A Shifting Mood on Crime Propelled Chicago’s Leading Candidate for Mayor

CHICAGO — When Paul Vallas ran for mayor of Chicago four years ago, it did not go well. He finished in a distant ninth place, winning only 5 percent of the vote and barely registering as an electoral afterthought.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Vallas, who hammered a tough-on-crime message on the campaign trail, finished well ahead of eight other candidates in an election that denied Mayor Lori Lightfoot a second term and made her the city’s first incumbent to lose re-election since the 1980s.

Mr. Vallas’s strong showing reflects a much different electoral mood in Chicago, where homicides spiked under Ms. Lightfoot’s watch during the pandemic, property crime rates have continued to rise and promises to crack down have taken on new appeal.

Across the country, even in liberal cities, calls for more expansive policing and harsher prosecution have gained political favor. Debates over those issues will shape Mr. Vallas’s runoff on April 4 with Brandon Johnson, who has outlined a progressive agenda for dealing with Chicago’s problems.

That matchup gives voters a choice between two starkly different Democrats: The younger, unabashedly liberal Mr. Johnson, a county commissioner and former union organizer who is Black; and the older, more conservative Mr. Vallas, a white man who is a former public school executive and a vocal supporter of law enforcement. Mr. Vallas has used a political playbook similar to the one that helped Mayor Eric Adams of New York City emerge from a crowded Democratic field to win election in 2021.

“Public safety is the fundamental right of every American: It is a civil right and it is the principal responsibility of government,” Mr. Vallas, 69, said Tuesday night in a speech. “And we will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America.”

But on Chicago’s influential political left, the prospect of a Vallas mayoralty has been met with fear, derision and implications that he is really more of a Republican than the lifelong Democrat he says he is.

“We cannot have this man as the mayor of the city of Chicago,” Mr. Johnson, 46, whose campaign was lifted by an endorsement from the local teachers’ union, told his supporters on Tuesday night. “Our children and families across Chicago can’t afford it.”

Mr. Vallas grew up on Chicago’s South Side and is a familiar figure in local government. He led Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001 before leaving to run the school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Conn. In those positions, he cultivated a reputation as a crisis manager and charter school supporter willing to take on hard jobs and implement sweeping changes, an approach that garnered a mix of praise and criticism.

But it was Mr. Vallas’s hard-line message on crime and policing that elevated him in this year’s nine-candidate mayoral field. After unsuccessful runs for governor in 2002, lieutenant governor in 2014 and mayor in 2019, Mr. Vallas positioned himself this year well to the political right of Ms. Lightfoot, and even further to the right of Mr. Johnson.

“I was never scared before,” said Martha Wicker, 61, who voted for Mr. Vallas and described worrying about crime during her daily commute. “Now I don’t want to be on the train alone when it’s dark.”

The next mayor will inherit a long-challenged Police Department operating under a consent decree and without a permanent leader. In Ms. Lightfoot’s first major announcement since losing re-election, she said on Wednesday that David O. Brown, who led the Chicago Police during most of her time in City Hall, would resign later this month.

As of Wednesday evening, with some mail-in ballots still not counted, Mr. Vallas was leading in 19 of the city’s 50 wards, compared with nine wards where Mr. Johnson was in first place.

Mr. Vallas racked up large margins in downtown Chicago, the site of widespread looting in 2020, and in parts of the Northwest and Southwest Sides with significant white, working-class populations. Mr. Johnson performed well on the city’s northern lakefront, carrying a plurality of the votes in some majority-white wards, while also winning some majority-Hispanic areas northwest of downtown.

Mr. Vallas was the only white politician in the field, which included seven Black candidates and one Hispanic contender. Chicago, which has a history of racial and ethnic groups sometimes voting as blocs, has roughly equal numbers of Black, white and Hispanic residents.

In the runoff, both candidates will seek to win over Chicagoans who backed Representative Jesús G. García, a progressive Democrat with a loyal base of Hispanic voters, and Ms. Lightfoot, who carried several mostly Black wards on the South and West Sides.

