Paul Beaty/AP Photo
Supporters of Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson listen to him speak after he defeated Paul Vallas in the Chicago mayoral runoff election, late Tuesday, April 4, 2023, in Chicago.
Today’s pop quiz: In recent polling, 57 percent of Chicagoans, and 61 percent of Black Chicagoans, called the city unsafe, and in poll after poll, voters said that the prevalence of crime was their top issue. On Tuesday, however, Paul Vallas, who vowed to enlarge the city’s police force to crack down on crime, lost to Brandon Johnson, who had once remarked that he backed defunding the police, who reversed that position while campaigning, but who still said that bettering social and economic conditions and not expanding the police force was the real way to fight crime.
Explain.
For that, we need to go into Chicago’s particulars. We should begin with the actually existing Chicago police, factoring in the beliefs and conduct of a sizable component of the force. Here, the beliefs and conduct of the local cop union—which had endorsed Donald Trump for president and whose leader said he supported the January 6th insurrectionists—doubtless weighed on a number of voters who placed crime atop their list of concerns. So did the conduct, past and present, of a police force with a very long record of racist brutality in its interactions with the city’s Black population. In Black Chicago, which made up more than a third of the voters in the mayoral election, the absence of the police is to be feared in a time of rising crime, but so, too, is the presence of police—at least, when those police are Chicago’s finest. When the local cop union went all in for Vallas, that probably boosted the pro-Johnson vote within the Black electorate—its 61 percent level of fear of crime notwithstanding.
Second, what happened in the third of the city’s population (not, however, its electorate) that’s Latino? Vallas, like Republican-turned-Democrat Rick Caruso in last year’s mayoral contest in Los Angeles, focused much of his campaign on winning over Latino voters, who also listed crime as their chief concern, and had not experienced quite the level of systemic hostility that Chicago Blacks had in their interactions with the police.
There were, to my knowledge, no exit polls in Tuesday’s Chicago elections, but we can look at the votes in each of the city’s 50 wards. One of the major candidates in February’s mayoral primary was Democratic Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, who represented much of the city’s heavily Latino West Side in Congress. García didn’t make it into the top-two runoff, but in February, he did carry seven West Side wards (more precisely, winning pluralities there in a multicandidate race). Both Vallas and Johnson devoted considerable time and resources to those wards, and on Tuesday, Vallas carried four of them while Johnson won the other three. Turnout in all seven was light when set against the turnout levels in the Black South Side and the whiter quadrants of the city.
Many other factors helped determine Tuesday’s outcome, but, as Stan Greenberg has emphasized in a number of Prospect pieces, crime is the issue on which Democrats most frequently stumble, and the role that the politics of crime played in Johnson’s victory does provide some crucial lessons for Democrats. First, Johnson did well by emphasizing the quality of policing and crime prevention over the quantity. He vowed to hire more detectives to deal with the epidemic of unsolved crimes, and he vowed to increase the socioeconomic programs that might reduce crime rates. It was crucial that he walked back his language on defunding the police, but just as crucial that he did not vow, as Vallas did, to simply increase the size of a very problematic force. The split vote in the city’s most Latino wards suggests that Vallas’s and Johnson’s contrasting stances each had supporters therein.
Johnson did not denigrate voters’ fear of crime, nor allege that the media hyped the crime issue, though local TV news has been doing that virtually since its inception. He walked a tightrope on that issue, and the split verdict among Latino voters makes clear that a portion of that electorate doesn’t think a tightrope walk answers their concerns. Still, Johnson’s positioning provides Democrats with a model for navigating what may be their most challenging issue. You want to stop crime? Yes, we need police, but quality matters.
