[The results of last night’s Chicago mayor election were
stunning: former Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson
advanced to an April runoff against neoliberal architect Paul Vallas
— pitting working-class power against austerity. ]
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BRANDON JOHNSON IS HEADING TO CHICAGO’S MAYORAL RUNOFF AS A
CHAMPION OF THE WORKING CLASS  
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Miles Kampf-Lassin
March 1, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The results of last night’s Chicago mayor election were stunning:
former Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson advanced to an
April runoff against neoliberal architect Paul Vallas — pitting
working-class power against austerity. _

Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks to supporters at El
Palais Bu-Sche on the West Side Tuesday night., Anthony
Vazquez/Sun-Times

 

On Tuesday night, the tectonic plates bracing Chicago politics tilted
dramatically. Brandon Johnson, a former rank-and-file member of and
staff organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), secured a spot
in the runoff race for mayor, where he will face conservative
privatizer Paul Vallas on April 4.

Outperforming both incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot and Representative
Jesús “Chuy” García, Johnson pulled off a shocking upset. He ran
an unapologetic left-wing campaign that prioritized taxing the rich to
fund social programs and reimagining public safety to increase
investments in mental health and other city services. At his victory
party last night, Johnson announced
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“The finances of this city belong to the people of the city. So
we’re gonna invest in the people of the city.”

Johnson, who now serves as an elected member of the Cook County Board,
started the race with little name recognition and faced eight
challengers. Just a month ago, Lightfoot scoffed at Johnson’s
candidacy, claim
[[link removed]]ing
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he “is not going to make the runoff” and
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going to be mayor of this city.”

Lightfoot is the first Chicago mayor in forty years to be denied a
second term. She faced opposition
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voters across the political spectrum, including those who supported
her four years ago. After abandoning many of her progressive campaign
promises from 2019 once in office, liberals grew critical of her
administration, while more moderate and conservative residents blamed
her for an increase in crime and other problems afflicting the city.
García, meanwhile, underperformed after being widely expected to beat
Johnson, due in part to having forced
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mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff in 2015. Whether García, who has
governed as a progressive in Congress, now gets behind Johnson’s
mayoral bid remains to be seen.

Throughout his campaign, Johnson made fighting inequality across the
city a central theme, prioritizing working-class communities while
taxing Chicago’s wealthy. He received major backing from the CTU and
United Working Families, a coalition of left-wing organizations and
unions that has become a highly influential player in city politics
over the past decade. He also received support from national groups
like the Working Families Party.

Johnson’s ascent sets up a stark choice for Chicago voters, who will
decide in April whether to embrace a progressive approach to urban
politics or return to the neoliberal model that created many of the
problems now plaguing the city. Crime, in particular, will be central
to the campaign, making the runoff a test case of whether Johnson’s
anti-carceral, pro–social services approach can defeat a traditional
law-and-order, reactionary appeal by Vallas.

A Movement Mayor?

Johnson got his start teaching in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in
2007, first at Jenner Elementary in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood on
the Near North Side and later Westinghouse College Prep on the West
Side. He then joined CTU’s staff alongside its then president Karen
Lewis
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who helped reshape the union into a democratic and militant force that
fought austerity not only in public education but in city politics
generally. In that role, Johnson helped coordinate the historic
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worked to block school privatization schemes, joined hunger strikers
at the shuttered poor and working-class Dyett High School
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for its reopening, and fought to win an elected school board (rather
than one handpicked by the mayor), which finally became
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in 2021.

In 2018, Johnson was elected to the Cook County Board, where he
continues to serve. In office, he has sponso
[[link removed]]red
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Just Housing Amendment, which ended discrimination against the
formerly incarcerated, as well as the Budget for Black Lives
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which helped lead to a multimillion-dollar investment
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violence prevention — including affordable housing, health care, and
other supports — as part of the 2021 Cook County budget. Johnson
also helped to create a program aimed at canceling
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to $1 billion in medical debt, secure legal representation for
immigrant refugees facing deportation, and launch a guaranteed income
pilot that offers
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per month to thousands of low-income residents.

