Brandon Johnson could be a national progressive star. He just has to win Chicago’s mayoral race first.

CHICAGO — Two months ago, nobody was comparing Brandon Johnson to Barack Obama, as Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers did at a Thursday rally headlined by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Nobody was saying, as the Nation has, that Johnson “could be Chicago’s most transformative mayor in decades.” Nobody really knew who he was.

Everything changed last month with Johnson’s second-place finish in the first round of voting in Chicago’s mayoral race. National attention turned to the shores of Lake Michigan just in time to recalibrate political compasses ahead of 2024’s presidential and congressional races.

“He rose to prominence in Chicago very quickly,” says Tracy Mayfield, a top political consultant in the city. Like others who spoke to Yahoo News for this article, Mayfield had been impressed by Johnson’s rapid ascent from a virtually unknown local politician to a national sensation. “There are elements of Brandon Johnson that feel very transformational,” she said.

The question is whether or not Johnson has staying power.

The answer should arrive on Tuesday, when he and Paul Vallas, also a Democrat, face off in Chicago’s mayoral runoff. Vallas is 69. He is white and moderate. Johnson just turned 46. He is Black and progressive. Both think the other would be a disaster as mayor.

A school reformer with a long but disputed record, Vallas has pitched himself as a wonk in an effort to insulate his campaign from attacks that he is a conservative in disguise. Johnson has also tried to reassure voters about his own ideological commitments, less with detailed policy proposals (though his campaign has those) than with expressions of deep attachment to the city where he was born and raised.

“The most radical thing we can do as a city is to love the people of Chicago,” the ebullient Cook County commissioner said at a celebration of his second-place finish in the first round of voting, in which Mayor Lori Lightfoot — the first Black woman to lead the city — finished a deflating third, becoming the first incumbent mayor since Jane Byrne in 1983 to lose a reelection bid.

Johnson’s problem, though, is that there are many voters in Chicago who emphatically do not want radical things. They want the recent rash of carjackings and shootings to stop, and more to be done about the systemic crime that has plagued many neighborhoods for decades. They want better schools and more affordable housing. They want subway trains that don’t require dramatic rescues.

Johnson says he gets all that, vowing that he can be progressive and practical at the same time. “The right investment transforms the city of Chicago,” he told Yahoo News in an interview. “There’s more than enough for everyone.”

He envisions a Chicago version of the progressive Green New Deal. He wants to open community schools with arts education and sports. He wants to find housing for Central American migrants arriving on buses from Texas and other border states.

His most controversial — and disputed — positions have to do with policing. In 2020, Johnson voiced support for the movement to defund police departments and replace armed officers with social workers. He has since backed off that stance, but Vallas has continued to press the point.

Johnson has deemed the attacks unfair, but he has also refused to adopt the kind of law-and-order messaging that might reassure skittish moderates. And he remains convinced that armed officers are not always best equipped to deal with crises; among his proposals is a “Treatment Not Trauma” program that would deploy mental health professionals, not just police officers, when responding to emergency calls involving people in the throes of psychic distress.

“I’m tethered to the interests of working people,” Johnson says, invoking his own upbringing in the city’s western suburbs. “Working people are going to elect one of their own.”

Johnson grew up in Elgin, on the western boundary of Chicago. He had nine siblings. Their house had a single bathroom. His father was a pastor, a link that has proved helpful politically. Johnson has won support from influential Black clergy in Chicago, as well as from Martin Luther King III.

“I think he has his finger on the pulse of what people need,” said Floyd Howard, a contractor and community leader in the South Side neighborhood of Manor Park.

On a recent afternoon, Johnson campaigned on Howard’s block of Calumet Avenue, a coterie of aides and a reporter from a French outlet in tow. As he went from house to house, Johnson chatted warmly with residents, who stood in doors that sported home alarm-company stickers. He spoke fluently about lowering sergeant-to-officer ratios in the Chicago Police Department, and about promoting more officers to the rank of detective to bolster the city’s homicide clearance rates, which are especially dismal in Black neighborhoods.

