The verdict was in: Lori Lightfoot was out.
The Feb. 28 election marked a decisive failure for Chicago’s controversial incumbent and the first loss for a one-term mayor in the city in four decades.
She finished third in a crowded field, earning just over 17 percent of the vote.
Lightfoot edged out Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a former favorite of the left, at 13.7 percent of votes.
She also defeated black Chicago’s answer to former president Donald J. Trump, South Side businessman Willie Wilson.
The self-funded Wilson, who has endorsed Trump in the past, got almost 10 percent of the vote.
A glance at the electoral map shows how the Windy City foreshadows one potential future for the United States, should mass immigration continue alongside sustained attacks on a positive, shared American identity.
Wilson snatched up bits and pieces of heavily black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.
Garcia, meanwhile, dominated Hispanic corridors on the Southwest, Northwest, and Far South Sides.
What about the two top vote-getters, Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson?
Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), did well on the Far Northwest Side and the Far Southwest Side, as well as in Bridgeport. Though they’re more black, Asian, and Hispanic now than in the past, they remain some of the final redoubts of ethnic, white, working-class Catholic Chicago in the southern half of the city.
Vallas also beat all comers downtown and in other parts of the North Side. He ultimately claimed 34 percent of the vote.
Brandon Johnson’s performance, meanwhile, almost mirrors Lightfoot’s in the 2019 general–almost, but not quite.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer and Cook County commissioner won Logan Square, Lincoln Square, Uptown, and Edgewater. He also excelled in “Mr. Obama’s neighborhood,” Hyde Park, and Kenwood on the South Side.
Although those neighborhoods aren’t ethnically uniform, their tone is influenced by young, left-wing, predominantly white Chicagoans—a close cousin of Lightfoot’s heavily white, North Side coalition from 2019, albeit one further from the center of the political spectrum.
Johnson and Vallas will face each other in an April 4 runoff.
The two share some similarities. They’re both Democrats. They’ve both worked in education. They both want to seem like a breath of fresh air after Lightfoot—herself a one-time reform candidate.
Political Life in a One-Party City
The answer has a lot to do with how Chicago, as a one-party city, actually works.“There is little meaningful distinction to be made between the government and the Democratic Party. Competition for control of California takes place, not between two rival parties with different political visions and corresponding electorates in a general election, but between aspirants within the Democratic Party, under a shared political vision.”
“In practice, this means competition for money from [organized] interests that fund the activist networks, which in turn translate those interests into various moralisms and thereby shape the vision of the party. The electorate largely drops out of consideration as a constituency.”
That’s pretty much the ground truth in the Second City. Organized ethnic lobbies, public sector unions, high finance, and a smattering of other powerful collectivities dictate who wins political office and how they govern.
In practice, anyone who wants to run Chicago must be a Democrat. Exceptions come from the left of the formal party, among groups that seek to steer the city toward socialism.
During the 2019 election, for example, multiple members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were elected to City Council.
Vallas and Johnson should be viewed in the context of Chicago’s one-party, left-skewed system.
Yet, the veteran of school reform efforts is, by national standards, a man of the center-left.
For instance, it includes a proposal to reestablish an environmental department for the city.
Ideological Rationalizations
In a one-party city, politics still has something to do with ideology. Any City Council attendee who has heard aldermen speechify against President Donald Trump and conservatism can attest to that.Yet, in some ways, ideology is merely a loose skein holding together very different and, at times, opposed interest groups.
Ideological formulas also fail when circumstances press upon political actors.
In Chicago’s case, rising violence has apparently surpassed the population’s high tolerance for lawlessness and criminality.
A few years after 2020, when talk of “defunding the police” and a “racial reckoning” was mainstream, law and order is back in style across much of the city.
For the most part, the mass demand for public safety drives ideological rationalizations, not vice-versa. Yet, the demands of earnestly held belief, and of factional allies, still hem in the universe of political possibilities.
The play between ideology, bloc politics, and mass public opinion explains Vallas vs. Johnson.
Vallas has the backing of a growing legion of top Illinois Democrats.
Longtime Secretary of State Jesse White, now retired, and former mayoral candidate Ald. Rod Sawyer, who is retiring, are two among the Democratic public figures to have endorsed Vallas in recent days.
Prior to the Feb. 28 election, Vallas secured the support of independent Ald. Anthony Napolitano, along with that of retiring Ald. Tom Tunney.
Brown has already resigned from his post, following the general election.
In early Jan. 2023, Vallas was endorsed by Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police—a cosign sought by just one other candidate, Willie Wilson, and one that may well have redounded to Vallas’ benefit, judging by the Feb. 28 results.
At the time, then-Mayor Lightfoot came after Vallas for the endorsement from the union, which represents more than 8,000 Chicago Police Department officers.
Two Public Sector Unions Face Off
Now up against Vallas, the police union’s pick, Johnson is the candidate of the very teachers union for which he has lobbied.Indeed, the CTU endorsed Johnson in Sept. 2022, before he had formally entered the race.
In practice, the CTU’s opposition to Vallas has a great deal to do with his school reform philosophy, which encompasses support for charter schools. Like everything else in Chicago politics, it is framed in explicitly racial terms.
Johnson has sometimes sought to position himself as a police advocate.
Johnson explicitly called to “defund the police” in 2020, describing it as not simply a mantra for activists but as an “actual real political goal.”
Public Safety
The runoff may ultimately come down to whether fear of crime overrides other concerns, whether at the level of the alderman or that of the individual voter.Johnson, an African American, is expected to do well in the parts of the city where Lightfoot, also African American, performed well in last month’s general election.
Although Vallas, who is of Greek descent, grew up in Roseland on the South Side, his skin color may still pose a problem in black neighborhoods.
On the other hand, the precedent set in 2019, when CTU-backed Preckwinkle lost badly to Lightfoot, suggests Johnson could still have an uphill battle, especially if Chicago voters worry more about public safety than about a few more charter schools.
