If the significance of an electoral victory can be measured by those who call to congratulate the winner, then the Chicago mayoral race is a big one. Within days of Brandon Johnson’s unlikely defeat of Paul Vallas in a runoff election, on April 4th, he received calls from President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama. A week later, the Democratic National Committee announced that Chicago will host the Party’s 2024 convention.
The attention from powerful Democrats indicates the importance of the race not just to those who live in the city of Chicago but to national politics. In the aftermath of the 2020 uprisings and Presidential contest, the Republican Party went all in on two issues: opposing crime and what they describe as “woke intolerance.” In doing so, they conflated the rise of crime rates during the height of the pandemic with the political outcry throughout that summer. Within this recriminating narrative, Chicago loomed large. For years now, Chicago has been described by Republicans as the quintessential example of big-city chaos. As former President Donald Trump once said, “All over the world they’re talking about Chicago. Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison.”
The Chicago election showed that these debates were happening not just between Democrats and Republicans but within the Democratic Party. The runoff pitted the first chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools, Paul Vallas, who promised to confront the “rampant crisis of unprecedented levels of crime” by hiring more police and prosecuting more misdemeanors, against a former public-school teacher and union organizer, Brandon Johnson, who campaigned to “direct more funds to violence prevention and community safety programming that address the root causes of community violence.” (Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who ran on police reform in 2019 but increased the department’s budget three out of her four years in office, failed to even make the final round.)
Vallas’s campaign was largely financed by Republican donors and, in one interview, he went so far as to say that he was more Republican than Democrat, but big-name Democrats backed him up. Senator Dick Durbin endorsed Vallas in the final days of the campaign, as did Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Twenty of Chicago’s mostly Democratic alderpeople endorsed Vallas. So, surprisingly, did the former South Side congressman and Black Panther Bobby Rush, who, as recently as 2020, described the Chicago police union—which backed Vallas—as “the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness by police in the land.”
Some of Vallas’s Democratic support could be chalked up to the cynical assumption that it’s best to be on the side of the (presumed) winner. But it also reflected the deep disagreements about how to address crime and violence in cities. When Eric Adams won the race for New York City mayor, in 2021, the new common sense was that it was time for Democrats to get tough on crime. When the G.O.P. largely flamed out while running on crime in the midterms, the lesson was that a punitive approach was losing its vigor in national races. But the national leadership of the Democratic Party was reluctant to be seen as embracing the big-government policies that they championed at the height of the pandemic; inevitably, they returned to arguing for more policing.
When Vallas won the first round of the election, in February, with 32.9 per cent of the vote, to Johnson’s 21.6 per cent, the assumption was that his law-and-order message had defeated Lightfoot. Lightfoot was certainly defeated, but, in the precincts where Lightfoot had led in the February election, Johnson went on to receive eighty per cent of the vote, suggesting that those voters were not nearly as enamored of Vallas’s talk about the police. And, indeed, in a poll taken a few weeks before the February election, nearly sixty per cent of voters said that more jobs and greater access to mental-health services might be a better way to address crime. Only twenty-six per cent suggested hiring more police.
It has been easy to dismiss the effects of the protests of 2020, but they continue to reverberate, largely through greater public receptiveness to a nuanced response to violence. Johnson’s victory was foreshadowed in last November’s election, when a referendum on a plan called Treatment Not Trauma passed, with over ninety per cent of the vote, in the three wards where it was on the ballot. The plan would reopen mental-health clinics that were closed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2012. It would also dispatch social workers and emergency medical technicians to mental-health crises, rather than police. Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, a member of the Democratic Socialist Caucus of the Chicago City Council who wrote a bill to create the program, told me, “At its core, the idea was ‘We need to move away from punishment, and in the direction of care.’ And that was sort of, like, common sense.”
Should the city council pass the bill, Johnson has committed to Treatment Not Trauma, saying that he will fund the program. In the heat of the 2020 summer protests, Johnson, along with many others in city government, also embraced the spirit, though not the slogan, of the movement to defund the police. In June of 2020, Johnson, in his role as Cook County commissioner, introduced a nonbinding resolution called Justice for Black Lives, which read, in part, “Cook County shall redirect money from the failed and racist systems of policing, criminalization, and incarceration that have not kept our communities safe, and will instead invest that money in public services not administered by law enforcement that promote community health and safety.” (Johnson, in introducing the proposal, added that it was “not about laying people off, consolidations or closures” but rather “calling for an expansion of government services” in other sectors.) In the political cauldron of 2020, Johnson’s resolution passed almost unanimously, with even one of two Republicans on the board of commissioners voting for it.
