Chicago may throw Mayor Lori Lightfoot out in the first round

Standing on a stage at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, a fast-gentrifying corner of south-eastern Chicago, Jesús Chuy García, a congressman, explains why he is running for mayor, in nostalgic terms. “Chicago 40 years ago saw an opportunity to make history by undoing a barrier, by electing someone who was different,” he says. In 1983, ten electoral cycles ago, Mr García was part of the movement that helped elect Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, with a “rainbow coalition” of ethnic-minority voters and white liberals fed up with corruption. His election inspired Barack Obama to move to the city. Now Mr García says he wants to repeat the trick to become Chicago’s first Latino mayor. Yet Chicago in 2023 is a very different place to what it was.