Overcoming a huge fundraising gap, accusations that he would “defund” the police and public polls predicting his defeat, progressive Brandon Johnson, Cook County commissioner and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, won a hotly contested race for mayor of Chicago, the third largest city in the country.
Johnson, a black leftist and former school teacher, defeated former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, a white technocrat in the conservative corner of the contemporary Democratic coalition.
Johnson’s victory in one of the starkest ideological proxy battles in recent municipal political history is a historic achievement for remaining activists that could have a ripple effect across the county. His importance to intra-Democratic Party politics is rivaled only by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was shocked when Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.
That Johnson won amid rising crime and economic uncertainty that has strengthened the Democratic Party’s moderate wing for the past three years is even more surprising.
In comments to supporters on Tuesday night, Johnson extended an olive branch to Vallas’ voters, promising to run for mayor as well. But he made it clear that he won’t let his efforts to make Chicago a more just and livable city stop.
“We’re not going to let old politics change us,” Johnson said.
“We’re building a better, stronger, safer Chicago. We’re doing it together,” he continued. “This is a multicultural, multi-generational movement that has truly captured the imagination not only of the city of Chicago but of the entire world.”
Since the start of the runoff, Vallas has raised about $13 million to Johnson’s $7 million. Even that level of cash would not be possible for Johnson without the support of the Chicago Teachers Union and other labor organizations that are responsible for 90% of the money raised during the entire campaign.
Johnson’s candidacy is on the culmination of a decade organizations and political institutions by the CTU. His victory over Vallas, an outspoken supporter of charter schools and critic of the CTU, also cemented a shift in education policy on the left that had been gaining strength around the same time.
“CTU’s influence in politics was crucial to his victory,” said Tom Bowen, a Chicago Democratic consultant who advised Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.
Vallas, endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, the main police union in the city, beat Johnson relentlessly for his sympathy for the call to “defund the police” in 2020. Johnson explained the slogan as a desire to shift funds from law enforcement to social. programs that attack cause the root of crime.
However, as a mayoral candidate, Johnson promised not to cut police spending and issued a rebuttal in the words that he doubted he had ever accepted a “police defund” in the first place.
But unlike Vallas, Johnson did not promise to increase police funding or fill the 1,600-man backlog facing the Chicago Police Department relative to 2019 staffing levels.
He instead proposed diverting a wasteful or unnecessary portion of the police budget to add 200 more detectives to the police force through internal promotions.
Johnson also raised taxes on businesses and wealthy households to fund a number of social programs that he considered the best route to reducing crime in the long term. Key parts of his agenda include reopening shuttered mental health clinics, doubling the city’s summer job program for youth and saving city taxpayers more money.
The son of a Christian pastor from Elgin, Illinois, Johnson worked for a good speech to attract the attention of Chicagoans. Anyone keeping up with the race knows that Johnson plans to “invest in people.”
“If we’re going to get a better, stronger, safer Chicago, we have to do what America’s safe cities do, and that’s invest in people,” Johnson said in a televised debate against Vallas on March 8.
The message resonated, including among the older, more moderate black voters whom Vallas loved.
LaTrell Rush, a resident of the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, told HuffPost that his priorities for mayor would be to “stop the killing” and provide better resources for people with mental illness.
“Paul – I don’t connect with his vibes,” Rush said. “With Brandon, my vibe connects.
Arjette James-Wallace, a retired emergency medical technician from West Englewood, left the room as Vallas addressed the congregation of New Beginnings Church on March 26. The pastor of the church, Rev. Corey Brooks, has endorsed Vallas, but James-Wallace supports it. Johnson, which he described as “less than two trophies.”
James-Wallace likes Johnson’s plan to fund mental health clinics and dislikes Vallas’ hysteria about crime, which she says shows white racial bias. “When it started affecting people of color, they wanted to get the word out,” he said.
Other voters who support Johnson simply don’t believe he will repeal the police, even if he wants to do so.
“I don’t think Brandon will do it,” said Ahmed Hattab, an IT specialist who lives in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side. “It’s not easy to do.”
Hattab blames what he sees as the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement for making police afraid to do their jobs. But his 17-year-old daughter, Jenin, who accompanied him to the polls, helped convince her father to support Johnson.
“He’s the kind of person who starts from the bottom,” Hattab said. “And they work with the school.”
Johnson is credited with the success of Lightfoot, the city’s first black female mayor and first gay mayor.
Nam Y. Hu/Associated Press
Amid continued criticism from the left and right and public outcry over the crime rate, Lightfoot narrowly missed out on the first round of direct elections in Chicago on February 28.
Johnson’s rise may have been due to a miscalculation by Lightfoot. The incumbent mayor largely ignored Johnson during the first round, focusing more on resources than cutting Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), who ended up in fourth place.
In the runoff against Vallas, Johnson consolidated the support he had among young and white progressive voters in the north of the city while increasing his coalition in the majority-Black areas of the South and West where Lightfoot was dominant in February.
To achieve the latter, Johnson succeeded in framing the race as a choice between the heirs of the black civil rights movement and the reactionary Republicans who became “Democrats for life.” He enlisted the support of local Black icons like Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle and the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., along with national Black surrogates like Rev. Al Sharpton and House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn (D.C.).
Vallas’ sarcastic comments on conservative talk shows — from his 2009 admission that he’s “more of a Republican than a Democrat” to more recent comments disparaging former President Barack Obama — made Johnson’s job easier. And while Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) is out of the race, Vallas’ criticism of Pritzker’s management regarding the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted Pritzker’s team to slide on Vallas.
Johnson and Vallas are “both candidates who come from their base, and they’re both flawed candidates,” Bowen said. “The winner is the one who covers the handicap the most.”
As hard as the campaign was for Johnson, the challenges that await him at City Hall may be even more daunting. He inherits the same public safety crisis and fiscal challenges as Lightfoot and may face more political opposition. The Chicago City Council, which is expected to be more moderate than Johnson, recently voted to expand its powers against the mayor.
In addition, the Fraternal Order of Police and major business groups have signaled their disapproval of Johnson’s agenda.
Bowen predicted that forces beyond Johnson’s control would force him to let down his base and rule more from the center.
“The strange thing about Chicago politics is that the extreme left hates you and the extreme right hates you, which automatically forces you to the center,” he said.
But some of Johnson’s allies have indicated they are aware of the limits Johnson will face in office.
“People will believe that if Brandon becomes mayor, miraculously, a generation of underfunding, a generation of segregation, a generation of fair school funding applications will end,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of Chicago Teachers. Union, told HuffPost in an interview in late March. “That’s not going to happen.”
In that way, mayor Johnson is a “starting point” rather than an “ending point,” he added.