Johnson’s comments at the height of the protests put him on the defensive during the campaign. (While running for mayor, he was forced to clarify, “I’m not going to defund the police.”) I asked Rodriguez Sanchez if she thought that Johnson was backing away from earlier statements in favor of defunding the police. She replied, “He tried to avoid the conversation during the debates because of how polarizing it can be. But the reality is that most people knew that his message was about care.” Rodriguez Sanchez, who won her first election in 2019 by thirteen votes, won her reëlection outright, avoiding a runoff. Both the Democratic Socialist Caucus and the progressive caucus have added seats. “The reason why so many of us are winning races is because people want to see something different,” she said. “They know that what we have been doing, like everything that Paul Vallas was proposing, is what got us into this mess.”
When I spoke to Johnson in April, he told me that, for progressives, “this election demonstrated that we don’t have to be afraid of our values, and that we obviously can win on our values.” Johnson’s win was not just about having a superior message to Vallas, though that certainly helped. His relationship to the Chicago Teachers Union and its role as a hub for radical political activism in the city meant that Johnson’s campaign benefitted from the mobilization of wide layers of trade unionists, ordinary activists, and organizers who viewed his candidacy as an opportunity to take political power. They helped him to overcome Vallas’s campaign outspending his by nearly two to one. As Johnson pointed out, “We knocked hundreds of thousands of doors, we probably made at least a million phone calls.”
This makes Chicago a model for progressive campaigns but also one that is difficult to reproduce. When I spoke with Emma Tai, the executive director of United Working Families, an independent political organization that backed Johnson, she said, “This isn’t like operatives who see each other every four years in Iowa or whatever. These are people who have been on picket lines together. We’ve been at jail support together, when people were getting locked up during the uprisings. People who’ve built ward organizations together, people who’ve been kicked out of city-council meetings together. There’s a rootedness in struggle and in a collective politics that animated the field operations.”
One of the main hurdles that the Chicago movement will now have to overcome is how to continue to apply pressure even with one of their own in office. Governing, in and of itself, is conservatizing. It requires collaboration and even compromise with people who do think differently than you or your allies. It inevitably means being pulled in directions that, under any other circumstance, you would resist being pulled in. To quiet his opponents, Johnson has already pledged not to shrink the police budget by “one penny.” He has also hired two city-hall fixtures, Rich Guidice and John Roberson, for the powerful roles of chief of staff and chief operating officer, respectively. Jason Lee, a key adviser to Johnson, recently told the press, “Pragmatism, to me, is essential to any effective progressivism. All pragmatism says is ‘I have a keen understanding of the reality of what it takes to get things done, and I will organize myself and my actions around that so I can be an effective progressive.’ ”
But can Johnson maintain the budget-busting two-billion-dollar allocation to the police and also fund his vision of summer jobs for teen-agers, housing for the unhoused, and free public transit? I asked Asha Ransby-Sporn, a longtime organizer, and prison and police abolitionist who coördinated efforts for Johnson across the South Side, how activists would stay engaged during the Johnson administration. Ransby-Sporn said, “He’s gonna have to manage a city that’s got a lot of problems, and I’m sure that there will be missteps, and I’m sure there will be things that will have to be compromised on, and so there’s going to continue to be a role for organizing and movement.”
Johnson told me that he put stock in the activists who made up his campaign. He said, “I am very conscientious of having quality people who can help run the Johnson administration, who are deeply tethered to our values—without absorbing all of our best and our brightest into the administration. I feel good about the steps that we’ve taken to insure that the movement doesn’t lose a beat, and also that the Johnson administration is ready to govern on Day One.”
One test came even before Johnson’s swearing-in. A little more than a week after the election, crowds of teen-agers assaulted strangers and engaged in general mayhem downtown. Johnson released a statement that described the events as “unacceptable” but also said that “it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” The response provoked bewilderment and vitriol from the political establishment. The Chicago Tribune, which had endorsed Vallas, released an editorial excoriating Johnson, saying that he “saw the weekend violence as a chance to offer a sociological admonishment to those who were frightened.” The business paper Crain’s Chicago also editorialized about the teens’ actions: “They are crimes. They demand an appropriate response.”
The “appropriate response” is more arrests and punishment. But these are the exact practices that have fuelled the movement for Black lives for a decade and that detonated the protests in the summer of 2020. They are also the practices that at least half of Chicago voters rejected in electing Brandon Johnson. ♦
