CHICAGO — After a lengthy and highly charged election season, Chicago voters have gone to the polls to choose between Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas for mayor.
Johnson campaigned on themes of racial justice and uplifting the working class, while Vallas ran with a one-track message to restore public safety in a city he portrayed as desperately needing rescue after four years of crises.
Early returns suggested an extremely close race, with only a few hundred votes separating the foes with nearly 90% of precincts reporting unofficial totals.
Johnson, a 47-year-old longtime Chicago Teachers Union leader, announced his candidacy for mayor in October by the Jenner Academy school building, where he started his career in education at the mostly Black elementary school that had served children who lived in the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing complex next door.
Vallas, 69, threw his hat into the ring last summer with a pitch that he could restore competency at City Hall and morale to a “degraded” police department. It was his fourth bid for elected office and the first where he was successful. In 2019, Vallas ran for Chicago mayor but finished an embarrassing ninth in a historic field of 14 candidates.
The affable but gutsy Johnson first won public office in 2018 when he defeated Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, who earned the ire of organized labor by voting against Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s so-called “pop tax.” There, he largely heeded Preckwinkle’s direction while passing some legislation of his own that focused on criminal justice. None of that work earned him substantial name recognition among Chicagoans during the early months of the race.
The wonkish Vallas served in city government during the 1990s as budget director, then CEO of CPS. From there, he continued on to lead school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Connecticut, earning a mixed record as a tough reformer undaunted by the challenges of the most struggling education systems — but also willing to punish low-performing schools and teachers.
When Vallas’ last run for office four years ago fizzled, it seemed his final chapter in politics was being penned. During his foray in this election cycle, he was at most seen as a middle-of-the-pack contender the first several months.
However, Vallas’ focus on crime and public safety caught fire and he emerged as the top vote-getter in the city’s Feb. 28 election in a divided nine-candidate field where he was also the only white hopeful.
Despite formidable progressive labor support, Johnson entered the race as an underdog and was polling as low as 3% in December. Vallas emerged as the top vote-getter in the city’s Feb. 28 election after focusing on crime and public safety in a divided nine-candidate field where he was also the only white hopeful.
He won 33% of the vote to Johnson’s 22%, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot only received 17% of the vote en route to the first reelection defeat of a Chicago mayor since Jane Byrne lost her bid for a second term in 1983. So began a runoff campaign in which the two extreme poles of a once-crowded race jockeyed for the middle.
The race has been closely watched around the country, as many poured their hopes and anxieties about the direction of the Democratic Party into the race between Vallas, the more conservative option, and Chicago’s most leftist finalist for mayor in decades with Johnson.
Vallas unsuccessfully ran for governor in the 2002 Democratic primary against Rod Blagojevich, lieutenant governor in 2014 on the ticket that lost to Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, and mayor in 2019. While his first two runs were competitive, his 2019 bid was a major failure that led to doubts over his viability.
As the 2023 election season got underway, many in the city’s white business community, as well as within North Side and downtown political establishments, actively searched for a candidate but never coalesced behind anyone individually.
Some attempted to recruit former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, downtown Alderman Brian Hopkins, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley and Lakeview Alderman Tom Tunney, but all four and others declined to run.
As a CTU organizer, Johnson was an instrumental force in crafting the union’s brash political strategy that earned the group a formidable reputation as a progressive powerhouse but also raised criticisms from opponents that Chicago doesn’t need a mayor beholden to CTU. As his candidacy nonetheless gained momentum, eventually propelling him into the runoff, those attacks snowballed with Vallas trying to paint him as too radical.
The son of pastors who also were foster parents, Johnson grew up in northwest suburban Elgin and frequently talks of his modest upbringing in which he shared a bathroom with nine siblings, fought over the “Thanksgiving menu” and ran an extension cord out the window when electricity was scarce.
The next mayor will succeed Lightfoot — Chicago’s third Black mayor, the second woman and first openly gay chief executive in City Hall. She was ushered into office on a rousing message of reform, but the COVID-19 pandemic, crime wave and recurring political feuds of her own making made her a one-term mayor.
