The sequel that Chicagoans neither want nor deserve.
Remember the good old days, when schlocky slasher franchises slapped silly subtitles onto their box office tripe? Who can forget the immortal Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland? It was the same old slop, reheated for resale in a new wrapper, and we happily lapped it up: Jason Takes Manhattan, The Return of Michael Myers, Freddy’s Dead, Nerds in Paradise . . . it’s a trope in need of reintroduction, because predictable horror is upon us once again: Brandon Is Back.
There’s really no better way to characterize Brandon Johnson’s Sunday announcement of his reelection campaign for mayor of Chicago than that, as the promise (threat?) of a sequel absolutely nobody except the members of CTU Local #1 wish to see. Everybody else is staying away in droves: According to the University of Chicago’s gold standard poll of the 2027 race, only 13.6 percent of Chicagoans want to see him run again. (On the bright side, his job approval is now up to a rosy 23 percent.)
Nobody wants him. So naturally, he’s running again, on the specific promise of more of the same. Let’s see how it works! I know I’ve characterized his time in office as a horror movie, but seen from a slightly different perspective, it’s also a mordant comedy. That’s why it’s at least grimly amusing to watch the least-popular mayor in Chicago history promise voters that these next few months his campaign will “identify the difference between real progressives and posers.”
Brandon claims to be the real McCoy, needless to say — and who are we to deny him? What a fantastic advertisement that is for his opponents, many of whom are outpacing him in the polling. Even among Chicago’s public sector employees — recall, Johnson was a Chicago Teachers Union lobbyist prior to his election — only 20.1 percent support him for reelection.
There isn’t a lot for me to explain anymore about the financial and political tire fire Brandon Johnson’s tenure as mayor (beginning in 2023) has been. It’s all in the archives, and I long ago ran out of creative ways to recount his various and picaresque disgraces. (Each time another one happens I feel the need to recount the whole tale from the beginning, as if a bard reciting a Homeric epic from memory in full before crafting the next stanza to add to the end.)
So the only question remaining is: Can Johnson, loathed as he is, somehow win? No. Chicago’s mayoral race is officially nonpartisan, which means that the first round — held in late February, to keep turnout as low as possible — is basically an open primary (any candidate can run, only Democrats need apply) that winnows the field down to the top two vote-getters. In April, Chicago voters are presented with a binary choice.
Even if the race remains a five-car smash-up, Johnson will be extremely lucky if he finishes any higher than third, what with the campaigns of Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias and State Comptroller Susana Mendoza already showing more strength in the polls than his moribund one. If he does, however, and the race devolves into a binary choice between him and Giannoulias or Mendoza, he is equally doomed. I obviously wouldn’t be caught dead endorsing either of them, but that’s the point in its own way: both lack the sort of history of centrism that fatally crippled Paul Vallas in 2023’s extremely low-turnout race.
Yes, Chicago has had enough of Brandon Johnson; it wants its Democrats nice, safe, and reliably senseless, just like the state party (and the national party) itself. But what has it learned from the past three years of the city’s downward spiral? Is there even a lesson to draw? As wise man Joe Bob Briggs might have said, there sure hasn’t been a whole lot of “plot” to get in the way of the story of Brandon Johnson’s mayorship anyway, just an unplanned, half-dazed stumble from debacle to disaster: a meaningless and repetitive tale of ultra-ideological progressive failures, where nothing is revealed — at least nothing that we didn’t know already.