Mayor Brandon Johnson: A Turbulent Year in Review

In the 17 short months since his inauguration as Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson has transformed his bold vision for the city’s future and a narrow electoral win into a legacy of — well, not much.

When he isn’t running Chicago, he’s an ambitious and seemingly-competent leader, capable of not only building a broad coalition of support, but also extending an olive branch to his former rivals.

Johnson’s 2023 mayoral campaign, although a close victory, was — for lack of a better word — a tour de force of coalition building. During his candidacy, he shored up support from diverse groups across the city, heading off the efforts of other would-be mayors.

Since taking office in May 2023, there’s been some progress on Johnson’s “Chicago for the people,” including the announcement of 12 weeks of paid parental leave for Chicago Public Schools employees, but it’s become bogged down in the controversy and muck of city politics.

While his office has eliminated the subminimum tipped wage and reopened shuttered mental health clinics, key parts of his 223-page plan for Chicago have yet to be implemented, including promises to stabilize Chicago Transit Authority reliability post-pandemic and boost rental affordability in the face of the ongoing housing crisis.

Despite his wins, opinions on Johnson’s administration have soured. Never having been the city’s most popular political figure — winning the mayorship in a bitterly-contested runoff after garnering just 21.6% of the vote in the first round — his polling has hit all-time lows of 70% unfavorability in some districts.

It’s not hard to see why Johnson has grown so unpopular, even with his successes in mind. The CTA, for example, just announced the creation of four brand-new stations — while over a quarter of the entire system continues to operate as slow-only zones, mostly on the South Side. 

While his policy promises represent a breath of fresh air, and his election heralded change for Chicago politics, the last few months of the Johnson administration have seen the mayor’s agenda slow to a crawl and his city council coalition start to crack.

The first warning signs appeared March 2023, with the failure of the Bring Chicago Home referendum. This proposal, aimed at boosting city revenue and fighting homelessness, was broadly popular — particularly in neighborhoods like Rogers Park, where it passed with 72.3% — but it still fell short by nearly 21,000 votes citywide.

Fairly or not, the proposal’s failure has been laid at Johnson’s feet, with The Chicago Sun-Times describing it as a “referendum on the mayor’s first year in office.”

In the wake of the loss, the city council’s progressive caucus, Johnson’s legislative base, released a statement acknowledging the defeat, but also expressed discontent with the mayor, claiming the referendum failed in part because Chicagoans weren’t sure if they could trust the administration to follow through on promised changes.

While the mayor told his opponents to “buckle up” for the next stage of the fight for Bring Chicago Home — and over his agenda writ large — there’s been little apparent movement to bring back its policy goals, particularly as fresh controversies have hit the fifth floor of city hall.

Problems with the CTA, Chicago Public Schools, migrant aid and an almost billion dollar budget deficit have driven the mayor further and further from his base of support. 

Continued turmoil in the mayor’s office, including a series of high-profile staff turnovers, has peaked with the mayor’s highly-public fight with CPS CEO Pedro Martinez over using a high-interest loan as stopgap funding for the city’s schools.

The battle between different sections of the city’s progressives over how to resolve the CPS funding crisis — pitting Johnson’s debt plan against Martinez’s furlough proposal — resulted in the mass resignation of the old school board last month and earned Johnson major criticism for his handling of the situation.

The mayor has also picked losing fights over the CTA and Regional Transit Authority boards, drawing fire from Gov. JB Pritzker over the lack of an “evolution of leadership” in how the city’s transit is run.

Johnson has tried to reconstruct his campaign strategy of consolidation without the needed coalition-building, infuriating many potential supporters in city government. He’s offered multiple important transit board positions to political allies with no experience, including two well-connected pastors.

One of Johnson’s appointees told alderpeople at his nomination hearing he hardly uses public transportation and their questions about Chicago’s upcoming $730 million transit fiscal cliff were the first he heard of it.

In spite of Johnson’s promises to shake things up and reinvigorate the city’s governance, his decisions — from his board appointments to his flip-flopping on shoveling taxpayer dollars to the Chicago Bears’ billionaire owners for a new stadium — have cracked his support base and raised questions about his ability to govern.

While Chicago’s issues are not Johnson’s fault, they’re certainly his problem. His recent choices have unquestionably tarnished his once progressive image, and with the current trend it’s no wonder discussion has started to swell of making him a “one-termer” in 2027.

In light of the mayor’s disapproval, it’s hard not to draw a connection between his choices and Illinois’ nine point swing toward Republicans in the 2024 presidential election, largely driven by rising voter apathy. Although Democrats still won the state, this shift is a major warning sign against politics as usual, especially considering Illinois is projected to lose two seats in Congress by 2030.

You can’t fix an entire city’s worth of problems in a year, and it’s unfair to expect Johnson to do so. Even Chicago wasn’t built in a day. To truly fix the long-standing and long-ignored problems the mayor has promised to tackle, it’ll take time, commitment and funds from both Springfield and Washington — which are hard to come by without better strategy from city hall.

As America’s cities face a crisis of confidence, Chicago needs its mayor to get over personality politics and coalitional calculus and start making bold choices — not just bold plans — for the future of the city.

As long as he sits in city hall, Johnson succeeding is Chicago succeeding. Let’s hope he does.