A brief Corner note to point out that congratulations are in order for Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, now the most unpopular mayor in the history of the city. Yes, a new local poll (from Change Research, and with a solid sample size) is out today with numbers for several local Chicago politicians, and they are grim: The only real question is the extent to which we here hate every single miserable last person or institution in this city and state. Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates (who sends her kid to private school, incidentally) is about as well liked as cholera, with a sparkling -8 approval rating. The Chicago public-school system itself scores -16 net favorability, which at least leaves it better positioned than the CTU (at -21 favorability) and Brandon Johnson’s handpicked new school board (at -34).
Bringing up the rear in this list of utterly unloved political hacks is none other than Mayor Johnson himself, with an approval rating of only 14 percent. And it’s not as if people have failed to form an opinion about him; his disapproval rating is now an incomprehensible 79 percent. Even more hilariously, a full 51 percent of all voters specifically view Johnson “very unfavorably.” I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that the City of Chicago has never had a mayor it despises more universally than Brandon Johnson.
There isn’t much more to add. Of course Johnson is appalling, and of course it’s not just Republicans in Chicago who think so (there are maybe five of us, anyway). But it really is remarkable how civically cursed we have become as a town, probably best embodied by the brutally ironic fact that the most popular politician tested in this poll — former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, the only one with a positive approval rating, in fact — lost to the most unpopular one just last February.