Black Voters Could Pick The Next Mayor Of Chicago

Just over a week after knocking out incumbent Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the two finalists to succeed her, Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson, have prioritized locking up the support of top Black politicians and community leaders.

Vallas, a white centrist and former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, has announced endorsements from former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, businessman and former mayoral candidate Willie Wilson, as well as Chicago City Council members Walter Burnett and Rod Sawyer, who was an unsuccessful mayoral candidate.

Johnson, a Cook County commissioner who is progressive and Black, has unveiled a rival slate of Black endorsements that is expected to grow in the coming weeks. He has won the support of U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) and Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and chair of the Cook County Democratic Party. They join a host of Black elected officials, including three members of the Chicago City Council, who had already endorsed Johnson before the first round of voting concluded on Feb. 28.

Johnson, a former schoolteacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, also flew to Selma, Alabama, on Sunday to join the annual commemoration of the Bloody Sunday march for voting rights in 1965.

The scramble for high-profile Black support reflects the pivotal role that the city’s Black voters are expected to play in the mayoral runoff election on April 4.

The mostly white, affluent voters on the northern lakefront “decided the first round and probably Black voters are going to decide the second,” said Brian Stryker, a Chicago Democratic consultant, who conducted the polling for U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García’s unsuccessful mayoral run.

Specifically, the so-called lakefront liberals who powered Lightfoot’s 2019 victory abandoned her either for Vallas or, in younger, more left-leaning enclaves further from the downtown Loop, Johnson. (Johnson also won many precincts in northwest Chicago, where professional-class gentrifiers mix with working-class Latino residents.)

As of Wednesday, with mail-in ballots still being counted, Vallas had received just under one-third of the vote and Johnson had received nearly 22%. Though both candidates outperformed Lightfoot in the first round of voting, foreclosing her path to a second term, they also fell short of an outright majority, precipitating the runoff contest.

That means they are now locked in a race to woo the nearly half of the electorate that voted for neither candidate in the first round.

Although an exact breakdown of how each demographic group voted in the election is not available, geographic patterns indicate that Black voters make up an outsize share of the Chicagoans who cast their ballots for someone other than Vallas or Johnson.

Despite her loss, Lightfoot won just under 17% of the vote, much of it in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. The city’s first Black woman mayor, Lightfoot dominated the predominantly Black precincts on the city’s South and West sides, winning all but one of the city’s 16 majority-Black wards, as Chicago’s city council districts are known.

Willie Wilson, a conservative Black businessman, also received 9% of the vote citywide thanks to his support in select Black neighborhoods. Four other Black candidates, whose bases of support were also in predominantly Black areas, jointly won just under 6% of the vote.

Johnson and Vallas both have strong, albeit different, reasons to woo these Black voters.

Given the reality that Black voters tend to vote for Black candidates when they are in head-to-head races with white candidates, Vallas is unlikely to get a majority of the Black vote. And though Vallas generally performed better than Johnson in predominantly Latino precincts that García won, Johnson generally performed better than Vallas in predominantly Black precincts carried by either Lightfoot or Wilson.

But Vallas, a self-described “lifelong Democrat” who entertained a Republican run for local office in 2009, does need to prevent enough voters of all races from seeing him as either a Republican or a racist. Vallas’ ties to right-wing groups and figures, including the president of Chicago’s police union (the Fraternal Order of Police), who has said racist things in the past, have already given his opponents fodder to portray him as a reactionary unfit to lead a diverse, liberal city.

In a press release last week, Johnson’s campaign accused Vallas of having “racist beliefs about Black families and teaching Black history,” over comments he made about Black history education on a conservative podcast in Nov. 2021.

In the podcast interview, Vallas affirmed his support for teaching Black history, saying that there is “no substitution for making sure that you’re teaching history and that you’re teaching it accurately.”

But he argued that, in practice, the focus on Black history education in cities like Chicago has undermined overall academic excellence.

“When it distracts from quality instruction in the core subject areas ― which it is, because we seem to be too preoccupied [with] … those things rather than focusing on our core curriculum ― our standards suffer and damage is done,” he said.

Vallas also said that progressive educators’ and politicians’ focus on the racism to which white Americans have historically subjected Black Americans can give both white and Black children “an excuse for bad behavior” by allowing them to cast their individual actions as responses to historical forces.

“When you introduce a curriculum that is not only divisive but a curriculum that further undermines the relationship of children with their parents, with their families, that’s a dangerous thing,” he said. “For white parents, how are you going to discipline your child when your child comes home and your child has basically been told that … their race, their parents or grandparents, have discriminated against others and have somehow victimized another person’s race? Or, for that matter, if you are a Black child, how do you go home and listen to your parent when your parent has failed to be successful in addressing these historically racist institutional obstacles that have denied them a chance at equal opportunity?”

In the first debate of the runoff election on Wednesday, Johnson flatly accused Vallas of opposing the teaching of Black history.

“I’m also going to make sure that we are educating children in teaching Black history,” Johnson said. “Paul Vallas, on the other hand, doesn’t believe that children of the city of Chicago should learn Black history.”

But Vallas pushed back directly on Johnson’s charges at the debate, calling the claims “nonsense.”

“I actually integrated Black history in all the curriculum, and it moved beyond just Black history month in February,” he said, referencing his tenure as head of Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001. “I also incorporated African studies into the world history curriculum. And … we worked with local school councils who wanted to provide a more Afro-centric curriculum.”

