Far-Left Democrat Brandon Johnson Wins Chicago Mayoral Race

Chicago voters on Tuesday elected far-left activist and teachers’-union lobbyist Brandon Johnson to be the next mayor of the nation’s third-largest city.

The Associated Press called the race for Johnson just after 9:30 p.m. in Chicago. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Johnson won 284,108 votes, or 51.5 percent. He defeated Paul Vallas, a more moderate Democrat, who won 268,115 voters, or 48.6 percent.

“You know, they said this would never happen,” Johnson said during a raucous victory party Tuesday night.

“To the Chicagoans who did not vote for me, here’s what I want you to know … that I care about you, that I value you. I want to hear from you. I want to work with you. And I’ll be the mayor for you, too,” he said. “This campaign has always been about building a better, stronger, safer Chicago for all the people of Chicago.”

Johnson called Chicago a world-class city with natural beauty that has repeatedly been the conscience of the nation. He said he is part of a “multicultural, multigenerational movement that is literally capturing the imagination of not just the city of Chicago, but the rest of the world.”

“Let’s take this bold progressive movement around these United States of America,” he said. “Chicago, we can show the country, we can show the world what’s possible when we stand on our values.”

The race was tight for much of the evening. Vallas had an early lead, but Johnson eventually overtook him, and his margin continued to expand as more precincts reported. Vallas conceded late Tuesday.

Johnson, 47, is a Cook County commissioner, a former social studies teacher, and a paid lobbyist for the radical Chicago Teachers Union. He ran as a decidedly far-left activist, and was backed by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Johnson campaigned on promoting racial justice and uplifting the working class. He is an  opponent of charter schools. In order to pay for a variety of new social programs, he has called for increased taxes on large corporations, wealthy residents, and suburbanites who visit the city. During his campaign, Johnson promised $1 billion in new spending.

In recent years, Chicago has been plagued by rising crime, which has contributed to residents fleeing the city and hollowing out of the downtown area. Crime was a focus of the campaign.

While Vallas ran as a law-and-order Democrat who called for hiring hundreds of new police officers, Johnson campaigned on tackling crime by focusing on what he deems to be its root causes: poorly funded schools, not enough good jobs, lack of affordable housing, and insufficient investments in mental-health care.

In 2020, Johnson was an outspoken advocate of the defund-the-police movement, saying in a radio interview, “I don’t look at it as a slogan. It’s an actual, real political goal.”

Johnson has tried to walk that back a bit as the defund movement increasingly became a drag on Democrats. But he still does not want to increase police funding or ramp up hiring. “Spending more on policing per capita . . . has been a failure,” he said at a news conference.

Instead, Johnson  prioritized training and promoting new detectives and hiring more social workers to respond to people suffering from mental-health crises. During the campaign, he accused Vallas of being too conservative, and a Republican in disguise.

While Vallas won a plurality of votes in the all-party primary in February, Johnson was a surprise second-place finisher, winning about 20 percent of the vote. He advanced to the runoff election by building a coalition of progressive whites and Hispanics, and peeling off enough black voters from incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot, who came in third in the primary.