Dismay and defeat with Paul Vallas in Chicago

From top to bottom, the Chicago Teachers Union — one of the shadiest unions in America — now runs the Windy City.

Brandon Johnson will succeed scandal-plagued Mayor Lori Lightfoot and hand his former colleagues in CTU the keys to the city. Johnson made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a CTU executive, while failing to pay thousands of dollars to Chicago in fees in water and sewage bills.

When all is said and done, Johnson will have defeated his fellow Democrat Paul Vallas in the runoff by about 4 percent. In contrast with Johnson’s platitude-heavy offering, Vallas ran a campaign laser-focused on crime, pledging to boost the city’s police force numbers at a time when crime is surging once again in America’s third largest city. Vallas, who ran as an afterthought in the 2019 race, surged to a first-place finish in the all-candidate election in February, but came up just short last night. (Full disclosure: I endorsed Vallas during his 2019 campaign while I was representing Chicago’s 5th Ward as its ward committeeman.)

I was at Vallas’s election night party and asked some of his supporters about Lightfoot’s controversial tenure as mayor and what they think it says that Chicago just elected a Defund the Police activist as mayor at a time when crime was the issue topped most voters’ minds.

Colleen Flanagan, from Lakeview, found Lightfoot “pretty incompetent, foul-mouthed and really gave Chicago, nationally, a bad name.” The lesson she takes away from a Johnson victory? “The Chicago Teachers Union is really rogue and controls the city.”

Thomas Woods, a Korean War veteran from the city’s North Side, told me Lightfoot’s legacy is defined by how “she couldn’t manage” the city, and said the next mayor will have to “have a good chief of staff who knows how to manage, and have staff in each department that knows what their department is.” His main takeaway for Brandon Johnson from four years of Lightfoot is “you just can’t be a dictator.”

Following February’s primary, Vallas consolidated support from Illinois’s Democratic Party establishment: Senator Dick Durbin and former secretary of state Jesse White. Meanwhile Johnson secured support from America’s far left in Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Despite Vallas’s bona fide credentials as an establishment Democrat, Johnson’s allies managed to gaslight Chicagoans into convincing them that Vallas, who has run as a Democrat for governor and lieutenant governor of Illinois, is a Trump-style MAGA Republican. 

Sources in the Vallas campaign told me that was all it really took for Johnson and his teachers union allies to scare Chicagoans into rejecting Vallas, who was also backed heavily by the city’s Fraternal Order of Police.

While this depiction is very unfair, I did meet one Trump supporter at the party. Andrew Nelson, from Chicago’s South Side, was a recent convert to Vallas. “In the first round, I voted for the other guy, Brandon Johnson,” he said. “Because at that time, I didn’t really know who to vote for. When I learned that Brandon Johnson badmouthed my president, Donald J. Trump, I immediately became a Vallas supporter.”

Locally, the election tore Democrats apart about police, crime, and public safety. Vallas’s allies in the Chicago Police threatened mass resignations and “blood on the streets” if Johnson were to win (we’ll see if this happens), whereas Johnson defended the city’s mass looting in 2020 and called defunding the police an “actual, real political goal.” 

Despite Vallas’s defeat, his allies said that Chicago’s resurgent left isn’t something that should concern Joe Biden, who’s been leaving members of his own party to the wolves on issues like crime time after time.

Joe Trippi, Vallas’s campaign manager, told me that there’s nothing in these tea leaves that should concern Biden. “Obviously there’s a spirited debate, and a split, in this city at least, about what direction to go in.”

“I’m not sure you can take what happened here and extrapolate it to Los Angeles or other big cities,” Trippi said. “Chicago and Illinois are going to vote for Biden. Half of Chicago was [willing to embrace Johnson], but that doesn’t tell you anything about anywhere else.” 

For Vallas supporters of all stripes, the future is bleak. “Johnson never had a plan, and he never managed a budget, can’t even pay his parking tickets and his water bill,” Dave Koehler, from Old Town, said.

“I’m appalled at my city. I used to be proud. I just don’t understand why this is happening. Chicago voters, what are you doing?”