Yet Tuesday, voters sided with Lightfoot in overwhelming margins, handing her a resounding victory as she prepares to become the first African American woman and first openly gay person to serve as Chicago’s mayor. Lightfoot’s outsider status and her pledge to combat political corruption resonated across the city’s traditional dividing lines of race and class. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, she had received 73 percent of the vote and was leading in all 50 City Council wards.
“Today, you did more than make history,” Lightfoot told a packed ballroom of her supporters that chanted her name Tuesday night. “You created a movement for change.”
Lightfoot, a Democrat, used her acceptance speech to underscore the historic nature of her victory. As her wife and daughter stood nearby, Lightfoot said her win proved that Chicago was “a city where it doesn’t matter what color you are” and “where it doesn’t matter who you love, just as long as you love with all your heart.” She also reiterated her promise to invest in struggling neighborhoods.
“We can and will make Chicago a place where your ZIP code doesn’t determine your destiny,” she said.
Lightfoot finished with the most support among 14 candidates in February’s first-round, nonpartisan election. In Tuesday’s runoff, she broadened that appeal and soundly defeated Toni Preckwinkle, a longtime politician who leads the county board and local Democratic Party. The two women will soon have offices in the same building and have vowed to work together.
In the Logan Square neighborhood on the city’s Northwest Side, Deepti Pareenja, 37, said she voted for Lightfoot on Tuesday in part because of the candidate’s lack of political experience.
“It’s because of Chicago,” Pareenja said. “We have a history of corruption with people who’ve been ingrained in politics for multiple decades.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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