It wasn’t long ago that Brandon Johnson, 47, was a county commissioner and teachers’ union organizer, unknown to many Chicagoans. On Monday he will be sworn in as the city’s 57th mayor. Mr. Johnson’s rapid ascent from political obscurity to the helm of America’s third-largest city was fueled by an unapologetically progressive platform, a gift […]
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CHICAGO — Bulging suitcases lined the wall of windows facing the street at a North Side police station in Chicago one morning this week. Air mattresses, blankets and pillows covered the shiny lobby floor. And more than 40 women, men and children were crowded together wherever they could find space — sleeping, chatting in Spanish […]
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The elections this week in Chicago and Wisconsin were different in many ways. One was for mayor, the other for a state Supreme Court seat. One was in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, the other in a closely divided swing state. But there was at least one issue — abortion — that was part of both […]
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It has been a big — even historic — week in American politics. Donald J. Trump was indicted. The liberal candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, easily prevailed over a conservative, Daniel Kelly. And Brandon Johnson, a progressive, was elected the mayor of Chicago. What did we learn? While in some cases it’s too […]
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CHICAGO — In the final days of the mayoral campaign in Chicago, Brandon Johnson drew more than 4,000 people to a jubilant rally featuring Senator Bernie Sanders, who endorsed him. He crisscrossed the South and West Sides, visiting six churches in a single Sunday. In a last push on Election Day, an army of volunteers […]
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CHICAGO — The mayoral victory on Tuesday of Brandon Johnson, a once little-known progressive and former teacher, over a more moderate veteran of this city’s burly political realm injected confidence in the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing — and may have pointed a way forward for the party on the fraught issue of crime. Mr. […]
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CHICAGO — Rufus Burns, a 73-year-old resident of Chicago’s West Side, voted for Brandon Johnson for Chicago mayor on Tuesday. But it was really more of a vote against Paul Vallas. “A Republican in disguise,” he said of Mr. Vallas. Ever since the resurfacing of a television interview from 2009 — during which Mr. Vallas […]
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CHICAGO — Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and teachers’ union organizer who called for a vast expansion of social programs in Chicago, as well as new taxes, was elected mayor of the country’s third-largest city on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Johnson’s victory over Paul Vallas, a fellow Democrat with far more conservative […]
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The election in Chicago is the latest race in a large, liberal American city in which crime has been a primary issue. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, defeated progressive candidates in his party’s 2021 mayoral primary by calling for a crackdown on crime. And in Los Angeles […]
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CHICAGO — Paul Vallas took control of Chicago Public Schools when the district was among the country’s most troubled. He went to Philadelphia to head up a teetering education system that the state had taken over. And after Hurricane Katrina washed away much of the New Orleans school district, he helped rebuild it. Mr. Vallas […]
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CHICAGO — When Bobby L. Rush, the Black Panther turned congressman turned elder statesman of this city’s South Side, stood last week to endorse Paul Vallas for mayor, the first question he confronted featured his own words. How could a man who just two and a half years ago called Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police […]
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CHICAGO — Brandon Johnson had a problem. In a crowded Chicago mayoral race full of established liberal politicians — a sitting congressman, the incumbent mayor, two City Council members — many voters had never heard of Mr. Johnson, a county commissioner from the West Side. But he had something those other contenders did not: the […]
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CHICAGO — As Brandi Johnson left a restaurant recently in Bronzeville, long a center of Black culture on Chicago’s South Side, she did not hesitate before naming the issue that would determine her vote for the city’s next mayor: crime. Her ideas for addressing the problem sprang from her own experiences growing up in Englewood, […]
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CHICAGO — The mayoral runoff in Chicago between Paul Vallas, the former Chicago public schools chief, and Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner, includes idiosyncrasies that have nothing to do with ideology: a white candidate against a Black one, the police union against the teachers, even the question of which man is the true […]
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CHICAGO — When Paul Vallas ran for mayor of Chicago four years ago, it did not go well. He finished in a distant ninth place, winning only 5 percent of the vote and barely registering as an electoral afterthought. But this time, after finishing well ahead of eight other candidates on Tuesday in the first […]
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