Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic Mayor of Chicago, blamed both racism and her gender as factors behind her crushing election loss, the NY Post reported on Wednesday.
Many Chicagoans, who were tired of the rising crime under her watch, celebrated her fall from being a “political rock star to rock bottom.”
Chicago Mayor blames election loss on racism, says she has been treated unfairly because she’s a black American woman
“I’m a black woman in America. Of course,” she responded to a reporter who asked if the decision was unfair.
“Certain folks, frankly, don’t support us in leadership roles,” she told the New Yorker.
But the 60-year-old said that she would “never apologize for bringing wealth and opportunity to Black and brown families that had been locked out for far too long.”
She said that without her, those communities would “slide back into thirty more years of not having a seat at the table.” And she considered being Chicago’s mayor “the honor of a lifetime.”
“Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said, as she motivated other mayors in the US to be fearless.
In addition to facing heavy criticism for the crime wave, homelessness, and other issues plaguing the city, Mayor Lightfoot had also brought race into the forefront of the lead-up to the election.
Chicago paper labeled Lightfoot’s loss as a ‘political embarrassment’
The Chicago Tribune argued that the crime rate had “skyrocketed” during her tenure.
“Homicides, mostly from gun violence, spiked dramatically in 2020 and 2021 from 500 murders in 2019 to 776 and 804 in the next two years, respectively. Shootings and carjackings also skyrocketed,” the paper stated.
Violent crime in the city went up by 40% since she promised during her inaugural address to end the “epidemic of gun violence that devastates families, shatters communities, holds children hostage to fear in their own homes,” the Chicago Tribute reported.
The newspaper also pointed out that some of her problems were due to unfortunate timing, specifically the pandemic and the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
