The Chicago mayoral election is today! Can you feel the excitement? Yes, we here in the Windy City, on a terminal February day in an off-off-year — the “Why are we even doing this, in this weather?” timing chosen quite by design — have been appointed to decide the fate of incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot (D — but why even bother clarifying), who is running for reelection as Chicago mayors inevitably tend to do.

The topline takeaway is this: It is extremely possible that Lightfoot will be ejected from office tonight. It’s not a guarantee, because (1) polling is so variable nowadays, especially in local races; (2) all the candidates have strengths and weaknesses that will appeal to various voter demographics in a city famously divided by them; and (3) almost everyone is triangulating their final vote. If that were to happen, it wouldn’t exactly be historic in Chicago history — it happened in 1983, more about which below — but it would be rather notable as a marker in the breakdown of Democratic machine politics within big cities, among which there are few bigger than Chicago.

And I do think it’s over for her, either tonight or in the runoff: Whether you’re a committed Leftist who thinks Lori Lightfoot has let you down by fighting the various unions and not defunding the police — while still alienating them; this is classic Lightfoot — or you’re just some guy with a wife and a kid worried about getting mugged or having masks forcibly tied to your weeping son’s face by agents of the state, you’re done with Lori. Votes that were once hers four years ago, when she ran as a “reform” candidate in the wake of Rahm Emanuel, are now going to split on the one hand to Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (the “Left” option) and Paul Vallas (the “non-Left” option . . . there is no conservative option). The actual hardest Left option on the ballot today with any plausible chance is Brandon Johnson, the African-American Cook County commissioner who has the endorsement of the (legendarily radical-activist) Chicago Teacher’s Union. But unless public polling has been a brutal lie, he has faded from the pack in what is now a three-person dance for two remaining musical chairs.

You can’t explain how Lightfoot might not even earn one of those two chairs without clarifying the structure of the race: After 1999, Chicago altered its mayoral election from the standard “party primary, then general election” format (familiar to all) to an all-party “jungle primary” free-for-all where the race was won by any candidate in the first round whose vote tally is 50 percent plus one, but which goes to a top-two runoff otherwise. It’s a virtuous reform because, and let’s not kid ourselves here, Chicago is an ultra-Democratic machine city. Your choices for councilman, mayor, dogcatcher, surly officious employee behind the plexiglass at the DMV . . . they’re all registered Democrats. Thus, a jungle primary recognizes the simple reality that when the only realistic ideological choice is between one shade of Democrat and another shade of Democrat (no Republican could ever win, because pace Jussie, this ain’t exactly “MAGA country”), it’s better for those of us who actually have to live here to have two bites at the apple rather than just one.

Which brings us to the excitement of today’s election, guaranteed (no need to qualify here) to go an April runoff. Assuming the three-person scrum depicted in polling is correct, there are a limited number of scenarios to game out. If Lightfoot somehow manages to survive to a runoff, then regardless of whether the challenge comes from her relative left (Garcia) or relative right (Vallas), I still peg her as losing for the simple reason that people do not like Lori Lightfoot and wish more than anything else to replace her. She would win against Brandon Johnson, which is the precise reason why Johnson has faded in the polls, in my opinion: Voters just want her out, and aren’t going to chance it with a guy who broadcasts far too many “Bernie Sanders” vibes for a city like Chicago. The Garcia vs. Vallas runoff scenario would be a fascinating culture and racial-politics battle, and (if it comes to pass, I suspect it will) Chicago will suddenly be interesting to the national media again. You’ll hear more about that in the future when and if it comes.

I fear my certainty that Lori Lightfoot will be turfed out tonight. I am famously poor at political predictions, and as a longtime Chicagoan, it is difficult to separate my personal contempt from her from my assessment of her political chances. If it should come to pass, the mainstream media will inevitably reach for a “local news hook” and try to tie her to Jane Byrne, the Chicago mayor who was booted from office exactly 40 years ago (in 1983) by Harold Washington, Jr.

But the connections they will draw between Byrne and Lightfoot (“pathbreaking female mayors” rejected by the city electorate, i.e. the bigoted intersectionality backlash narrative) are predictable, and predictably miss the more salient commonality: Both rode into power as “reformist” mayors and then promptly, in their attempted acts of reform, ran sidewall into the massive barriers to structural change posed by all those entrenched economic interests they shared a party with. On top of that, Lightfoot is by all accounts simply an unpleasant human being to deal with personally. It doesn’t help around here, in a gladhanding, palm-greasing town quite different in its cultural folkways from New York City or Los Angeles.

The simple fact that Chicago’s mayor is desperately hoping (and is the underdog) to even make it to a top-two runoff is as much of a verdict as could ever be empirically delivered upon her tenure. The fact that she might be preferable to the person who takes her place, despite all that? Well that’s what makes Chicago such a toddlin’ town.