Gregory Royal Pratt: Lessons for Joe Biden’s campaign from Lori Lightfoot’s failed mayoral bid

Politicians looking to win reelection have to ask themselves important questions.

Do they have a base that wants to vote for them? Is it big enough to win? Can they succeed in the race by not being “the other guy”?

President Joe Biden hopes so. So did former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Lightfoot’s failed bid for four more years echoes the dilemma Biden faces as he weighs whether to continue his run for a second term.

I covered our former mayor for five years at the Tribune. As Lightfoot contemplated her reelection campaign, she considered her standing. She had low favorability with wide swaths of the city. White voters, particularly those who supported her in 2019, abandoned her in droves. To compensate, Lightfoot worked to win Black voters on the South and West sides while hoping some of her old base along the liberal lakefront would eventually come home.

When confronted by polls that showed her behind her rivals, Lightfoot argued that these surveys don’t simulate elections. In a brawl with knives and elbows, Lightfoot believed she could bloody up the competition. U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García might look good in October as a noncandidate, the Lightfoot campaign figured, but negative television ads would cut into that.

Lightfoot hoped she could make a runoff against former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, then turn him into a Republican cartoon in an overwhelmingly blue city and win over the voters.

In plain English, every campaign is an exercise in disproving the old adage, “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.” It is, unfortunately, not a contest of who plants the healthiest garden, reads the most books and helps more helpless people cross the street.

Biden is making some of the same calculations Lightfoot made as he tries to stay in the White House after an abominable debate performance against former President Donald Trump.

According to published reports, Biden’s team argues that he won swing voters in swing states during the debate. He thinks voters will remember the chaos and tumult of Trump’s four-year term and reelect him. The president’s campaign plans to spend millions of dollars to convince Americans that Trump was bad.

But Biden is running uphill, just like Lightfoot, with political baggage — age and personality — overshadowing a positive message.

One of the top questions I hear while discussing my book on Lightfoot is, why did she lose her reelection?

The question is worth pondering. How does someone win 75% of the vote and then get rejected by 83% of the voters four years later?

The simplest and truest answer came from former Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, who lamented in a podcast interview with the great Ben Joravsky: “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with — police, fire, teachers, alderpersons, businesses, manufacturing, and that’s it.”

Gregory Royal Pratt: ‘They won’t burn my city down.’ How Mayor Lightfoot handled the rioting in 2020.

One of the conclusions of my book is Lightfoot misunderstood her 2019 victory. She didn’t win that race against Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle because the voters loved her Girl Scout character and policy platform. She won because she was brand-new and unconnected to the corruption scandal that came down from the sky like a thunderbolt and incinerated then-Ald. Ed Burke.

Biden owes a lot of his 2020 victory to voter fatigue with Trump, too.

What’s clear to me after five years reporting on Lightfoot for the Tribune and writing a book on her is she would’ve been better off not running for a second term. She could’ve bowed out and declared victory: “I led us through hell. It’s time for someone else to carry the city.” Some people would’ve mocked her for skipping out, but in the end, she would’ve been remembered more fondly.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where people gauge one-termers — even those who walk away voluntarily — as misfits and failures. Lightfoot felt she had more to do and ran for a second term. Her gamble was that the voters would reject Vallas again. In fact, that’s what ultimately happened — for Brandon Johnson.

I don’t know how the 2024 election will end. Biden is clearly in deep trouble, but so is Trump, who has his own profound issues with the electorate.

Biden could be right. Anybody who tells you they know how an election will end hasn’t lived through the last six years in Chicago.

But if he is wrong, Biden could also end up like Lightfoot, a pugnacious first-term mayor whose achievements in office — most notably, saving lives with her COVID-19 vaccine efforts and attempting to refocus development on the South and West sides — are now overshadowed by a failed reelection.

Losers don’t get to write their own history.

Gregory Royal Pratt is an investigative reporter at the Tribune. He is the author of “The City is Up for Grabs: How Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led and Lost a City in Crisis.”

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