Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune via AP
Chicago mayoral candidates Brandon Johnson, left, and Paul Vallas shake hands before the start of a debate at ABC7 studios in downtown Chicago, March 16, 2023.
Chicago is locked in a bitter mayoral contest between the progressive and conservative wings of the Democratic Party. On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls to cast their ballots for two dramatically different candidates: either former Chicago public school teacher and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, supported by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Working Families Party, or Paul Vallas, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, backed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. Chicago FOP president John Catanzara has threatened a mass “exodus” of the city’s police force if Johnson were elected.
Both candidates have built bridges with their own set of local leaders and have drawn national endorsements as well. Earlier this month, Johnson received a crucial endorsement from Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), a mover and shaker in Black Democratic politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently held a get-out-the-vote rally for Johnson. His colleague Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), however, endorsed Vallas, as did a host of Obama-world alumni with deep ties to Chicago, including Arne Duncan, the education secretary during the Obama administration.
Based on recent polling, the race is a dead heat with roughly 12 percent of voters still undecided. The winner will take over from Mayor Lori Lightfoot, eliminated in the first round of the election. Each has pledged to turn around a city plagued by both rising poverty and violent crime.
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Polling shows that Johnson now enjoys the approval of two-thirds of the city’s Black voters. Vallas, who was the front-runner in the first round, maintains a hold on the white vote by the same margin. Those voting blocs appear to be pretty locked in. Vallas also maintains the support he won from the city’s small but growing Asian American population in February’s primary.
Vallas has racked up a number of high-profile endorsements from key Black business, political, and clergy leaders in recent weeks. Those endorsements might just peel off older Black voters to Vallas’s benefit, thus heightening the stakes for Johnson to hold onto his margins elsewhere.
That leaves one more voting bloc that could well determine the outcome: Chicago’s Latinos, who make up roughly a third of the city, which is split almost evenly between them, Blacks, and whites. Over the last ten years, the Latino population surpassed the city’s Black population and is the second-fastest growing racial group in the city. Asian Americans are also expanding their footprint, but as yet constitute just 7 percent of city residents.
Examining the voting patterns of Latinos has become a tea leaf reading exercise in national politics. Local ties and ethnic distinctions within the diverse community still matter more than party affiliations, often bucking the expectations of national pundits. Though solidly Democratic, Latino voters in many parts of the country have trended toward conservative candidates in recent years. In the 2021 New York mayoral race, they helped swing the election to Eric Adams. But in Los Angeles, they tipped the scales for progressive Karen Bass over centrist businessman Rick Caruso.
Examining the voting patterns of Latinos has become a tea leaf reading exercise in national politics.
BOTH JOHNSON AND VALLAS MADE IT THROUGH the hotly contested primary race by winning neighborhoods, primarily in the North Side, that are home to more white and highly educated residents. From its outset, the runoff has been a race to make inroads in the Black and Latino South and West Side of the city, which split most of its vote between Lightfoot and U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García.
Johnson’s campaign is primarily pitching Latino voters on such progressive economic policies as imposing a wealth tax on high-income earners and strengthening public education. To combat Vallas’s tough-on-crime rhetoric, Johnson instead emphasizes greater public investment in social programs. While public safety ranks high as a top priority for Latino residents, so does education, an issue on which Johnson has leaned in, pointing to his record as a former public school teacher.
Still, Johnson remains hampered by his previous, if unclear, comments over police funding. His campaign refutes the widespread allegations that he’s a “defund” candidate, instead championing the slogan “treatment, not trauma.” Despite these efforts, he hasn’t dispelled his anti-police image with a share of the voting public, and his opponents have seized on that opening.
Within the city’s Latino community, Johnson’s campaign has gathered a number of local spokespeople to carry his message. Alderman Andre Vasquez is part of a coalition of city councilmembers backing him. Vasquez sees Johnson’s more ambitious policy agenda as strengthening his campaign with Latino voters, in contrast to Vallas’s more narrow message of getting tough on crime and lowering taxes.
“I’ve seen [Johnson] engage with members of the community to actually hear feedback … He’s got the monopoly on that kind of relationship-building,” Vasquez told the Prospect.
That level of local engagement is crucial for Johnson’s success. His campaign is running against the last vestiges of the city’s political machine harnessed by two generations of Chicago’s Mayor Daleys in the latter half of the 20th century. In 1983, after the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, the junior Daley assembled local Latino leaders under the Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO). By offering city jobs, mostly in sanitation, the HDO handed out favors in exchange for future political support, according to Wilfredo Cruz, a professor at Columbia College Chicago who authored the book Latinos in Chicago: Quest for a Political Voice. In practice, Daley’s HDO was wielded to create a bulwark against what was then the city’s Black voting majority.
By the 2000s, the HDO had disbanded following federal corruption investigations that put several members in prison. Still, the political infrastructure the HDO established continues to carry influence within the Latino community, albeit less than in the HDO’s heyday. What remains will be turning out Vallas voters tomorrow.