In his mayoral run, Johnson’s stated priorities include
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funding to neighborhood schools, year-round youth employment programs,
reopening the city’s public mental health clinics shuttered by
former mayor Rahm Emanuel, reducing fares on public transit, investing
in new affordable housing, and instituting a “Chicago Green New
Deal” to boost environmental protections. To pay for this agenda,
Johnson proposed
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real estate transfer tax on luxury home sales, a financial transaction
tax, a head tax on large, profitable companies that do business in the
city, and new user fees for high-end commercial districts. According
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Johnson, “The ultra-rich and large corporations continue to benefit
from the subjugation and the isolation of poverty, and my budget plan
speaks to these critical investments.”

When it comes to public safety, which played a central role in the
mayor’s race, Johnson plans
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pass the “Treatment Not Trauma
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ordinance advanced by socialist city council member Rossana Rodriguez
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create a hotline to deal with crisis response, invest in violence
prevention programs, end no-knock warrants, establish a dedicated
office to deal with illegal guns, and end the city’s gang database,
which opponents have claimed
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a class action lawsuit is racially discriminatory.

Taken together, Johnson’s agenda represents a profound break from
the corporate-friendly politics that have dominated Chicago in the
neoliberal era. As the leader of the third-largest city in the
country, a Mayor Johnson could be positioned to usher in a new era of
urban progressivism unseen in recent memory, if he and the forces
supporting him can overcome the massive pushback that capital will
mobilize against him.

In order to win, however, he will first have to overcome both a
well-financed opponent and a political and economic establishment
fully at odds with his platform, especially as it relates to the issue
of policing.

Johnson made it to the runoff — even while competing for liberal
votes against García, who was the standard-bearer of left-wing
politics in the city’s mayoral race two cycles ago — by
articulating a progressive approach to crime that does not include
massively expanding policing. He noted
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the campaign trail that the Chicago Police Department’s budget of
$1.94 billion is “bigger than it’s ever been, and we’re still
not safe.”

Chicago public school teachers and supporters picket in front of the
Chicago Public Schools headquarters, September 11, 2012. (Scott Olson
/ Getty Images)

Many observers have argued that, at a time when crime is a serious
concern for many voters, especially working-class voters, this
approach to public safety will sink left-wing candidates. In Buffalo,
for example, left-wing mayoral candidate India Walton was attacked
repeatedly
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a “defund the police” candidate and defeated. That was not the
case in Chicago last night: voters didn’t run from Johnson’s
criminal-justice proposals.

But in the runoff, Johnson will be under constant bombardment on this
issue. He will have to figure out how to parry Vallas’s
law-and-order attacks in a way that can win the election without
abandoning progressive principles.

Chain Saw Paul

On the other side stands Paul Vallas, the envoy of Chicago’s
corporate class. While he has never held elected office before, Vallas
has managed to do monumental harm to working-class communities across
the country as an appointed administrator of austerity. The bulk of
that damage has been inflicted on Chicago.

Vallas has never been an educator. As he t
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[[link removed]] the _New
York Times_, ”I’m not unfamiliar with the classroom, but my
experience is finance and management.”

Starting in the mid-1980s, Vallas led the Illinois Economic and Fiscal
Commission before being hired by Mayor Richard M. Daley, first as
Chicago’s director of revenue and then, in 1990, as municipal budget
director. In these roles, Vallas was responsible for implementing
austerity policies like doubling parking-ticket collections and
helping balloon the city’s pension debt through creative budgetary
gimmicks, which would then be used as a pretense to cut social
spending programs for successive decades. Vallas also guided the
creation of a slew of new tax increment financing (TIF) districts,
budget instruments intended to aid “blighted” areas, that have
overwhelmingly benefited corporations and wealthy developers.

In 1995, Daley handpicked Vallas to become CEO of CPS, which came
under direct mayoral control that year rather than being run
democratically after a Republican-drafted bill designed to centralize
power over the education system passed the Illinois state legislature.
Vallas’s tenure
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CPS included attacking and vilifying the teachers’ union,
privatizing services like custodial staff, firing educators, and
elevating standardized testing as a primary marker of student and
school achievement, which created a path to close
“underperforming” schools and replace them with charters. In line
with his “business model” for education, Vallas slashed school
budgets and ended key CPS programs. He also paused pension payments
for CPS workers and moved money into a general fund, which led to
disastrous consequences for the school district’s budget that are
still being felt today.

