Paul Beaty/AP Photo
Chicago mayoral candidate Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson addresses his supporters, February 28, 2023, in Chicago.
For most of Chicago’s history, there was no such thing as an open competitive primary race. Backroom deals preordained the results of elections, which were more Kabuki theater than the democratic process at work. But in contrast to the machine era, a crowded field of nine candidates vied for the mayoralty this year, with numerous legitimate contenders going into Election Day. It’s a far cry from the past, especially for a city where residents talk about the long shadow cast by the Daley dynasty that still hangs over today’s politics.
Once all the votes are counted, incumbent Lori Lightfoot will go down as the first Chicago boss to lose re-election in nearly 40 years. Lightfoot will hand the keys over to either Paul Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and top vote-getter, or Brandon Johnson, a teacher and Cook County Board commissioner who pulled off a major upset victory. With nobody hitting 50 percent of the vote, these two will square off on April 4th in a general-election runoff, representing dramatically different visions for the city. Vallas will run a tough-on-crime campaign, promising to revitalize the downtown business center. Johnson has made the progressive case for revamping education and anti-poverty measures to turn the city around.
“What our victory says is that presenting real political alternatives speaks to voters who see that there are better, more humane ways to run a city than what the status quo is right now,” said Emma Tai, executive director for United Working Families in Chicago, a major backer of Johnson’s.
LIGHTFOOT’S TENURE IN OFFICE was dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has tanked the approval ratings of many mayors who had to steer big cities through the upheaval of those years. Both Eric Garcetti and Bill de Blasio bowed out of office amidst widespread voter dissatisfaction, while in San Francisco, only a quarter of voters have confidence in Mayor London Breed, elected the same year as Lightfoot.
After winning in a landslide in 2019, Lightfoot championed some progressive measures, like anti-corruption reforms for the city council and a $15-an-hour minimum wage. But she was not selective about picking fights with the city’s power centers, rankling both the downtown business community and outside reformers. In several high-profile incidents, Lightfoot openly clashed with the Chicago police union over mandated vaccinations for officers, while at the same time she fought the Chicago Teachers Union about returning students and teachers to in-person learning. With both powerful interests opposing her, Lightfoot ended up in no-man’s-land come time for re-election.
Lightfoot took heat for the city’s high crime rates, and for mishandling the federal consent decree on the Chicago police force after the shooting death of Laquan McDonald.
Lightfoot’s collapse may be historic, but she brought down Congressman Chuy García along with her. García landed in fourth place behind Lightfoot, but when he entered the race last November, he was the front-runner. He had a high level of name recognition after nearly beating former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015. Even in early January, many citywide polls showed García in front.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, right, waves to supporters after she conceded the election in the mayoral race, February 28, 2023, in Chicago.
Lightfoot spent a good portion of her campaign fortune going after García for ties to corrupt officials like former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, as well as contributions his congressional campaign received in 2022 from disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Despite the fact that Lightfoot herself sought to secure FTX’s headquarters in Chicago this past May, the attacks worked, effectively chipping away at García’s progressive bona fides and record as a reformer. García plummeted in the polls and never recovered.
Some of García’s wounds were self-inflicted. His campaign staff was beset by internal discord, and he missed a handful of mayoral debates over the course of the race. Some questioned his interest in campaigning, rather than resting on his prior reputation.
García also chose to stake out a moderate-to-tough stance on crime issues, calling for a greater police presence on the streets in a public-safety proposal. Even though crime was a top issue for Chicago voters, García misread the moment. By hitting Lightfoot on public safety, he shed progressive support and ceded the narrative to the more conservative Paul Vallas. García’s main base of support was the Latino vote on the West Side of the city. In polling leading up the election, many of those Latino voters were peeling off to Vallas. By making the election about crime, the strategy backfired.
BRANDON JOHNSON TOOK a different approach. After polling at just 3 percent in November, Johnson surged in the final weeks of the campaign by consolidating the progressive vote that García abandoned, especially in the northern Logan and Lincoln Square neighborhoods. An unabashedly left-wing candidate with long-standing labor ties, Johnson bucked much of the conventional wisdom by not making crime the central focus. Instead, he ran on a slogan of “treatment not trauma” to frame his public-safety policies, emphasizing investing in mental health facilities and social-work units instead of doubling down on policing.
City politicos were skeptical about the strategy, but by the end of the race even veteran insiders were singing a different tune.
“You have to give him credit, he never equivocated and stayed on message the entire race by saying we should use city money wisely and not sink it in a money pit,” said David Orr, a former Cook County clerk and political adviser.