In the primary, two of the districts where Johnson performed best were majority-Latino, though they are also gentrifying neighborhoods with younger residents. The challenge for his campaign has been to garner support in Southwest Side neighborhoods predominantly made up of Mexican families, many of whom have lived in the city for generations.
In the primary race, those Southwest neighborhoods swung for García, whose ties run deep in the Chicago Latino community. Even though García endorsed Johnson, the impact has been marginal. Less than a week before Election Day, Vallas led Johnson with Latino voters by 11 points, though more than a quarter remained undecided. Some question whether García has mobilized the full power of his network in those Southwest neighborhoods to rally behind Johnson.
At least until 2020, simplistic narratives about a growing Latino electorate had pigeonholed Hispanic voters as a natural ally for Democrats.
Jaime di Paulo, president of the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview with the Prospect that “just because Congressman García endorsed Brandon Johnson doesn’t mean that all Latinos support him.” According to di Paulo, the Chamber’s endorsement of Vallas over Johnson was an unprecedented move. In reality, it’s predictable that a Chamber of Commerce, regardless of its ethnic affiliation, would support a centrist candidate calling for lower taxes over a liberal lawmaker who wants to raise them. Still, the move also illustrates the antagonism between the city’s teachers union—probably the most potent progressive force in Chicago politics—and its business elite.
The CTU and United Working Families provide Johnson with an unquestionable organizing advantage in the ground game. His foot soldiers have flooded the Latino Southwest Side every bit as much as they have its Black neighborhoods. Johnson’s opponents have tried framing the CTU affiliation with Johnson in a negative light, which may be evidence of union overreach. “I’m a product of public education,” di Paulo said. “But I’m sick of the Chicago Teacher Union … Teachers should be educating, not getting involved in politics and picketing.”
Johnson’s organizing strategy is to bring Latinos into a broader coalition of left-leaning social movements across the city. Rocío García, an organizer for the United Working Families who has been a key figure in Johnson’s Latino outreach, told the Prospect, “Brandon [Johnson] is a movement candidate.”
At least until 2020, simplistic narratives about a growing Latino electorate had pigeonholed Hispanic voters as a natural ally for Democrats, especially for more progressive lawmakers and policy proposals. That characterization undermines the agency of Latino voters and can downplay the issues they care about most, says Chuck Rocha, a Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign adviser. As with any other community, Rocha told the Prospect, candidates must “show up and give [Latinos] something to vote for.” Counting on them to cast protest votes against the other candidate no longer works, if it ever did.
IN SOME RESPECTS, VALLAS IS TRYING to resurrect the old Daley strategy by courting the endorsements of local Latino political and business leaders. Fittingly, Vallas served as budget director for the junior Mayor Daley in the 1990s, while Daley was fashioning the HDO arm of the machine. The campaign has milked this history, and strategy, for all it’s worth. In one Spanish-language ad, Alderwoman Silvana Tabares tells viewers, “[Paul Vallas] is going to make sure that our community is not left behind in the mayor’s office.”
This “left behind” narrative tracks with what Chicago’s Latino business community has said about the race. According to Vallas’s surrogates, he’s an effective reformer with a proven record as an executive of large institutions like the Chicago school system. These claims are undermined by the fact that Vallas repeatedly allowed financial interests to fleece the coffers of the school systems he oversaw, according to a recent report from the Action Center on Race and the Economy.
Despite Vallas’s checkered record, his surrogates tout his strong support for school choice, lax business tax requirements, and heightened police presence. Korina Sanchez, a member of the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told the Prospect, “[Vallas] is criticized for closing down schools, but what happened in the end was he made them some of the best charter schools … That’s really valuable for kids in underprivileged areas.”
Sanchez conceded that it was absurd of the police union to threaten a mass resignation in the case of a Johnson victory. She did argue that Vallas would clearly be better positioned than Johnson to cultivate relationships with the city’s police force. According to Sanchez, “A misconception about Vallas … is that he isn’t looking at the root problems [causing crime], but he actually is … [But] he knows that first and foremost, we need officers on the street.”
In every voting bloc in the city, crime is a top issue, and especially in Latino communities that have experienced upticks in violent offenses such as the carjackings across the Southwest Side of the city. As di Paulo said, “Crime is the topic of the election. It impacts everybody.”
In recent Chicago elections though, crime hasn’t always favored the pro-police approach. The Chicago political consultant Frank Calabrese notes that the 2020 race for Cook County state attorney could be an analogue for gauging the voting blocs in the mayoral election. Kim Foxx, a progressive prosecutor, ran on a criminal justice reform platform and won the race with just over 50 percent of the vote. In the primary, she defeated conservative Democrat Bill Conway even though his campaign carried Latino support in the southwest neighborhoods. Though Foxx’s victory could certainly bode well for Johnson, it’s true that voters look for different qualities in a chief executive than in a district attorney. It’s also true that violent crime has increased significantly since 2020.
“People tend to care more about trash being taken out and quality-of-life issues than ideological ones,” Calabrese said. The prevalence of crime and the quality of schools—both quality-of-life issues par excellence—will weigh on Chicago voters as they choose their mayor tomorrow.