Once Vallas’s promised future of higher test scores and better
education outcomes failed to materialize, he resigned from CPS in 2001
and took a new job in Philadelphia, where he continued
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pursue a privatization agenda as CEO of the school system there until
2007. In this position, he outsourced everything from curriculum
writing to school management while handing over dozens of
“low-performing” schools to private operators. Vallas again
oversaw massive budget deficits and left the system in financial
disarray, leading _Forbes_ magazine to dub him “Chain Saw Paul.”

Chicago mayoral candidate and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul
Vallas leaves Robert Healy Elementary School after casting his ballot,
February 28. (Kamil Krzaczynski / Getty Images)

Vallas then moved to New Orleans, where he was put in charge of the
city’s school system in 2007, after Hurricane Katrina. He quickly
replaced the city’s public schools with charters and us
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data calculations to illustrate supposed success in improving school
performance. During this period, Vallas also toyed
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the idea of running for office back in Chicago — as a Republican.

His next stops were abroad, in Haiti
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where he continued to push a market-fundamentalist approach to both
education and the economy. In 2012, he returned back to the States as
the new superintendent of the school system in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. The role was short-lived, however, as Vallas was
swiftly removed
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his post by a judge for not being qualified, or “properly
credentialed,” for the job. He then joined an ill-fated Democratic
Illinois gubernatorial ticket alongside Pat Quinn, which lost to
Republican billionaire Bruce Rauner in 2014.

The Right’s Candidate

It’s not just Vallas’s past that should concern Chicago voters. He
has run a textbook law-and-order campaign for mayor, stressing the
need for an extreme police crackdown in the city. Endorsed by the
Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge, Vallas has campaigned
alongside its president, John Catanzara, who has voiced open support
for the January 6 rioters and is a strong backer of Donald Trump.
Vallas’s plan calls for hiring 1,200 more cops, in a city where 40
percent of the budget is already earmarked for policing, while violent
crime 

Vallas has made tackling crime the centerpiece of his mayoral run,
citing the need for more police to deal with crimes like carjackings
and shootings, which are overrepresented in areas of the city that
have faced systematic disinvestment. He’s received financial support
from big-money Republican donors and last year spoke
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a fundraiser for a far-right group, Awake Illinois, that traffics in
homophobic and transphobic rhetoric. Vallas has also joined the
right-wing panic against critical race theory, calling
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“dangerous” and saying it “undermines the relationship of
children with their parents.” He has also said
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“Fundamentally, I oppose abortion.”

Vallas’s right-wing connections and record are well-documented, and
so are his close relationships with Chicago’s corporate elite. Major
figures in private equity, venture capitalism, real estate
development, and the health care industry have been strong supporters
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his campaign. If he becomes mayor, he has promised
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take on organized labor — especially the CTU, which has long been a
target of his professional and political career.

Runway to the Runoff

The next five weeks will test whether Johnson’s redistributive
platform and a new approach to public safety can win a majority of
voters who will be overwhelmed with warnings about the dangers he
poses to the status quo. While Johnson has organized labor’s
backing, Vallas will continue to unite organized capital behind him.
And the racial stratification that has marked Chicago for decades will
present challenges for building the type of “rainbow coalition”
necessary to repeat the type of progressive victory achieved by former
mayor Harold Washington in 1983.

If he wins, Johnson will face enormous odds as mayor of a city where
corporations have called the shots under successive administrations.
Forces like the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade would
likely try to stand in the way of his progressive economic and
taxation plans, while other businesses could threaten capital flight.
What’s more, the police union could potentially take actions, such
as “blue flu
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intended to resist reforms and even sabotage his mayorship.

Yet this is a challenge that the Chicago left-progressive movement has
been hoping for and building toward for years. The fact that one of
that movement’s own could soon occupy the fifth floor of city hall
is a testament to the dedicated organizing that countless social
justice advocates have taken up to create a more equitable city.

As Johnson said
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Tuesday night, “A few months ago, they said they didn’t know who I
was. Well, if you didn’t know, now you know. . . . We have shifted
the political dynamics in this city.”

_Miles Kampf-Lassin is the web editor of In These Times
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* chicago
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* Mayoral Race
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* Brandon Johnson
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* pro-union
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