Could Lori Lightfoot become the first Chicago mayor to lose a re-election bid 40 years? Voters went to the polls today to choose between a mayor who has presided over a massive increase in violent crime, and several other candidates that could hardly do worse. Polls are scheduled to close at 7 pm CT/8 pm ET, but often those times get extended over precinct issues, especially those in Chicago’s graveyards.

Kidding! Well, sorta anyway.

Turnout in this election hasn’t been a joke, though. Even before in-person voting began this morning, the early voting count came up to nearly a quarter-million ballots, NBC’s local affiliate reported. Those were almost evenly split between early in-person voting and mail-in balloting:

According to the Chicago Board of Elections, 244,580 voters have already exercised their civic duty and cast their ballots, with 131,806 voters choosing to vote early in-person and another 112,774 voting by mail.

Chicago’s 19th Ward, which includes Beverly, Morgan Park, Kennedy Park and Mt. Greenwood, has the highest voter turn out so far, with 7,701 early ballots cast, data from the Board show.

If you haven’t voted yet however, you’re not alone. In both the 2019 and the 2015 Municipal Elections, the majority of voters waited until Election Day to cast their ballot. Both of those years, the city saw a voter turn out between 34 and 35 percent.

The city is well on its way to a larger turnout this time around. The city has 1.58 million registered voters, so 13% or so have turned out already even before the polls opened this morning. This is nearly twice the number of early voters four years ago (130K) on the way to 560K overall votes cast. Clearly, Chicago voters are more motivated in this cycle than they were when they put Lightfoot in the mayor’s office.

It may take a while to see if she gets to stay there, though. First off, this is a primary, at least functionally, since no one will come close to 50%+1 tonight. All Lightfoot has to do is finish in the top two, but as we’ll see, even that may be a problem for the incumbent.

Second, thanks to Chicago’s rules, mail-in ballots received as late as March 14th will still get counted in the election. Voters have to apply for mail-in ballots, so the number of outstanding ballots is known — just over 100,000, which represents a very large part of the expected turnout. If two candidates get overwhelming pluralities by the end of business today, we may see two winners declared. Otherwise, we’ll likely not know who makes the runoff until the river stops being green after St. Patrick’s Day.

It doesn’t appear that we’ll get that kind of outcome, however. Polling shows Lightfoot trailing Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas outside the margin of error, but no one’s breaking away from the pack so far:

In case you can’t read it, the toplines are:

• Paul Vallas: 23.91%
• Lori Lightfoot: 17.97%
• Jesus ‘Chuy’ Garcia: 15.85%
• Brandon Johnson: 14.49%
• Willie L. Wilson: 11.88%
• Five other candidates at less than 6%

Vallas seems ready for a runoff, but Lightfoot is mired in a three- or even four-way tie for the second slot. That is no vote of confidence in current leadership, nor should Lightfoot expect one, given the current circumstances, although the large field does leave her a chance of squeezing into the runoff. It’s about the only hope Lightfoot has to avoid a humiliating re-election defeat in a city where machine politics practically got invented.

Now Lightfoot is all about crime, which is a remarkable turnaround from Lightfoot’s first campaign, as Politico’s Jonathan Martin points out:

As Chicagoans go to the polls Tuesday, Lightfoot’s fate may depend on whether enough other Black voters will listen to the last-minute appeal she’s making on the stump and in television ads, where she’s broadcasting a closing commercial assailing the African-American Johnson as a “radical” who’d “wreck our city with dangerous defunding of police.”

Four years after Lightfoot won what was her first bid for electoral office by forging a coalition of Blacks and liberal whites, many of them angry about the police killing of Laquan McDonald, her punch-left strategy offers a vivid illustration about the shifting politics of crime. The former president of the oversight-focused Chicago Police Board, who entered the race then before Mayor Rahm Emanuel even announced he’d skip a third term, is now weaponizing past pleas to defund the police.

Polling from the campaigns and outside groups shows that it’s by far the biggest driver of voters, with some surveys I’ve seen indicating that well over half the electorate call it the dominant issue facing the city. What’s more striking, and what’s at the heart of Lightfoot’s offensive, is that some of the same polls indicate that defunding the police is highly unpopular with Black voters.

Lightfoot’s problem is that she’s aiming at Johnson, while Paul Vallas takes aim at Lightfoot’s own defunding track record:

Two decades after narrowly losing the Democratic gubernatorial primary to Rod Blagojevich (yes, that Blago) and over 10 years after losing a general election bid as then-Gov Pat Quinn’s running mate, Vallas has resurrected himself as the tough-on-crime favorite of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Across the racially and economically stratified wards that make up Chicago’s sprawling, complex and deliciously parochial political map, that style of campaign has made him a favorite of the voters people here still unabashedly call white ethnics. Largely on the northwest and southwest side, these high-turnout voters, many of them city police officers and firefighters required by law to live in Chicago, have rallied to Vallas, who’s white, and all but assured he’ll be the top vote-getter Tuesday.

Er … don’t be too sure that Vallas’ support will come primarily from white voters. Black voters are none too pleased with crime, and Vallas is pretty much the only alternative to Lightfoot taking the issue seriously. They won’t turn to Johnson or Garcia, certainly, both of whom are even more hardline progressive than Lightfoot. That’s the reason that Lightfoot is attacking Johnson and Garcia — she’s hoping to escape the pack and get into the runoff against Vallas, where she’ll reset her campaign and argue … well, something.

We have the vote widget for tonight’s count, but don’t expect to learn who the new mayor will be tonight, or even who will make the runoff. Too many mail-in ballots will be outstanding even to be sure that Vallas will make it, unless he streaks out to a huge lead today. We might, however, see enough to determine whether Lightfoot will get the boot rather than track shoes for the runoff, but that will also be almost certainly up in the air for a couple of weeks as well. I haven’t found the widget that displays the graveyard precincts yet, but I’ll keep looking.

Update, 9 ET: Live results below, but DDHQ is seeing Vallas overperform expectations. They are calling Vallas for the first runoff position, even with the large number of mail-in votes outstanding:

BREAKING: Decision Desk HQ projects Paul Vallas advances to the Chicago Mayoral election runoff scheduled for April 4th

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) March 1, 2023

At the moment, Lightfoot is in third place behind hard-progressive challenger Brandon Johnson by 17,000 votes and four percentage points. There are still a lot of votes to count, but it’s looking like a humiliating night for Lightfoot — and maybe the end of a career.

Update, 10:20 pm: Both DDHQ and Fox News are now calling the second runoff slot for Johnson:

Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has lost her bid for re-election as the race heads to runoff without her after no candidate reached the required 50% vote threshold to be elected. …

Vallas received enough votes to head to the runoff and will face Brandon Johnson on April 4.

It’s the first time in 40 years that Chicago has denied an incumbent re-election — and Lightfoot couldn’t even make the runoff. A total humiliation, and a well-deserved one.