Supporters of Mr. Johnson, who previously worked as a public-school teacher, said they appreciated his approach on education and policing. Mr. Johnson at one point suggested that he agreed with the movement to reduce funding for police departments, though he later backtracked.

“I like his opinions about funding the police differently, not defunding but doing it differently,” said Carla Moulton, 61, a legal secretary who voted for Mr. Johnson.

Mr. Johnson, a pastor’s son and West Side resident who won election to the County Board in 2018, called on the campaign trail for increasing access to mental health services, adding funding for schools and creating more affordable housing. To pay for it, he has called for raising some taxes, including on businesses.

“The finances of the city belong to the people of the city,” Mr. Johnson said on Tuesday night. “So we’re going to invest in the people of the city.”

Progressives united against Mr. Vallas because of his views on the police, his track record supporting charter schools and, most recently, a Chicago Tribune report that his Twitter account liked an array of offensive posts on Twitter about Ms. Lightfoot. (Mr. Vallas suggested his account was breached.) Mr. Vallas also said in a television interview in 2009 that he considered himself more of a Republican than a Democrat, a strike against him in the eyes of many voters in overwhelmingly liberal Chicago.

As he made his case to voters, Mr. Vallas welcomed an endorsement from the local Fraternal Order of Police, called for the replacement of Chicago Police Department leaders and put forth a plan to improve arrest rates and prosecute more misdemeanor crimes. His campaign website described Chicago as a near dystopia in which “city leadership has surrendered us all to a criminal element that acts with seeming impunity in treating unsuspecting, innocent people as prey.”

For many voters, unnerved by homicide rates that soared to generational highs during the coronavirus pandemic, that message resonated.

Mike Curran, 50, a real estate broker, said he voted for Mr. Vallas because of public safety concerns.

“I’m very disappointed in the last four years,” Mr. Curran said. “I grew up in Detroit and know what can happen to a city. I voted for Vallas because I’m extremely fed up with crime in the neighborhood.”

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Vallas became a sought-after leader for school systems in crisis. He became chief executive of Chicago Public Schools in the years after the district was referred to as the country’s worst. He led the Philadelphia school system and expanded charter schools after the state took over the district. And after Hurricane Katrina, he oversaw the rebuilding of the New Orleans school system.

Creg Williams, who worked as a school district administrator under Mr. Vallas in multiple cities, described his former boss as an energetic, determined leader who was open to criticism but steadfast in advancing his vision.

“He looks at problems and he thinks about, ‘How do I innovate and how do I create? How do I make this change, and make that change a lasting change?’” said Dr. Williams, who later worked as a school superintendent in other districts and who has supported Mr. Vallas’s campaign.

During his stint with the Chicago school district, Mr. Vallas had a cordial relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, an organization that battled repeatedly with the last two Chicago mayors and that helped elevate Mr. Johnson’s profile in this year’s campaign.

Deborah Lynch, whose tenure as president of the teachers’ union overlapped briefly with Mr. Vallas’s stint leading the Chicago schools, said she appreciated Mr. Vallas’s approach even though she did not agree with him on every issue.

“He was a leader with lots of energy, lots of ideas, lots of plans,” said Ms. Lynch, who now lives in suburban Chicago and who supports Mr. Vallas’s mayoral campaign. “Some of those plans went as intended. Some, you know, were lessons learned.” She added: “He has a vision, but he also backs up his vision with specific plans.”

His work, however, has also brought criticism. Mr. Vallas was appointed in 2017 to the board of trustees at Chicago State University, which was struggling financially.

After arriving there, he quickly moved into a top administrative role, where he was charged with helping set the course for the university’s future. But as it became clear he was planning to run for mayor in 2019, he was forced out. The Rev. Marshall Hatch Sr., who at the time was the chairman of the university’s board, said he believed Mr. Vallas “didn’t help at all” and had “no impact,” though others on campus defended his work.

“It didn’t make a lot of sense, other than the school was in trouble and it looked like the school’s in such a crisis that, hey, let’s throw a fixer like Paul over there,” Mr. Hatch said. “It didn’t last long.”

Julie Bosman, Robert Chiarito and Dan Simmons contributed reporting.