities that are now dealing with shockingly high rates of violent crime, destruction, and squalor.

In Chicago, for instance, last year’s homicide rate was five times higher than that of New York City and two and a half times higher than the homicide rate in Los Angeles, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Lightfoot’s brief, single term is especially unusual in Chicago, where residents usually remain loyal to mayors who do not make waves. 

Richard M. Daley, for instance, ran the city for 22 years when he was reelected five times from 1989 to 2011, just as his father before him, Richard J. Daley was reelected five times when he ran the city from 1955 to 1976. 

Not only did the high rates of shootings, car-jackings, and failing public schools during Lightfoot’s term cause Chicagoans to lose heart in her, but the violence, looting, and $125 million worth of destruction that went unchecked at the end of May 2020 during police protests created a feeling of lawlessness and chaos in the city.

The decline in Chicago mirrors that of San Francisco, where Bay Area voters, who usually tolerate some of the most left-wing policies in the country, showed they finally had enough with the out-of-control crime, squalor, homelessness, and rampant public drug use that has ruined the formerly beautiful and elegant Bay Area city.

In a shocking referendum, on June 7, 2022, San Francisco voters recalled ultra-progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin after suffering three years of his implementation of far-left criminal justice reform, bail reform, and “alternatives” to prosecution and sentencing.

“[Voters recalled Bodin] because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality,” Nellie Bowles famously wrote in “How San Francisco Became a Failed City,” in the Atlantic. “There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been [acting out] left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.”

In contrast to other cities’ soft-on-crime attitudes, Mayor Adams emphasized his commitment to restoring public safety in New York City.

While Chicago Mayor Lightfoot was busy with progressive “identity politics,” “I showed up at crime scenes,” Mayor Adams said. “I knew what New Yorkers were saying, and I saw it all over the country. I think if anything, [Lightfoot’s resounding defeat] is really [showing] that this is what I have been talking about. America: We have to be safe.”

When CNN’s Dana Bash asked the mayor whether his focus on crime is overblown, Adams replied, “I say, ‘I listen to Americans and New Yorkers.’

“The polls were clear: New Yorkers felt unsafe, and the numbers show that they were unsafe,” said Adams, just days after the NYPD reported a 5.6% drop in major crimes last month compared to February 2022. Robberies, burglary, and grand larceny rates double-digit percentage drops, as well. 

“Now, if we want to ignore what the everyday public is stating, then that’s up to [others]. I’m on the subways, I walk the streets. I speak to everyday working-class people, and they were concerned about safety.

While shootings and homicides in the city have declined, New York has to focus on stopping recidivism, said the mayor, who along with NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, has many times blamed on the state legislature’s progressive bail reform of 2020.

“We have a recidivism problem in New York and far too many people: about 2,000 people are repeatedly ‘catch, release, and repeat’ in crimes,” Adams said. “If we don’t take them off our streets, they’re going to continue to prey on innocent people.”