The city’s first Black mayor was Harold Washington, who was elected in 1983 and again in 1987 before he died in office later that year. Eugene Sawyer, the city’s second Black mayor, was appointed to serve out Washington’s term until a 1989 special election, when he lost to Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Vallas and Johnson entered the runoff after knocking out Lightfoot and six other candidates seeking City Hall’s top job in the first round of voting on Feb. 28. The Chicago police union-backed Vallas received support from the more conservative bungalow belts on the Northwest and Southwest sides as well as downtown voters while Johnson, the CTU’s candidate of choice, primarily pulled progressive votes along Milwaukee Avenue and north of Lakeview.
The runoff campaign promised to be contentious from the beginning as Vallas and Johnson represent starkly different wings of the Democratic Party.
Vallas had reassembled the vestiges of the Daley machine as well as Black establishment Democrats, the business community and labor groups representing first responders and the trades in propelling his candidacy as one that he signified would steer the city back to its former glory.
His campaign mantra that “public safety is a human right” was backed with detailed plans to beef up the police force and remove policies he described as encumbering. On the trail, he depicted the city as one overrun by lawlessness, where children are murdered without impunity and once-gleaming business corridors are under siege.
But above all, Vallas tapped into a less tangible but just-as-pressing sense that Chicago’s cops have been left behind, and his candidacy was about returning the respect they deserve.
Johnson amassed a coalition that included the powerful CTU and its allied unions as well as similarly left-leaning politicians ranging from City Council’s growing democratic socialist bloc to national figures such as the two-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — a popular U.S. senator with whom Johnson held the mayoral race’s biggest rally last week.
The progressive umbrella under which Johnson’s followers fell were motivated by his campaign promise to rid Chicago of its “politics of old” and “tale of two cities,” slogans that he buttressed with sweeping proposals to ramp up community investments — as well as raise some taxes. Johnson, while stressing the concerns of crime, pitched his candidacy as not that of another politician’s quest for higher office but as a movement to bring “the people” to the fifth floor of City Hall.
To that end, Johnson had cast Tuesday’s runoff — falling on the 55th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination — as “the resurrection of the city of Chicago,” an encapsulation of his bid to see his election as an extension of the civil rights movement.
Throughout the race, Vallas faced repeated questions about his association with Republicans, a toxic label for a politician in overwhelmingly blue Chicago.
GOP donors and business interests poured millions of dollars into Vallas’ campaign, giving him resources he lacked four years ago but raising questions about his political loyalties.
He also faced questions about his associations with the firebrand Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara and right-wing former state Rep. Jeanne Ives, who ran a failed bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2018.
As the campaign unfolded, Vallas came under fire for attending an event for Awake Illinois, a suburban group that has taken extreme positions and called Gov. J.B. Pritzker a “groomer.” He later said his attendance was a mistake.
To ease voters’ concerns about his party identification, Vallas unfurled endorsements from political leaders ranging from City Council progressive caucus chair Sophia King to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the Senate. Vallas also introduced himself everywhere he went as a “lifelong Democrat.”
Initially, Vallas sought to remain above the fray, releasing campaign ads aimed at cultivating a positive image and broadening his base by featuring support from the popular Black ex-Secretary of State Jesse White and former Whitney Young High School principal Joyce Kenner. Johnson, however, went immediately negative, lashing into Vallas in his victory speech on Feb. 28.
“This is the truth about Paul Vallas: He has literally failed everywhere he has gone. In fact, Paul Vallas is the author of ‘The Tale of Two Cities,’” Johnson said, setting the tone of what would be a bitter runoff.
The decision to hold back fire was a potentially pivotal one for Vallas. One of the most critical tasks political campaigns face is portraying their candidate positively while defining their rival in negative tones.
Vallas entered the runoff with a financial advantage over Johnson but waited to launch negative advertisement, giving the upstart campaign more room to catch its breath and maneuver. By contrast, Lightfoot’s campaign was ready to launch negative ads against Vallas immediately if she had made the runoff.
