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APRIL 6, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Parsing Chicago

What progressives should learn, and what they shouldn't learn, from
Brandon Johnson's upset victory in the mayoral race

Today's pop quiz: In recent polling
<[link removed]>,
57 percent of Chicagoans, and 61 percent of Black Chicagoans, called the
city unsafe, and in poll after poll, voters said that the prevalence of
crime was their top issue. On Tuesday, however, Paul Vallas, who vowed
to enlarge the city's police force to crack down on crime, lost to
Brandon Johnson, who had once remarked that he backed defunding the
police, who reversed that position while campaigning, but who still said
that bettering social and economic conditions and

**not** expanding the police force was the real way to fight crime.

Explain.

For that, we need to go into Chicago's particulars. We should begin
with the actually existing Chicago police, factoring in the beliefs and
conduct of a sizable component of the force. Here, the beliefs and
conduct of the local cop union-which had endorsed Donald Trump for
president and whose leader said he supported the January 6th
insurrectionists-doubtless weighed on a number of voters who placed
crime atop their list of concerns. So did the conduct, past and present,
of a police force with a very long record of racist brutality in its
interactions with the city's Black population. In Black Chicago, which
made up more than a third of the voters in the mayoral election, the
absence of the police is to be feared in a time of rising crime, but so,
too, is the presence of police-at least, when those police are
Chicago's finest. When the local cop union went all in for Vallas,
that probably boosted the pro-Johnson vote within the Black
electorate-its 61 percent level of fear of crime notwithstanding.

Second, what happened in the third of the city's population (not,
however, its electorate) that's Latino? Vallas, like
Republican-turned-Democrat Rick Caruso in last year's mayoral contest
in Los Angeles, focused much of his campaign on winning over Latino
voters, who also listed crime as their chief concern, and had not
experienced quite the level of systemic hostility that Chicago Blacks
had in their interactions with the police.

There were, to my knowledge, no exit polls in Tuesday's Chicago
elections, but we can look at the votes
<[link removed]>
in each of the city's 50 wards. One of the major candidates in
February's mayoral primary was Democratic Rep. Jesús "Chuy" García,
who represented much of the city's heavily Latino West Side in
Congress. García didn't make it into the top-two runoff, but in
February, he did carry seven West Side wards (more precisely, winning
pluralities there in a multicandidate race). Both Vallas and Johnson
devoted considerable time and resources to those wards, and on Tuesday,
Vallas carried four of them while Johnson won the other three. Turnout
in all seven was light when set against the turnout levels in the Black
South Side and the whiter quadrants of the city.

Many other factors helped determine Tuesday's outcome, but, as Stan
Greenberg has emphasized in a number of

**Prospect** pieces, crime is the issue on which Democrats most
frequently stumble, and the role that the politics of crime played in
Johnson's victory does provide some crucial lessons for Democrats.
First, Johnson did well by emphasizing the quality of policing and crime
prevention over the quantity. He vowed to hire more detectives to deal
with the epidemic of unsolved crimes, and he vowed to increase the
socioeconomic programs that might reduce crime rates. It was crucial
that he walked back his language on defunding the police, but just as
crucial that he did not vow, as Vallas did, to simply increase the size
of a very problematic force. The split vote in the city's most Latino
wards suggests that Vallas's and Johnson's contrasting stances each
had supporters therein.

Johnson did not denigrate voters' fear of crime, nor allege that the
media hyped the crime issue, though local TV news has been doing that
virtually since its inception. He walked a tightrope on that issue, and
the split verdict among Latino voters makes clear that a portion of that
electorate doesn't think a tightrope walk answers their concerns.
Still, Johnson's positioning provides Democrats with a model for
navigating what may be their most challenging issue. You want to stop
crime? Yes, we need police, but quality matters.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>

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<[link removed]>
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