In addition, Vallas’ new Black surrogates are already playing a critical role defending his bona fides as an advocate for the interests of Black Chicagoans.

Jesse White, a Democrat who backed Lightfoot in the first round, stars in Vallas’ first TV ad of the runoff. “Paul Vallas will be a mayor for all Chicagoans,” White concludes in the 30-second spot.

Alderman Walter Burnett, as members of the Chicago City Council are often known, told HuffPost that he endorsed Vallas because of his positive experience with the mayoral contender dating to the 1990s when Vallas was city budget director and then head of the city’s public schools.

Burnett, who supported Lightfoot in the first round, cited Vallas’ record of granting construction contracts to Black-owned development firms, his early support for an ongoing program that helps children commute to school safe from violence and his implementation of preparatory programs that made it easier for Black kids in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood to gain admission to a new magnet high school in the area.

“He’s always been sensitive to our community and helping the kids,” Burnett said.

Asked about Vallas’ comments on the podcast, Burnett told HuffPost, “I try not to judge people on what they say. I try to judge them on what they do.”

Wilson’s endorsement, which came out shortly before the candidate debate on Wednesday, could prove especially critical to Vallas given his base of support in select Black neighborhoods. “Paul has a long history of working closely with the Black community, and his plan to invest in neighborhoods that have been neglected for too long is impressive, and he will do it without imposing new taxes that will drive away companies and jobs,” Wilson said in a statement announcing his endorsement.

Johnson’s task is to succeed where Lightfoot failed by consolidating the Black vote behind his bid and supplementing it with many of the liberal white and Latino voters who supported him in the first round.

The stakes of pursuing Black voters are likely higher for Johnson than they are for Vallas, however, given Vallas’ strong showing with a slice of the white professional class and the working-class white voters that form the city’s conservative base.

“Brandon Johnson needs [the Black vote] more than Paul Vallas needs it, because his base would be in the Black community,” said Laura Washington, a political analyst for ABC7 in Chicago. “He’s going to need it to offset what Paul Vallas is going to gain in some of the white ethnic parts of the city.”

The challenge for Johnson with many Black voters, especially older Black voters, mirrors the hurdles he faces with moderate voters of all backgrounds due to many of his left-leaning positions.

Those positions include an economic plan that would seek to “invest in people” by generating $1 billion in new revenue. Johnson would accomplish that by increasing taxes on affluent residents and corporations. He proposes using the money to fund social initiatives like the reopening of the city’s shuttered mental health clinics and doubling the size of Chicago’s summer youth jobs program. He has also said that the new revenue would enable him to break with previous mayors and forego raising property taxes.

But it’s Johnson’s complex ideas about tackling the “root causes” of crime that are likely to encounter the greatest skepticism. As a county official in 2020, he embraced the “defund the police” slogan, which he interpreted as redirecting law enforcement resources to social programs that prevent crime.

As a mayoral candidate, Johnson has clarified that he would not seek to reduce police funding. But unlike Vallas, Johnson is not promising to fill the 1,700-person backlog affecting the Chicago Police Department relative to its 2019 staffing levels. Dismissing Vallas’ planned hiring spree as unrealistic, Johnson has instead proposed using efficiency savings to add 200 more detectives through promotion within the department.

Johnson and his defenders maintain that his candidacy presents a unique opportunity to turn the page on an enforcement-only approach to policing that has contributed to the current crime wave rather than prevented it.

“The naive thing is to double down on the current policies, which is what Paul Vallas wants to do,” said Illinois state Sen. Robert Peters (D), who has been supporting Johnson’s bid since before the Feb. 28 election.

As chair of the powerful Cook County Democratic Party, Preckwinkle is likely to be an asset for Johnson as he seeks to sway prominent Black Democrats who are on the fence about his candidacy.

“She can make promises and cut deals on behalf of Brandon Johnson,” said Washington, noting that an endorsement from the party itself ― and the resources it would unlock ― would be the biggest coup of all.

But as Chicago reels from a crime wave that has hit Black residents especially hard, it’s not clear how receptive Black voters are going to be to Johnson’s pitch ― however logical that pitch may be.

A majority of Black Chicagoans – 54% – cited “reducing crime” as their biggest concern in an independent poll conducted in early February by BSP Research in conjunction with Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy.

In the poll, nearly three-quarters of Black Chicagoans said they support reducing police funding to “invest in addressing root causes of crime.” But in the same poll, an even higher percentage of the city’s Black voters want to increase the number of cops in the city.

Alderwoman Sophia King, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in February, exemplifies the dilemma of Black voters who fall somewhere between Vallas and Johnson on the ideological spectrum.

King campaigned for mayor on a more moderate platform than Johnson’s, but she chairs the City Council’s progressive caucus and is more liberal than old-guard lawmakers like Burnett.

King told HuffPost that she is undecided in the race and plans to meet with both Vallas and Johnson. She believes that some predominantly Black parts of her ward where residents live in fear of gun violence are “under-policed.”

Johnson “needs to get beyond the rhetoric of ‘investing in people,’” King said. “Yes, we want to invest in people. What does that mean, though?”

At the same time, King said she has not yet heard enough from Vallas to have confidence that he “understands the reality of how he’s going to get at these root causes of safety as well and how he will invest in people.”