[In Chicago’s mayoral runoff Tuesday, Paul Vallas’s vision of
budget cuts and law and order lost to Brandon Johnson’s promises to
tax the rich and invest in social services. ]
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BRANDON JOHNSON: A WIN FOR PEOPLE POWER IN CHICAGO  
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Miles Kampf-Lassin
April 5, 2023
Jacobin
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_ In Chicago’s mayoral runoff Tuesday, Paul Vallas’s vision of
budget cuts and law and order lost to Brandon Johnson’s promises to
tax the rich and invest in social services. _

Brandon Johnson celebrates Chicago mayoral victory Tuesday night.,
Jack Grieve

 

On Tuesday night, Chicago’s left scored its biggest victory in
recent memory. Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Public Schools
teacher and union organizer, defeated Paul Vallas, a privatization
zealot
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to become the city’s next mayor.

This outcome was far from presumed. Johnson started the race polling
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just 3 percent. In January, outgoing Chicago mayor Lori
Lightfoot promised
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“Brandon Johnson isn’t going to be mayor of this city.” She was
proven wrong. Next month, he will be sworn in to lead the
third-largest city in the nation, a watershed moment for the
progressive movement that took Johnson over the finish line.

A week ahead of the April 4 election, Johnson rallied alongside Sen.
Bernie Sanders in Chicago, who declared
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“The fundamental issue is: What side are you on? Are you on the side
of working people or are you on the side of the speculators and the
billionaires? And I know which side Brandon is on.”

At his victory party Tuesday night, Johnson echoed this sentiment
saying, “Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in
all of its people… a city where no one is too poor to live.
There’s more than enough for everyone in the city of Chicago.”

Such rhetoric is a reflection of the agenda that undergirded
Johnson’s campaign: investments in social spending programs such as
affordable housing, year-round youth employment, mental health
supports and other alternatives to traditional policing, fully funded
public schools, and reduced public transit fares. To fund this suite
of progressive policies, Johnson promised to tax the rich and large
corporations.

This platform is in line with the vision of downward wealth
redistribution championed by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which
has become an influential player in city politics. One of the most
militant and democratic teachers union locals in the country, CTU has
run a series of successful electoral campaigns sending allies into
office who share a left-wing platform, from the Chicago City Council
to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. But Johnson’s mayoral win
represents the most significant feat yet, putting a former CTU
organizer on City Hall’s fifth floor.

Johnson’s stunning win was powered by an intensive ground game run
by grassroots organizations in alliance with labor unions, especially
CTU. United Working Families, a coalition of such groups, was
instrumental in turning out the vote for Johnson, knocking on over
half a million doors across every ward in the city and recruiting
thousands of volunteers.

CTU’s central role in the campaign was recognized Tuesday as the
union’s president, Stacy Davis Gates, introduced Johnson before he
spoke. Davis Gates honored
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legacy of the late former CTU president Karen Lewis
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who helped shape the union into the political powerhouse that it has
become.

“You don’t have a Brandon Johnson without a Karen Lewis,” Davis
Gates said. “She transformed the political debate in our city. She
showed Chicagoans how to stand up and demand what their schools and
their city need and deserve. Tonight affirms Karen’s dream of a city
that works for us all, not just a privileged few.”

The CTU was also one of Johnson’s top funders, alongside its parent
union the American Federation of Teachers. Across the city, the
progressive wing of organized labor got behind Johnson, an
acknowledgement of the ardently pro-union campaign he ran and his long
background supporting workers’ rights.

Vallas’s campaign, meanwhile, was bankrolled by many of the
right-wing forces that have long sought to crush labor unions and
strengthen corporate power. In addition to receiving
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$1 million in donations from Donald Trump donors, Vallas also had the
backing of a PAC founded by Betsy DeVos
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Trump’s education secretary who pursued an anti–public school
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in office. He was similarly funded by employees of the hedge fund
Citadel, whose CEO, Ken Griffin, has been a longtime GOP donor and
came out strongly for Vallas during the race.

The level of big business financing allowed Vallas to outspend
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two-to-one, blanketing the airwaves with ads painting his opponent as
a dangerous threat who would compromise public safety.

None of this is surprising. When Vallas was CEO of the school system
in Chicago in the 1990s, he pushed a corporate reform approach to
education, privatizing services, opening the door to charters
replacing public schools, and undermining teachers’ unions. He did
the same when running school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans,
and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

In addition to ushering in privatization schemes in Chicago, Vallas
also introduced new standardized testing mandates which were later
used as a pretext to close underperforming schools and replace them
with charters. He targeted the CTU and fired educators across the city
— actions which would later be repeated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the
2010s.

Vallas ran for mayor on a conservative “law and order” platform,
pledging to “take the handcuffs” off of cops, instituting a
crackdown while pushing
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criminalize dissent. He has close ties to the Chicago Fraternal Order
of Police (FOP), which endorsed him and whose president, John
Catanzara, is a vocal supporter of former president Trump and backs
the January 6 rioters. Last month, Catanzara predicted
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resignations of police officers and “blood in the streets” if
Vallas lost, an indication of the challenges Mayor Johnson will likely
face when dealing with law enforcement union leadership.

In recent years, Vallas cozied up to the far right, speaking
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a fundraiser for Awake Illinois, which pushes homophobic and
transphobic policies and calling
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Race Theory “dangerous.” This right turn wasn’t all that new: in
2009 after Barack Obama won the presidency, Vallas publicly claimed
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“I’m more of a Republican than a Democrat now… if I ran for
public office, then I would be running as a Republican.”

But while Vallas courted the Right in the mayoral race, much of his
record and agenda fits comfortably with the pro-corporate Democratic
politics that has dominated the party for decades. It’s this
neoliberal, Third Way doctrine that suffered the clearest defeat on
Tuesday. Voters rejected a candidate in Vallas who represented tepid
centrism and instead chose Johnson, a Bernie Sanders–style left
challenger who argued for soaking the ultra wealthy to lift up the
working class.

Johnson will face significant challenges in office as he seeks to
implement policies that the business interests that have long
controlled decision making in the city will find disagreeable.
Corporations will use their lobbying power to resist taxation plans,
and some could threaten to leave Chicago altogether. And as the
FOP’s Catanzara’s warning implies, the police union could take
steps to undermine the Johnson administration.

But despite deep-pocketed interests throwing everything they had at
Johnson to prevent him and the social movements he’s backed by from
taking power, it didn’t work. He will be the next mayor. As Johnson
said Tuesday night, “Tonight is just the beginning. We have ushered
in a new chapter in the history of our city… Let’s take this bold
progressive vision throughout these United States of America.”

* Brandon Johnson
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* Chicago Mayoral Elections
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* progressive agenda
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