Brandon Johnson is rapidly establishing himself as one of the worst mayors in Chicago’s history. In just over a year and a half in office, his approval rating has plummeted to an abysmal 25 percent. This decline highlights broad-based discontent, not only among the civic and business communities but also in a significant portion of the mayor’s progressive base.
Johnson’s tenure has been marked by a troubling blend of cronyism and incompetence. At the heart of his administration is an overt alignment with the teachers’ union, for which he once worked as an organizer. This relationship has also led him to surround himself with untested leftists, whose extreme views have alienated many members of the city council.
Johnson is currently embroiled in three self-inflicted crises, the most pressing of which revolves around his attempts to oust Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. Johnson wants Martinez to secure a $300 million, high-interest loan to help finance an exorbitant contract for the teachers’ union, which is pushing for a staggering 9 percent annual raise in teachers’ salaries and the hiring of nearly 5,000 new teachers, despite declining public school enrollment. The union’s demands extend beyond traditional concerns about compensation and working conditions for its employees—they include building public housing for homeless families. With a former teachers’ union organizer in the mayor’s office, the union now controls the commanding heights of city politics. But even Johnson’s hand-picked members of the Chicago Board of Education balked at his fiscally irresponsible idea and declined to fire the CEO.
Johnson’s next move was to pressure the board members to resign. On Monday, he replaced them with a more pliant crew—including a staff member of the Chicago Teachers Union. This is a short-term board; it is scheduled to be replaced next year, under state law, with a hybrid slate of 11 mayoral appointees and ten others who will be elected in November. It is expected that the interim board will more readily carry out Johnson’s wishes: fire Martinez and hire a new CEO who will take out the payday loan to fund the union raise. But 41 of Chicago’s 50 aldermen have denounced the mayor’s tactics and the instability they have caused.
On the public safety front, Johnson’s administration has faced significant backlash following his decision to eliminate the ShotSpotter system, which utilized listening devices across the city to provide real-time gunshot detection to the Chicago Police Department. ShotSpotter not only aided law enforcement in solving crimes but also helped to provide timely medical assistance to wounded victims.
Johnson claims that ShotSpotter contributes to the over-policing of minority communities. But getting rid of it will only hurt the very communities he professes to care about. Indeed, many aldermen representing minority districts have voiced their support for keeping ShotSpotter. Since the system’s discontinuation on September 23, tragic stories have already emerged of lives that might have been saved if the police had been promptly alerted to gunfire.
On the fiscal front, Johnson is grappling with a looming $1 billion budget deficit that was forecast over a year ago but has been largely ignored. Instead of implementing proactive measures from the beginning of the year, Johnson opted for a hiring freeze just a month ago. His delay in submitting a budget appears to be a strategy to pressure aldermen into acquiescing to his undisclosed plans. He ran for mayor promising various tax schemes, including assessing businesses for every employee, imposing a tax on every financial transaction on Chicago’s exchanges, and raising hotel taxes. But even during his initial honeymoon phase, the legislature was reluctant to support his proposals, recognizing the economic peril of overburdening Chicago’s already-struggling businesses. Johnson’s referendum to raise funds through a transfer tax on commercial and high-priced residential properties also fell flat, reflecting voters’ deep-seated skepticism of his ability to manage funds effectively.
An atmosphere of evasion and demagoguery pervades Johnson’s administration. For instance, while Chicago Public Schools CEO Martinez stated clearly that Johnson had requested his resignation, the mayor dodged questions on the issue, redirecting the conversation toward his broader agenda. Just this week, when Johnson was challenged on his spending plans, he compared his critics to defenders of slavery. “The so-called fiscally responsible stewards are making the same argument when our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country,” he said. “The argument was you can’t free black people because it would be too expensive. They said that it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate black people.”
Johnson’s term as mayor is up in 2027, but it is not clear for how long he will wield much political power. The city council must approve any budget he submits, and thus it holds substantial leverage to roll back Johnson’s policies on ShotSpotter and schools. Moreover, the state legislature and governor must approve most new revenue measures, and they have no incentive to help a politician with Johnson’s dismal approving ratings. Johnson campaigned on a promise not to raise property taxes, even despite inflation. But the most plausible remaining way to balance next year’s budget is to do just that—perhaps at a rate higher than inflation. Of course, if he does so, Johnson’s approval rating and authority will likely plummet further.
Voters had ample warning that Johnson would be a disaster as mayor. They entrusted the public school system to a man who bragged that he never assigned his students any homework. They entrusted their safety to a man who campaigned on removing a system that had demonstrably improved public safety. They entrusted the city budget to a man who failed to pay thousands of dollars in city water bills until it became a campaign issue. The only silver lining to Brandon Johnson’s administration may be its effect on the next election: candidates will try to outdo one another as the mayor’s most vehement critics.
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