While other candidates hit Lightfoot on policing reforms, Johnson attacked her administration for refusing to reopen mental health clinics closed under Emanuel, which she’d campaigned on reviving. The shuttered clinics picked up significant traction in the mayoral debates, and Johnson cornered it as his signature issue.
His campaign also released a full budget proposal, unlike the other candidates. The proposal included a tax-the-rich plan to increase funding to social services, mainly education and affordable housing. Some officials saw it as needlessly opening up his campaign to scrutiny. But ultimately, the ambitious set of policies—likely the most progressive agenda for a Chicago mayoral hopeful since Harold Washington—helped Johnson, who started the race with little name recognition, stand out in a crowded field.
What carried the day for Johnson, though, was the support of the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, the Working Families Party, and labor unions like SEIU Local 73 health care workers. Those endorsements handed Johnson’s campaign an organizing infrastructure that union leaders had built up for years. According to the United Working Families Party, over a thousand volunteers participated in get-out-the-vote activities just on Election Day. By the end of the race, the campaign door-knocked or otherwise contacted over 250,000 residents in the city.
“No other candidate rallied as many people as we did to go out into the field, and that resonated with voters,” said Tai.
Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo
Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas smiles as he speaks at his election night event in Chicago, February 28, 2023.
Johnson needed more of an active presence on the ground compared to the other candidates. García’s national profile and ties to the West Side secured a base of support. Lightfoot as the incumbent had immediate name recognition. Johnson, meanwhile, was a teacher at a public school that Richard M. Daley’s administration tried to shut down in a round of closures and budget cuts that ramped up during Emanuel’s tenure. That’s when he got involved in CTU politics, worked his way up the ladder, and then served as a Cook County commissioner starting in 2018.
CTU organizing helped deliver Johnson’s path to the runoff, but was also a source of controversy during the race. Though the union still maintains broad popularity, its reputation took a hit after the 2022 strike in defiance of a city plan to return students to in-person learning. The strike came up frequently during the campaign. In a much-derided debate moment, Johnson said he didn’t disagree with the CTU on any issue when asked by the moderator. But in the end, the CTU’s strong base of support proved more formidable politically than the backlash it provoked.
JOHNSON’S ORGANIZING POWER will square off against Paul Vallas, backed by the downtown business elite and the Chicago police union. Vallas served as city budget director under Daley in the early 1990s, and later became the chief executive officer for the Chicago public-school system. He’s tried to run for public office several times unsuccessfully, most recently in the 2019 mayoral race. High crime rates have been his calling card, with some comparing his positioning in the race to that of Mayor Eric Adams in New York City, who rode a crime panic to victory. Vallas also wants to slash taxes for businesses to try and revive the still largely vacant downtown business center, and bring back companies that left during Lightfoot’s tenure, notably Citadel and Boeing.
Vallas’s backing from police caused a stir right before the election when Florida governor and 2024 GOP hopeful Ron DeSantis came to town. Seen as a warning shot to Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, DeSantis made a much-publicized visit to a Chicago suburb to heap praise on the local police union. That local chapter happens to be endorsing Vallas, and DeSantis’s visit opened him up to a round of attacks in the heavily blue city. The visit played into Vallas’s questionable credentials as a long-standing Democrat. In a 2009 interview, Vallas said he’s “more of a Republican than a Democrat now” and also aired his apprehensions about abortion rights for religious reasons.
The general election will be a showdown between the progressive and corporate wings of the party. Though politically polar opposites, Vallas and Johnson both drew their main base of support from the city wards on the north side of town. The northern neighborhoods are mostly white, higher-income, and more highly educated, which is to be expected for a primary election that tends to only turn out the most engaged voters. But it poses a challenge for the general election as to which candidate can make inroads in the heavily Latino West Side, which went to García, and the city’s historically Black South Side, which broke for Lightfoot.
The Chicago machine has often courted the support of Latino neighborhoods in order to dilute the Black vote, which was about 40 percent of the city but has dropped recently. In the ’90s, the young Richard Daley formed the Hispanic Democratic Organization, tasked to hand out jobs for political favors in Hispanic parts of town. The legacy of that strategy still lingers, and some analysts expect pockets of the West Side to shift to Vallas.
Conventional wisdom would say that the South Side would likely go to Johnson, though that can’t necessarily be taken for granted. Crime still ranks as a top priority in many Black neighborhoods, which have borne the brunt of the post-pandemic spike in murders. Willie Wilson, who placed fifth in the race, embodied those fears. He mostly won church-going Black residents on the South Side by taking an exceptionally hard line on crime and advocating for the police to hunt criminal suspects down “like rabbits.” Wilson’s appeal is limited, but his support could tilt to Vallas.
The Johnson campaign plans to deploy its organizing force into South Side neighborhoods to build momentum. In other words, they’re not taking anything for granted.