Stilted on the debate stage, Johnson is charismatic and easygoing in person. He lives with his family in Austin, a South Side neighborhood where violence is all too common. He told one Park Manor resident that when his 6-year-old son rides a bike down the street, he worries about stray bullets, not speeding cars.

Crime consistently tops the list of Chicagoans’ concerns. Those concerns have grown especially acute in the last three years, as the social and economic tumult of the pandemic saw violent crime spike across the country. The increase has been especially pronounced here In 2021, Chicago saw more murders — 797 — than any year in the last quarter century. Property crime rose sharply in 2022, with the frequency of carjackings and auto thefts emerging as an especially worrisome trend.

“Crime has been coming to communities that frankly haven't seen as much violent crime in a long time,” says Mayfield. Whiter, wealthier neighborhoods on the city’s North Side had long been insulated from problems that South Side residents experienced as a daily reality. That is no longer the case.

“It feels very close to home to many people,” Mayfield says. “Many people know someone who has been carjacked.”

This near-universal feeling of public disorder undoubtedly contributed to Lightfoot’s embarrassing defeat — and to the emergence of Vallas, who focused relentlessly on public safety. There is little transformative about his plan to hire more officers; rather, his main argument seems to be that entrusting the department to a “defund” proponent would be folly.

Johnson has found plenty of vulnerabilities in the Vallas record, too. He has charged that his opponent is little more than a stalking horse for the national GOP. He has pointed to support for Vallas from Ken Griffin, a hedge funder who is also a top backer of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a hard-right likely presidential contender. Johnson has also flagged a Vallas campaign contribution from a group tied to Betsy DeVos, the Trump-era education secretary and religious education proponent.

It is sometimes easy to forget that both men are Democrats, so thoroughly has each candidate caricatured the other while downplaying his own more controversial positions.

Democrats have been in charge of Chicago for a century. Only they are not the right Democrats, according to Johnson, who says past mayors have been beholden either to the city’s notorious Daley family political machine. Or they always looked to the national establishment, like Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff. Maybe they were combative loners like Lightfoot, finding few friends on either right or left.

“Republicans and Democrats have collaborated to move austerity budgets,” Johnson told Yahoo News.

Johnson says he will pay for his plans with six new taxes, including those on corporations, airlines and hotels, which he argues would bring $2 billion per year into city coffers and allow him to implement his proposals. Detractors say his plans are unrealistic and unworkable, and that he is unlikely to raise more than $800 million from his proposed new levies.

“Chicago’s well positioned for a progressive champion,” he said. “This is also the city that elected Harold Washington.”

Tuesday’s vote will come exactly 40 years after the 1983 mayoral race in which Washington became Chicago’s first Black mayor, which remains a watershed moment in the city’s politics. Washington broke with the Daley machine to defeat the younger Richard Daley (that would be Richard M.; his father was Richard J.) and incumbent Byrne, the city’s first woman mayor, in the Democratic primary.

Republican candidate Bernie Epton, an effete state legislator with little political skill, was seen as a final bulwark against Washington. His campaign was framed in all-but-explicit racial terms, with one notorious advertisement warning voters: “Epton For Mayor. Before It’s Too Late.” Epton’s allies spread the rumor that Washington would appoint the Rev. Jesse Jackson as his police chief, an especially preposterous assertion since Washington disliked Jackson.

Washington narrowly prevailed, but the racism he encountered remains an all-too-potent reminder of how quickly racial animus had risen to the surface. In 2023, Johnson has arguably faced similar attacks. Epton’s son felt compelled to publish an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, urging Vallas not to succumb to race-baiting, as his father had.

“Pivot to a different message,” Jeff Epton wrote. “One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory.”

Several days later, local police union leader John Catanzara warned that there would be “blood on the streets” if Johnson were elected. (Vallas, who had been endorsed by the union, condemned the remark.)

