According to ousted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, her defeat last week was the result of racism and sexism.
“I’m a black woman in America. Of course,” she explained when a reporter asked her if she’d been treated unfairly.
It was an embarrassing excuse for someone who, only four years earlier, had become the first openly LGBT and black female mayor of the Windy City but also painfully indicative of how Democrats have become so blind about the folly of the radical policies they support. Like many other Democrat city leaders, Lightfoot went all in on the Defund the Police movement — much to the detriment of public safety. Crime skyrocketed on her watch, and she refused, even in defeat, to admit that her embrace of soft-on-crime policies had been her downfall.
On her watch, Chicago’s murder rate increased by 30%, while motor vehicle theft complaints increased by 130%.
But New York City mayor Eric Adams, a fellow Democrat, called her defeat a wake-up call for the entire country.
“You worked closely together on a range of issues, particularly on questions of crime,” CNN host Dana Bash began. “That is an issue that dominated the election in Chicago. What is your takeaway from her loss?”
“Well, I think all of our big cities, I like to say, we are three parties: Democrat, Republicans, and mayors. Mayors, we are closer — we’re the closest to the problem. And I stated on a campaign trail and in the city, public safety is a prerequisite to prosperity. Same in Chicago, like New York, and many of our big cities across America. That is why we’re zero focused, double-digit decrease in shooters,” Adams said.
“Double-digit decrease in homicides,” he continued. “We have witnessed this year, particularly in the month of February, all of our index crimes is low, low for the entire year. We are focused on public safety because people want to be safe. They don’t feel safe and they’re actually safe, you’re going to lose control of your city.”
“Is what happened to her a warning sign for you here in New York?” Bash asked.
“I think it’s a warning sign for the country,” he replied. “Eric Adams has been talking about public safety, not only on the campaign trail, but for the first year. I showed up at crime scenes. I knew what New Yorkers were saying. And I saw it all over the country. I think if anything, it is really stating that this is what I have been talking about. America, we have to be safe.”
Adams is right. Americans from all walks of life want to feel safe, and Democrat leaders chose radical activist policies over public safety. Playing the race and gender card didn’t work for Lightfoot, and she lost in a city that had elected her four years earlier. She was too devoted to the left-wing narrative to care that her re-election slipped through her fingers. You can hit all the right diversity boxes, but that won’t matter if the voters don’t feel safe. This tells us that the issue of crime and “defunding the police” remains a potent issue to the voters like it did in the aftermath of the BLM riots in 2020.
Even Joe Biden, who embraced the defund the police movement in 2020, is trying to reinvent himself and the Democratic Party as tougher on crime. As if we’ll fall for that.
We know that Democrats will pivot on this issue when they run for office, but they’ll always be beholden to the radical left — which hates the police — and in 2024, the GOP will have to ensure the voters never forget what the left really is all about.