CHICAGO — The mayoral victory on Tuesday of Brandon Johnson, a once little-known progressive and former teacher, over a more moderate veteran of this city’s burly political realm injected confidence in the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing — and may have pointed a way forward for the party on the fraught issue of crime.
Johnson, 47, walked back some of his most progressive positions, including budget cuts to Chicago’s police force. But he never disavowed the position that, in a city where violence and crime are surging, those in power must take a fundamentally different approach to public safety. Instead of more police on the beat, he called for economic and community development, more social workers and mental health professionals — and more detectives to actually solve the crimes that are committed.
“He may not call that law enforcement activity, but it will be part of the law enforcement system,” said Rep. Danny K. Davis, a longtime House Democrat from Chicago who backed Johnson.
Johnson’s victory may be a lesson for other Democrats struggling with the issue under the verbal assault of Republicans. Rep. Delia Ramirez, a newly elected progressive Democrat from Chicago’s Northwest Side, was ecstatic. “We’ve had a police department that had been attempting to do the jobs of social workers, counselors, mediators, you name it,” she said. “What we haven’t had is help.”
Perhaps no issue has divided Democrats more than crime and policing as violence has surged across the country during the coronavirus pandemic, and Republicans have relentlessly made the case that their opponents are soft on criminals. Crime and public safety were the top concerns of Chicago voters, with 57% of Chicagoans — and 61% of Black Chicagoans — calling the city unsafe, according to a poll done for the conservative Manhattan Institute by Schoen Cooperman Research.
The city has experienced a 45% increase in crime compared with the same point last year in several categories, including sexual assault, robbery, burglary and car theft. Murders have fallen from the pandemic-era rise in 2021 and 2022, but the number of murders this year is still almost 50% higher than in 2019.
National Democrats had conceded that they expected those numbers to yield a narrow victory for Johnson’s opponent, Paul Vallas, 69, a former Chicago schools chief who centered his campaign on being tough on crime.
“When people are afraid, they will flock to what they perceive as strength,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., who took part in an internet ad for Johnson that criticized Vallas for his stewardship of the Philadelphia school system. “As Bill Clinton once said, people will choose strong and wrong over weak and right. We as Democrats need to have a message on crime that meets this moment.”
Then Johnson won.
Boyle cautioned against reading too much into the outcome. Vallas may have lost because so much attention was focused on his missteps running the school systems of Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans and on his association with Republicans, whether they were suburban business leaders or the pro-Trump president of the local Fraternal Order of Police. With the power of the Chicago teachers’ union behind him, Johnson out-organized and out-hustled Vallas, who spent far more money on the campaign.
“This in many ways came down to Paul Vallas,” Boyle said.
Analysts also cautioned that Johnson’s victory most likely had less to do with ideology than with Johnson’s consolidating the Black vote after a divided primary and with Vallas’ failing to make up for that with a larger-than-expected Hispanic turnout.
But liberal activists were not about to squander the triumph of a young progressive voice who exuded optimism over an older, gruffer moderate who relied heavily on the message that more crime required more police officers with fewer restrictions. Leaders of the Democratic left, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, endorsed Johnson, lifting him from obscurity to a second-place finish in the first round of voting.
And in the end, his appeal in an overwhelmingly Democratic city overcame Vallas’ efforts to prove his Democratic bona fides with the endorsements of party mainstays, including Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois; Arne Duncan, a secretary of education under former President Barack Obama; and former Rep. Bobby L. Rush, who became an icon on the South Side as a Black Panther.
“Brandon is representative of today’s Chicago — it’s progressive, it leans younger,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat whose north lakeshore district was the core of Johnson’s support. “This should give heart to people who want to run progressive campaigns around the country, and it should give inspiration to people who believe in diversity, who believe in individual participation in elections.”
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