Brandon Johnson won the mayor’s office in 2023 by painting his runoff opponent, Paul Vallas, as a “Republican in disguise” and too conservative for Chicago. Upon taking office, Johnson vowed to become Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, surpassing Richard M. Daley’s 22-year reign.
Three years later, only 13.6 percent of voters want Johnson to run for reelection. Despite his promise to make Chicago “the safest, most affordable city in America,” his priorities have often clashed with the concerns of ordinary residents. In June, for example, while Chicagoans worried about “teen takeovers” ravaging the city, the mayor bragged about the success of his “Transfemicide State of Emergency.”
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Johnson is determined to keep his job, announcing his bid for a second term on September 13. To distract from his deep unpopularity and poor first-term performance, the mayor has increasingly focused on national and even international issues, attacking the Trump administration, AIPAC, and Israel. Johnson claims the 2027 mayoral election will present voters with a choice between “real progressives and posers”—but the incumbent mayor and his policies may ultimately prove too radical for Chicago.
Featured guests at Johnson’s reelection campaign announcement included prominent allies from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the socialist caucus at City Hall. The mayor bragged about being part of a “radical tradition of shifting power and disrupting the status quo.” He didn’t have many accomplishments to cite besides resisting the Trump administration’s immigration policies, opposing data centers, and pouring more funding into public schools and mental-health clinics. He presented his fiscal recklessness as a victory, since he didn’t balance the budget “off the backs of working people.” (In 2024, he proposed a property tax increase, betraying a campaign promise.) He even took credit for Chicago’s decline in violent crime, though the drop mirrors a national trend across major cities since the Covid-19 pandemic—and violent crime was already going down before Johnson entered office.
The mayor’s sharp rebukes of the Trump administration weren’t limited to immigration. He called federal policies on health care, food assistance, and affordable housing “part of a much longer history in which wealth has been extracted from our communities.” One means of this extraction, Johnson recently argued, is U.S. military aid to Israel. “There is a direct line between federal dollars that are taken out of Black communities and used to pay for bombing brown and Black people around the globe,” he said.
In his reelection campaign announcement, Johnson attacked “someone” running for mayor who takes money from AIPAC and billionaire private-equity executive Michael Sacks—an obvious reference to presumed mayoral frontrunner and current Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias. While Giannoulias has received large donations from Sacks, he has not taken a penny from AIPAC, but that didn’t stop Johnson from attempting to tie his chief opponent to the Israel lobby and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Just as he framed Vallas as a closeted Republican, he’s adopting a similar approach with Giannoulias, hoping Chicago’s progressive voters reject someone perceived as a Zionist deferent to the Israel lobby and billionaire donors.
Giannoulias, a longtime friend of Barack Obama, whom he considers his mentor, has already received over $22 million in donations for his simultaneous mayoral and secretary of state campaigns. His digital ads feature his Obamaesque speech and mannerisms. His electoral challenge will be to distance himself from the Democratic Party establishment and to limit the risk of being portrayed as a Rahm Emanuel 2.0 who will close down schools and restore the “machine” status quo. Emanuel shuttered nearly 50 public schools during his tenure, action the CTU vigorously opposed, and Giannoulis has supported closing down schools with under-enrollment, such as a high school with only 27 students on a campus built for 1,000.
Johnson will have considerable leverage to make the “machine” case against Giannoulias by warning that he’ll take Chicago back to the Daleys’ corrupt, pro-business, patronage style of governance. It may not matter that Giannoulias will vastly outspend him. In 2023, Vallas outspent Johnson by nearly two-to-one and still lost.
But that was before the Chicago Teachers Union had one of its own on the fifth floor of City Hall. In just three years, Johnson has left his potential successors with a “financial ash heap,” according to the Chicago Tribune editorial board, and only 23 percent of Chicagoans approve of his job performance. It may be that, in 2027, Windy City voters prefer a revival of the old machine to the current CTU-backed mayor.