Becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose reelection is arguably more relevant than her accidents of birth and sexual proclivity.
Here’s how the Associated Press alerted readers to the breaking news on Tuesday night that incumbent Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot had lost her bid for a second term and had failed even to secure enough votes to advance to a runoff election:
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who made history as 1st Black woman and 1st gay person to lead city, loses reelection bid.
Leading Lightfoot’s political obituary with her demographic traits is little more than a verbal tic. That it’s a common one among journalists doesn’t make it any less of a non sequitur. It doesn’t inform the reader of anything related to the breaking story. Indeed, it might lead readers to draw erroneous conclusions about the event upon which the AP is reporting, and that misapprehension would suit Lightfoot’s purposes just fine. “I’m a black woman in America,” the ousted municipal official said when a reporter asked her if she had been treated unfairly. “Of course.”
Of all the mayor’s historic accomplishments, her identity barely registers as one. Indeed, when it comes to making history, Lori Lightfoot did more than her part.
Lightfoot presided over historically low arrest rates in her city, despite a surge in the city’s violent-crime rate. “The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported last year. The Sun-Times alleged that the statistics reveal what “amounts to a pullback by police officers,” and not just in areas of the city where violent crime is tacitly accepted as an intractable feature of modern life. A Crain’s Chicago Business analysis of the city’s crime problem observed that arrest rates fell off a cliff in 2020 and 2021, and Cook County’s prison population declined, even as the city’s homicide rate surged.
The rate at which major corporations fled Lightfoot’s Chicago also defies precedent. Rampant, organized retail theft has forced brick-and-mortar stores large and small to cut their losses and abandon the Chicago marketplace, even in glitzy downtown stretches such as the city’s famed Magnificent Mile. Large firms such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Tyson Foods, the hedge fund Citadel, and even the Chicago Bears abandoned the city during Lightfoot’s tenure. The corporate leadership of major employers, such as McDonald’s, have confessed that it’s getting harder and harder to resist overtures to relocate to safer parts of the country.
“The fact is that there are fewer large companies headquartered in Chicago this year than last year,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said of the city’s corporate exodus last September. “There are fewer this month than last month,” he added, contending that the city had to “face facts” about its prohibitive crime rates. To this gentle admonition, Mayor Lightfoot said it would be “helpful” if Kempczinski opted to “educate himself before he spoke.”
Lightfoot oversaw “historic declines in math and reading” test scores among the city’s minority students. Barely more than one-fifth of the city’s high-school students can read at grade level, and their math proficiency is even worse. That might have something to do with the fact that Chicago public schools did not reopen for in-person instruction until January 2022, and only after prolonged and unfruitful negotiations with city’s teachers’ union in a halting attempt to get the organization’s members to do their jobs.
Lightfoot’s efforts to avoid a politically painful standoff with this powerful union came to naught. Her administration was eventually forced to take action against what the city deemed an “illegal” strike designed to forestall the reopening of city schools. If it was always going to come to a fight, the tragic learning loss suffered by so many of the city’s students might have been avoided had the confrontation come sooner.
Of all of Lightfoot’s historic achievements, becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose reelection — in a machine city such as Chicago, no less — arguably outranks her accidents of birth and sexual proclivity as a relevant fact. Reporters might hesitate to lead with such objectively relevant details because that would constitute making editorial judgment calls. But so, too, does the decision to lead with her identity. That’s an editorial judgment call that doesn’t even register as a judgment call inside the guild. Moreover, it crowds out information far more germane to the circumstances about which these outfits are ostensibly reporting.