Paul Beaty/AP Photo
Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson celebrates with supporters after defeating Paul Vallas, following the mayoral runoff election, April 4, 2023, in Chicago.
On Tuesday, Chicago elected progressive public school teacher Brandon Johnson as its next mayor over Paul Vallas, the candidate of the Chicago Police Union and Chamber of Commerce, who ran a tough-on-crime campaign and stoked fears about capital flight. But this election was bigger than a skirmish in the perennial moderate/progressive wars, or a signal about the saliency of a tough-on-crime message in big liberal cities. The most progressive Chicago mayor since Harold Washington staked his claim in the backyard of the standard-bearer of the Democratic establishment for the past 15 years: Barack Obama.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Vallas received endorsements from both Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), a close ally to Obama, and Arne Duncan, Obama’s former secretary of education, who penned an op-ed lauding the candidate’s record as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Obamaworld was said to be “coalescing” around Vallas. But in the end, their endorsements proved inconsequential.
Johnson garnered his own set of endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), as well as local fixtures such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But what ultimately won Johnson the day was the ground game his campaign ran across the city, tapping into the infrastructure that the Chicago Teachers Union and Working Families Party—his two main backers—had established over decades. It was a version of the people power that Obama himself rode to the presidency in 2008, now in the hands of a progressive who beat the Obama machine.
Entering the race with low name recognition as a Cook County commissioner, Johnson gained traction with an ambitious policy agenda. He was the only candidate who released a full budget proposal, which promised reinvestments in social programs and public education, more affordable housing, and a wealth tax on financial transactions.
The business community in Chicago, led by Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, predictably hated it. Executives in the downtown center funneled contributions to Vallas’s campaign, which outspent Johnson by 2-to-1 on TV ad spots. They darkly warned of a business exodus if Johnson won.
The ads tried to paint Johnson as an inexperienced radical out of step with the voters’ concerns about public safety. Vallas primarily attacked Johnson for supporting the “defund the police” movement in 2020, which he contrasted by pledging to ramp up police presence on the streets. The head of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police not only stumped for Vallas on the trail, but threatened that thousands of officers wouldn’t show up for work if Johnson won.
In part, Johnson rebuffed these attacks by sidestepping the defund slogan. Instead, the campaign called it “treatment not trauma,” and focused on investment in social programs, while also calling for more detectives rather than police officers to address an abysmal clearance rate for homicides. Chicago already has a greater police presence per block than both New York and Los Angeles. But actually solving crimes has been a problem, and that’s where Johnson focused his energies.
Johnson’s campaign characterized Vallas as a pseudo-Democrat, highlighting past comments declaring his support for the Republican Party. Vallas also took heat for his record as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as well as school superintendent in both Philadelphia and New Orleans, the latter coming right after Hurricane Katrina. In each role, Vallas built a reputation as a fierce charter school advocate and clashed with teachers unions over privatization reforms and shortchanging pension payments.
Johnson’s upset victory will bring the city its most left-wing mayor since the days of Harold Washington, in the 1980s.
Despite representing dramatically different directions for a city plagued by crime and poverty, both candidates shared a similar base of support during the primary election at the end of February. Vallas and Johnson made it into the top two by primarily winning voters on the North Side of the city, which is more affluent, whiter, and highly educated. The weeks leading up to the general election turned into a contest to forge a broader coalition with South Side and West Side voters, which broke for incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot and Rep. Chuy García (D-IL).
That’s where Johnson’s organizing muscle kicked in. The campaign was aided by several different organizations, which divided up canvassing across the city. United Working Families Director Emma Tai referred to this as “a full-court-press strategy,” and it worked. Just in the get-out-the-vote period days before the election, Johnson’s team contacted nearly 500,000 residents across the city.
Johnson also got several key backers down the stretch of the campaign who expanded his profile with South Side voters. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), who helped deliver Joe Biden a victory in South Carolina, gave Johnson an endorsement. Clyburn has proven time and again that his influence with Black voters extends outside of South Carolina; he has intervened in several House primaries, usually on the side of the more moderate candidate. This time, Clyburn helped the progressive Johnson win around 80 percent of the Black vote in Chicago.
Vallas, for his part, got backing from conservative Black leaders in Chicago such as Bobby Rush, who pointed to public-safety concerns. However, Vallas’s main base of support was always with white voters in the downtown area and on the North Side.
Down the stretch, Latino voters on the West Side became a key swing vote that both campaigns vied for. Despite crime concerns, Latino voters also ranked education as one of their top issues.
García, who finished well back in the primary but who has a base of Latino support, backed Johnson, which gave his candidacy much-needed credibility with a certain set of West Side neighborhoods that carry mostly older Mexican families. Johnson won five majority-Latino wards across the city in the general election, including Pilsen and Little Village, both of which García won in the primary.
Johnson’s upset victory will bring the city its most left-wing mayor since the days of its first Black mayor, Harold Washington, in the 1980s. It also poses a tension for national Democrats and the Biden administration, which has tacked toward the center on crime in recent weeks. In early March, President Biden called for the Senate to override a local D.C. crime bill that modestly lowered maximum sentences for carjackings while actually increasing sentences for stacking charges involving multiple criminal offenses.
Though Biden’s strategy is likely targeted at courting moderate suburban voters, Johnson’s win in Chicago shows that the tough-on-crime approach is at least out of step with the core base in blue enclaves like Chicago.
