Lori Lightfoot will become Chicago's first black mayor and its first openly gay person to hold the office when sworn in next month
CHICAGO — Lori Lightfoot has made history on several fronts after winning Chicago’s mayoral runoff on Tuesday.
Lightfoot is a first-time candidate, a former federal prosecutor who was also president of the Chicago Police Board, a civilian watchdog for the city’s cops. She easily defeated a longtime politician in the city, Toni Preckwinkle, who currently serves as president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Preckwinkle, like Lightfoot, is an African-American woman.
The two women — both are Democrats in the officially nonpartisan election — were facing off just five weeks after the initial election, in which no candidate earned a majority of the vote. Lightfoot led the 14-candidate field with 17.5 percent of the vote, with Preckwinkle at 16.1 percent. Daley’s brother, Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff and Clinton-era Cabinet secretary, finished third.
But the first runoff polls showed Lightfoot ahead by large margins — and with that momentum behind her, Lightfoot soon gathered top-tier endorsements and donations. Preckwinkle’s financial support has been primarily from big unions — the SEIU and the Chicago Teachers Union.In the last weeks of the race, Preckwinkle stopped airing television ads as her campaign struggled to raise money. The SEIU eventually came up with $100,000 that allowed her to go back on TV for the final week of the race.
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