“It’s dangerous,” Johnson told Yahoo News, suggesting that he could face an insurrection if he were to win on Tuesday. “They’re turning yet another election into a mockery. This has a lot of reminiscence around January 6.” Vallas has given no sign that he would refuse to accept the election’s results.

Race relations today are not as calcified as they were in 1983, but it is impossible to wage a campaign in this city once famous for its ethnic fiefdoms without being highly attuned to demographics.

Chicago has roughly equal populations of white, Black and Latino residents. But those broad categories say little about the fissures large and small that Vallas and Johnson must negotiate in the campaign’s final days.

Johnson has solid support with white progressives. Endorsements from national figures like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as well as Chicago-bred celebrities like the rapper and activist Common and alt-country band Wilco, have only burnished his credentials in predominantly white, wealthier neighborhoods like Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago campus, and fashionable Lakeview, on the North Side.

“White progressives really like Brandon, and they’re very enthusiastic,” says Pete Giangreco, an influential political consultant who has worked for Bill Clinton, Obama and other Democrats. “You’d walk over glass,” Giangreco says. “You're knocking doors, you're posting stuff on social media.”

Only white progressives were already firmly in Johnson’s camp, just as white moderates are thoroughly behind Vallas. “There are no undecided whites in this race,” Giangreco says.

Polls suggest that Vallas has made considerable inroads with Black and Latino voters, which could be an ominous sign for Johnson. Whereas Washington’s campaign marshaled 70% turnout from the Black electorate in 1983 and consequently reaped 85% of the Black vote, Johnson simply cannot rely on such margins. He is not established enough politically; nor are racial voting blocs anywhere as solid as they used to be. Indeed, Black voters have recently formed the core of the Democratic Party’s moderate faction, boosting figures like President Biden and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, both of whom defeated progressives in their respective primaries.

Black voters are on edge about crime, but many of them are unsure about Vallas, who has pledged to hire 1,500 new officers. At the same time, many are also uneasy about Johnson. In areas like Bronzeville, a historically Black middle class community, Lightfoot was the top vote-getter; both Vallas and Johnson are now vying to win over her supporters.

“Johnson is a very, very talented politician candidate. He's really good. He's got a very bright future,” Giangreco says. “But if he loses, it'll be because he coughed up 30% of the Black” electorate.

Although policing has been at the forefront of the runoff election, education is not far behind. Johnson taught for four years and later became a Chicago Teachers Union organizer. He remains a member of the union, a powerful force in city politics. Nobody has made the case against Vallas more forcefully than the CTU, which appeared to break its own rules by asking members to pay an extra $8 to fund Johnson’s campaign.

The CTU has deep roots in the Black community, but its image was battered by a resistance to reopen schools during the coronavirus pandemic — a resistance that lasted longer in Chicago than in most other major American cities.

Bitterness thus lingers. “The teachers were popular,” says consultant Giangreco. “After COVID, their numbers flipped. Now they're upside down,” he says, with a majority holding unfavorable views. He says the trend is especially pronounced among white and Latino households but adds that “even among Black voters, where they have their best numbers, you still have a core 20%, 25%, 30% of the community like, ‘You know, I’ve kind of had it with these guys.’”

Vallas is blasting the CTU for “dirty tricks” in the campaign’s closing days, while the police union is warning of an “exodus” of its police officers if Johnson wins. Johnson has been forced to answer questions about unpaid water and sewage bills, an echo of the controversy over Washington’s unpaid taxes in 1983.

Chicagoans are tired, and many are anxious. Johnson wants to reassure them in Bill Clinton’s classic I-feel-your-pain-style. If he does not yet have rhetorical skills equal to the former president’s, he has a compelling story of his own.

“I know what it takes to live and survive in this city,” Johnson says. He understands that the rhetoric of his opponents is meant to discourage voters, to make them uncertain enough to stay home.

Fear is a powerful force in politics, but Brandon Johnson believes it can be overcome.

“We have something more powerful,” he says. “And that’s the power of hope. The power of love.”