Big city elections provide clues about trends in national politics, the composition and attitudes of Democratic constituency groups, and voters’ responses to emerging matters. Recent examples include the March 2019 primary for mayor of Chicago and the June 2021 Democratic contest at New York City.

The latest example is last week’s nonpartisan mayoral primary at Chicago, in which the 2019 winner, Lori Lightfoot, finished third among five serious candidates, with only 17 percent of the vote. That’s a pathetic showing for an incumbent mayor, and a measure of the impact of a vast increase in murders and violent crimes, such as carjacking, since the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots and demands for defunding the police started in late May 2020.

The crime problem played a similar role in the victory of Mayor Adams, an NYPD veteran, two years ago. The key constituency in Adams’ victory were middle-class Black voters — people with jobs and families in large parts of Brooklyn, southeastern Queens and the north Bronx. They spurned the candidacy of Maya Wiley, a left-wing ally of the incumbent, Mayor de Blasio, and gave next to no support to Kathryn Garcia, the New York Times endorsee who carried affluent white people in Manhattan and fashionable areas of Brooklyn.

Ms. Lightfoot, who is Black, did carry Chicago’s heavily Black South and West Sides. But she topped 50 percent in only three or four precincts — most Black people voted for someone else. And she was almost entirely abandoned by the Lakefront liberals who, four years ago, had formed her primary base of support.

Even though Chicago’s population is now approximately one-third white, one-third Black, and one-third Latino, the candidate who led in early public polls, Representative Chuy Garcia, a Democrat, ran a poor fourth, with just 14 percent of the vote, after being pummeled with attacks by Ms. Lightfoot. He carried but seldom exceeded 50 percent in majority Latino neighborhoods, where turnout was light.

The big winners were the one-time (1995-2001) head of the Chicago school system, Paul Vallas, a strong backer of proactive policing, who led with 33 percent, and a Cook County commissioner and former Chicago Teachers Union organizer, Brandon Johnson, who won 22 percent.

Mr. Vallas, of Greek descent, won enormous majorities in the mostly white bungalow wards in northwest Chicago (you pass through them on the way to O’Hare) and in the city’s southwest fringes. They’re the ancestral home of white voters who supported Mayor Richard Daley in various elections. They are a waning percentage of Chicago voters — a counterpart of white voters from Staten Island and various enclaves in the Bronx and Queens that voted for Mr. Adams in New York’s mayoral race.

Mr. Vallas also carried the Lakefront wards from the South Loop north to Irving Park Road. These are full of Chicago’s most successful white college graduates, professionals in soaring apartments, and beautifully restored and renovated townhouses. Once Republican-leaning, the area is as heavily Democratic as New York’s Upper East Side, but residents appear unnerved to see North Michigan Avenue attacked by shoplifting gangs and carjackers.

Yet college graduate white people are not a united constituency. Precincts north of Irving Park and a mile or two inland from the Lakefront were carried by Mr. Johnson. White voters there are less affluent, younger, interlaced with significant percentages of Latinos and Black people and a few small pockets of Asians.

These areas resemble the Manhattan-adjacent areas of Brooklyn and Queens (Williamsburg, Bushwick, Long Island City, Astoria) that voted for Ms. Wiley in 2021 and elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the House Democratic leadership favorite, Representative Joe Crowley, in 2018. These are the young professionals coping with the overproduction of elites, the graduate student proletariat, and the woke junior employees to whose demands liberal executives and editors seem to capitulate. These are the backers of “Occupy Wall Street” and “Defund the Police.”

Who’s going to win? The first public poll shows Mr. Vallas leading Mr. Johnson, 44 percent to 32 percent. The Cook County Board president, Toni Preckwinkle, Ms. Lightfoot’s runoff opponent in 2019, is backing Mr.  Johnson. Businessman Willie Wilson, who won about 20 percent of Black people’s votes last week, is expected to endorse Mr. Vallas.

A couple of interesting quirks: Mr. Vallas seems to have finished second among Hispanics, and Mr. Johnson appears to have won larger percentages from white people and Latinos than from Black people. Middle-class Black people may decide the result in Chicago just as they did in New York.

Whoever wins, the results show the increasing importance of white college graduates in the Democratic Party. And although it’s been less widely appreciated (but apparent also in 2021 in New York), it reveals the existence of an economic class division within that constituency.

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