The Chicago mayoral runoff is now upon us, and there is good news and bad news. The good news is that for practically the first time in modern history, Chicagoans face two authentically competing (albeit Democratic) visions of the future of the city in candidates Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson, with Tuesday’s race teetering on a razor’s edge. We have a real choice on Election Day. The bad news is that it is quite possible we will choose poorly.
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As Tolstoy might have said, “Happy cities are all alike; every unhappy city is unhappy in its own way.” And the current state of the mayor’s race can’t be explained without at least gesturing briefly toward the unique political situation facing the Second City. Chicago’s crime issues have long been legendary; they are, obnoxiously, the only Chicago issue the national conservative media ever seem interested in mentioning. But the crime rate has spiked from already intolerable levels to toxic ones in recent years due to the twin hammer blows of (1) police shooting scandals so outrageous that they reduced Mayor Emanuel’s tenure to ashes and hastened CPD’s collapse into a dysfunctional and demoralized force bleeding veterans and desperate for new recruits; (2) the explosion of lawlessness triggered by the 2020 George Floyd riots.
The Floyd riots hit Chicago especially hard; my own (normally safe) neighborhood had its stores looted by coordinated gangs of thieves, with the police nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, scenes of raised lift bridges barring access to the Chicago Loop (to prevent looters and rioters from gaining access to and further savaging the Magnificent Mile) played out on the news and on Twitter like outtakes from World War Z. Something changed for all of us in the city after that, though the ferment was masked by the city’s disastrous policy reaction to (at that time) the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. With Chicago laboring under self-imposed lockdown restrictions far harsher than those of even many other “blue” cities (city public parks were bolted shut for nearly an entire calendar year) and an accelerating breakdown in civic safety to match, nearly all of us living in the city — left or right — could agree on at least one thing: We were done with Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Lightfoot’s story has been told elsewhere; what matters here is that in 2019 she won an open-seat mayoral race by nudging her way into a runoff slot as a box-checking avatar of every trait beloved by Chicago’s bien-pensant liberal upper-middle class — black, female, lesbian, political outsider, diminutive — and not much else. A mere 17.5 percent of the vote in a massively fractured field was enough to get her into the second round with a vaguely progressive mandate for “reform” in the wake of Rahm Emanuel’s unpopularity. After taking office, she proceeded to alienate literally every constituency in the city. Aldermen, police and firefighters unions, the teachers union . . . you name the special-interest group in Chicago, and Lori Lightfoot found a way to get on their bad side, not just politically but with an added dash of personal charmlessness. They say the dead have been known to vote in Chicago; somehow Mayor Lightfoot managed to offend even them.
In the first round of the mayoral race, Chicago voters therefore quickly dispensed with her. (As an incumbent she received a humiliating 17 percent, slightly less than what she received in the first round of the 2019 race.) Instead, the runoff slots went to Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson. The stark difference between the two men illustrates the divide in Chicago Democratic politics post-Lightfoot as if made to order for the occasion.
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Paul Vallas was head of Chicago Public Schools during the Daley era of the late Nineties, after which he took his “Democratic reformer” act to the troubled school systems of Philadelphia and New Orleans, among other places. Vallas speaks with a notable Chicago accent — there is more than a bit of “Ditka” in his cadences — and harkens back to the era of the Democratic machine that made the city’s politics famous throughout the 20th century. He is running overwhelmingly on the issue of crime in the city and, in that sense, has successfully dictated most of the ground upon which the campaign has been fought. Vallas’s brand is as a “kinder, gentler” law-and-order Democrat, with decades of experience in navigating urban special-interest politics, and a specific background in dealing with the city’s notoriously unruly Chicago Teachers Union.
Vallas has the endorsements of not only the Chicago police union (often a double-edged sword in this city, given police scandals) but of a sheaf of trade unions as well. In short, Paul Vallas is selling himself to voters as the type of Democratic mayor that used to somehow make this notoriously sclerotic city function for the everyday Joe who had to live and work here. An implied “return to normalcy” pitch underlies his entire campaign. He led the first round on his strength with middle-class voters clustered near the heart of the downtown and the near north side and a surprisingly good showing among the city’s working-class Hispanic voters.
Meanwhile his opponent, Brandon Johnson, happens to be a Cook County commissioner, but that is unimportant. He is also black, but that is surprisingly — for Chicago in particular — incidental to this race. Finally, he is a former schoolteacher and a paid lobbyist for the Chicago Teachers Union, which has completely funded his campaign, and this matters. Johnson, given his resume, is properly understood as a creature of the legendarily radical CTU. (To say that he’s “owned” or “bought and paid for” by them is to miss the point entirely: What ingrate child would need to be paid to support his parents?) Johnson’s inextricable association with the CTU is its own double-edged sword. With its outsized strength, singularly combative orientation, and ability to upend the life of the entire city at a moment’s notice — Chicago voters well remember the wildcat teachers’ strike that canceled a week’s worth of classes during the Omicron wave in early 2022 — the CTU is a behemoth in city politics that voters are justifiably wary of being held hostage to.
