I wanted to call this piece by Ross Barkan at New York Magazine via MSN to your attention. It’s an analysis of the Chicago mayoral run-off and I think it’s of broader interest than just to Chicagoans, as being published in New York Magazine and MSN should indicate to you. Here’s the kernel of it:
Two wildly divergent candidates vie to replace her in the nonpartisan April 4 runoff: Paul Vallas, the former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and a former public-school teacher. The contest might naturally sort along racial lines — Johnson is Black and Vallas is white — but the starkest difference between the two men, both Democrats, is ideology. Just as the party has undergone enormous shifts at the national level, veering leftward from the ’90s Clintonian consensus while influential moderates simultaneously try to beat back progressive upstarts, Chicago is now the locus of a pitched struggle between the left and center — or even center-right, depending on your view.
Here’s his characterization of Paul Vallas:
Vallas, a 69-year-old who has managed three other school systems beyond Chicago’s, has emerged as the obvious if beatable favorite. In the first round of voting, Vallas took 33 percent to Johnson’s 22 percent — a remarkable finish for a man who placed ninth in the race against Lightfoot four years ago. He is quietly assembling a formidable coalition, branching out beyond his white moderate base to court-reform-oriented liberals disenchanted by Lightfoot and crime-weary Black voters willing to allow the candidate backed by the right-wing president of the local police union to control City Hall.
while here’s his characterization of Brandon Johnson:
Johnson, 47, is the candidate of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Jesse Jackson, and the local affiliate of the Working Families Party.
There are several points on which he is either mistaken, out-of-date, or simply fails to mention.
Whether the race is “bent slightly toward Vallas” as Mr. Barkan avers depends on which polls you read. Some polls show Vallas 46%/Johnson 41% while others show Vallas 46%/Johnson 44%. Still others show the two candidates tied at 44% each. I suspect the results depend substantially on who is being sampled.
The TV spots being run by the Johnson campaign could not be clearer: anyone who doesn’t accept the most radical positions of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is a crypto-Republican. That’s very peculiar since those endorsing Vallas include Jesse White, arguably the most popular Democrat in the state, the senior senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, the Senate majority whip, and many of those who served in the Obama Administration. Basically, Vallas is what used to be called a “regular Democrat”.
Brandon Johnson has no experience relevant to the job of mayor of the country’s third largest city. Zero. He has never managed or administered anything.
Nearly all of Johnson’s campaign contributions come from unions, mostly from public employees’ unions, a lot of it from the Chicago Teachers Union. Most of Vallas’s contributions come from individuals. The majority of Johnson’s contributions come from outside Chicago; most of Vallas’s from within Chicago.
The individual contributors to Vallas’s campaign tend to be more highly compensated and more highly educated.