In the middle of March, Vallas began attacking Johnson more aggressively for his past support of the “defund the police” movement and his record as a teachers’ union organizer.
At debates, Vallas often scoffed while criticizing Johnson’s record on the county board. “I’m basically debating with someone who never managed a budget,” Vallas would say before admonishing Johnson, “Please don’t lecture me on managing multibillion-dollar budgets.”
One of Johnson’s biggest hurdles during the campaign was addressing criticism over his past support for “defund the police,” or the activist-backed calls to reallocate law enforcement budgets and send the funds to other social services in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.
Johnson struggled to give a consistent, coherent answer and, at some points, attempted to pivot and sidestep the issue entirely.
When asked during a debate about his statement that defunding police was “a real political goal,” Johnson said, “I said it was a political goal. I never said it was mine.”
Despite Johnson’s denials, he repeatedly endorsed the “defund” movement.
In 2020, he referred to “defund the police” as “a cause that I think, quite frankly, is not just admirable, but is necessary” and praised organizers of a “We Don’t Call Police: Fighting for a Police-Free Future” panel for pushing “an agenda that actually can transform people’s lives.”
“And part of it is removing ourselves away from this, you know, state-sponsored policing,” Johnson said.
Eventually, Johnson settled on an answer where he stated simply, “I’m not going to defund the police” and promised the Police Department’s budget would not be “one penny” less.
Vallas and Johnson also argued over the shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vallas attacked Johnson over the CTU’s refusal to teach in-person during two work stoppages.
At one debate, Vallas blamed juvenile crime spikes on closed schools, leading to a counterattack from Johnson: “My opponent talks about school closures. Well, he set up the market for schools to be closed. He got so good at it, he went around the country doing it.”
Johnson then argued there is a link between violence and neighborhoods that faced school closures or privatization. To that, Vallas retorted that his opponent is the one to blame for any classroom shutdowns before rolling through his record building new schools and growing enrollment, almost daring Johnson to poke holes in it.
“Have you ever been to New Orleans? Have you ever seen New Orleans after Katrina? Eighty percent of the schools were destroyed,” Vallas said.
Vallas continued: “I had rebuilt this school district out of nothing, from scratch. Every single child is in either a brand-new school or a completely renovated public school governed by local community boards. ... And that school district led the state for seven consecutive years after Katrina.”
Johnson’s racial justice-themed campaign was the result of a decadelong effort to move Chicago to the left, largely led by progressive labor groups including the CTU and SEIU.
The teachers’ union president Stacy Davis Gates often invoked the Chicago Board of Education vote to close 50 schools in 2013 as a pivotal moment for the progressive movement. Her predecessor, the union’s iconic late president, Karen Lewis, declared that they needed to shift the political landscape.
Lewis considered running for mayor in 2015 but dropped the idea after being diagnosed with brain cancer and threw her support behind then-Cook County Commissioner Jesús “Chuy” García, who lost to Rahm Emanuel but became a progressive folk hero after forcing him into the city’s first runoff election.
CTU and its close allies in the progressive labor movement worked to push a broad slate of candidates in 2019 and 2023 that have helped create a more independent City Council while frustrating more traditional Democrats who are often criticized for going to get along.
“We planted seeds in 2015,” Davis Gates once told the Tribune.
Vallas entered Election Day with endorsements from 23 sitting members of City Council while Johnson had support from 13.
Both candidates spent significant resources campaigning for Black and Latino support.
Johnson struggled to pull together a broader base than the one that supported him in the first round. He was surprisingly endorsed by Alderman Pat Dowell, Lightfoot’s budget chair who represents the Bronzeville neighborhood, in February, a move that gave his campaign legitimacy and embarrassed the incumbent.
But he wasn’t able to pull off any other major surprises in the runoff. Instead, Johnson relied on national support from Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Presley to boost his support with progressives while visiting churches on the South and West Side to earn Black votes.
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(Chicago Tribune’s Adriana Perez and Hank Sanders contributed to this story.)
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