Johnson has run, more or less, as an activist progressive’s realistic dream candidate, in the sense that he can actually win. He will tell you volubly that he does not (anymore) want to “defund the police” — he simply does not want to increase funding or invest heavily in recruitment and training, instead preferring “community approaches” like increased hiring of social workers. (His opponents have, with some justice, taken to calling this position “defund-lite.”) His proposed method of raising revenue is, via a bundle of taxes, to implement what amounts to a “city surcharge” upon suburban commuters and tourists, which has its downsides for a city primarily known as a tourist destination and business hub. Johnson finished ten points behind Vallas in the first round, but his base is unpersuadable and will vote on Election Day: white upper-class progressives (primarily clustering on the North Shore but fading down all the way into Streeterville), ideological leftists, and of course the powerful teachers’-union vote.
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The endorsements in the race reflect the sharp ideological divide in the Chicago Democratic Party. Notably, they cross predictable racial lines, with former secretary of state Jesse White and Representative Bobby Rush from the South Side endorsing Vallas alongside more expected pickups such as Dick Durbin, whereas fourth-place finisher Representative Chuy Garcia broke with the majority of his Latino constituents to endorse Brandon Johnson. (Al Sharpton and Randi Weingarten also dropped in to endorse Johnson, to give you a sense of the constituencies he is aiming his message at.) The contours of the race are immeasurably complex, but in the broadest sense this is a battle of the establishment Democratic Party against the activist — and, some veteran Chicago Democratic pols will privately grumble to you, nationalized — Left.
It is to both men’s credit that a race as tight as a tick has been run with a minimum of controversy and mudslinging. (The Johnson campaign’s incessant attempts to tie Vallas to Donald Trump in the minds of voters have been done in comically bad faith, but it’s all in the game.) The momentum in the polling is clearly behind Johnson, however. After a 33-22 finish in March with Vallas leading, his poll numbers have consistently topped out around the mid 40s — as expected after banking Willie Wilson’s vote — while Johnson has steadily climbed to meet him there. The most recent poll of the race had the two at 44 percent apiece, an outcome that raised hairs on the backs of necks across Chicago politics.
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Two questions will determine the future of Chicago: (1) how the remaining undecided voters break and (2) where the votes are coming from on Tuesday night.
To the first question, it is notable that white voters are not up for grabs in the runoff. Progressive educated whites have their champion in Johnson, and working-class and business-oriented whites have their guy in Vallas. It is the African-American and Hispanic communities that are genuinely up for grabs here. This might be mildly surprising to non-Chicagoans, given that Johnson is himself black; but culturally he plays more to the priorities of upscale elite progressives than the working class (non-teacher division, that is). Johnson will almost certainly win a supermajority of the black vote, but his softness on policing issues has created a surprising opening for Vallas to shave off a slice of them, and this is the sort of race that could be won on such margins. Meanwhile the city’s Hispanic vote is breaking for Vallas, reflecting a focus on bottom-line issues of public safety and economic security. His ability to turn out those voters will be key to his breaking 50 percent.
This leads us to the second question, and perhaps the decisive one: Who votes? Even though Paul Vallas has been unable to rise above 48 percent in any given poll, he has a hidden strength: The precincts that favored him most strongly in the first round of the race tended to correlate with high turnout. Johnson had his strengths there as well (primarily in well-to-do progressive northside wards), but much more of his vote came from lower-turnout precincts . . . and the ones that gave a significant number of votes to Lightfoot and Garcia in the first round are also predominantly low-turnout precincts as well. This means that both Johnson and Vallas have been scrambling in places where you wouldn’t normally expect to see either an African-American or a white establishmentarian Democratic candidate hunting for votes (and for very different reasons!): in the city’s majority-minority west, northwest, and south sides. If either side can juice turnout in these underperforming precincts, it might decide the ball game.
Chicago faces a critical choice in its mayoral runoff. Regardless of party affiliation, Vallas and Johnson stand for two significantly different visions of the city’s future. Readers of National Review may cavil about how both merely represent differing flavors of leftism, but for those of us who live in (and love) America’s big cities, these choices matter. Mine is obvious, yet beside the point: Tuesday, with the polls balanced on a knife’s-edge in a town carved apart by racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, my primary hope is that citywide turnout in a hotly contested race will at least break 40 percent. Because my greatest fear of all is that far too many in Chicago have, in their resignation, ceased to care about a decision that will determine the future of our families here.