| In this edition, we go to Chicago for a mayoral runoff that could send the city in two very differenÍâ Íâ Íâ Íâ Íâ Íâ |
 | David Weigel |
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In this edition, we go to Chicago for a mayoral runoff that could send the city in two very different directions; to New Hampshire, where Chris Christie has a lot of regrets; and to Tennessee, where the identity of a mass shooter turned into a political flashpoint. Was this e-mail forwarded to you? Click here to sign up! |
Why Chicagoâs mayoral race is going down to the wire |
| Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images |
CHICAGO, Ill. â The race to replace Mayor Lightfoot is tightening. The candidates, both Democrats, could not be further apart. |
On Sunday, Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson campaigned across heavily Black wards on the cityâs South Shore and west side, promising to raise taxes on the âultra-richâ and pour their money into the community. |
âDuring the Great Depression, they gave white men shovels before there were places to dig. They gave them housing. They gave them free college. No one called it entitlement,â said Johnson. âIn the city of Chicago, we have stuff to build and lives to save.â |
The next day, ex-Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas rallied with union leaders whoâd already endorsed him, decrying Johnsonâs tax plan and worrying about crime. Johnsonâs proposed taxes, said Vallas, were âjob killers at a time when the city is strugglingâ that came from a candidate who wanted to âdefund the cops.â |
Voter worries about crime have defined Biden-era city elections in major cities, from the victory of New York Mayor Eric Adams in 2021 to last yearâs recall of ex-San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. |
Neither city faced as much violent crime per capita as Chicago. Vallas, a non-factor when he ran for mayor four years ago, rode the issue to a fundraising lead and first-place primary showing. |
âI feel like I need to have a gun in my house,â said Jim Sweeney, the president of IUOE Local 150, as he stood beside Vallas. âThis is not the Chicago I grew up in.â |
But Chicagoâs election isnât another black-and-white story about liberal cities rebelling against crime. One week out from the April 4 runoff, the 69-year old Vallas and 47-year old Johnson are in a dead heat, separated by single digits in polls, in a city thatâs gotten used to landslides. |
Johnson, a teacher and union activist who helped organize the cityâs resurgent left, has portrayed Vallas as an incompetent executive whoâd rather talk about crime than his record â and a crypto-Republican in a community that gave Donald Trump just 16% of the vote. |
Vallas, campaigning with fellow âlifelong Democratsâ to help blunt those attacks, calls Johnson âbought and paid for by the Chicago Teachers Union,â and warns that the city might not recover from a left-wing mayor. |
Vallas grabbed 33% of the vote to 22% for Johnson. Both candidates got the opponent they wanted to maximize their contrasts: For Johnson, a white moderate whoâd made enemies in the other cities that hired him. For Vallas, a Black progressive whoâd mused about âredirecting money away from policing,â an electoral anchor for other Democrats. |
âBrandon Johnson isnât going to be the mayor of this city,â Lightfoot scoffed at one pre-primary campaign stop, at a moment when Rep. Jesus âChuyâ Garcia looked like a more credible progressive candidate. |
But most Chicagoans who didnât vote for Vallas last month went for someone running to his left, including Lightfoot, who started the attacks on his donations from Republicans. Her ads featured a 2009 interview clip where Vallas called himself âmore of a Republican than a Democratâ and said that he was personally âpro-life.â |
Johnsonâs campaign, which includes strategists who worked on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sandersâ 2020 presidential bid, went after Vallas relentlessly for his criticism of some Democrats and progressive ideas. This week, lawn signs with no listed sponsor began appearing in Black precincts on the cityâs south side â Vallasâ name next to a Trump-style âMAGA 2024â logo. Vallas blamed Johnson for the signs, which Johnson flatly denied. |
âItâs embarrassing, itâs humiliating. Itâs really insulting when you really think about it,â Vallas said on Monday. âYou have a whole conversation about how youâve been an undying supporter of Roe vs. Wade and womenâs reproductive rights. And then when somebody asks you about your personal religious convictions, you make a comment, and thatâs the comment that shows up in commercials.â |
But the message had made inroads with the cityâs heavily Democratic electorate. âMore than anything, itâs the problem with Vallas,â said Josef Michael Carr, an organizer of Johnsonâs Sunday stop at a South Shore school gym. âBrandon is a great candidate. But you see on the news that Vallas, heâs associated with many people that supported former President Trump. And that just doesnât sit well with most Chicagoans.â |
| Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images |
Johnson, whoâll campaign with Sanders on Thursday, has also connected his party loyalty to his progressive tax and schools agenda â one that has been stymied by generations of mayors since the death of Mayor Harold Washington in 1987. |
âVallas needs the middle class and working class people to pay so that his donors can make good on their investment in his campaign,â Johnson said in a Monday speech to the City Club of Chicago. âI believe that the wealthy should pay their fair share, just like all Democrats.â |
But there are many kinds of Democrats in Chicago, and Johnson is building on left-wing organizing that started as a response to two-term Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The CTU and its national affiliates have put more than $2 million combined into a campaign to defeat Vallas; the United Working Families labor coalition, founded in 2014, is canvassing for votes. It endorsed Johnson last September, when he was polling in the low single digits. |
âThe terrain of the 2023 municipal elections â including a weak mayor and an unprecedented wave of aldermanic retirements â provides us with a generational opportunity to continue organizing for radical alternatives and mass-based political power,â UWF wrote in its endorsement resolution. |
In Vallas, the union sees a long-time enemy whose real education plan can be seen in his charter school advocacy in other cities. In Johnson, the union has a candidate who favors strong âneighborhood schoolsâ over a system of school choice and selective enrollment. |
âWe cannot afford to have a stratified school district where you have to apply in order to have access to a quality school,â Johnson said on Monday. âWeâre talking about the desires of families and parents like mine, who do not want to receive letters deeming their children ineligible. Thatâs an inequitable structure.â |
Some âradicalâ ideas have not made it. In debates, Johnson has repeatedly rejected the âdefundâ approach to policing, emphasizing the part of it that got lost in the protests of 2020 â that more jobs and resources in deprived neighborhoods would prevent crime. He portrays Vallasâ promise to fill the more than 1000 vacancies in the police force as an unrealistic quick fix thatâs less effective than his own plan to hire more detectives. |
âIâm not going to defund the police,â Johnson said at the City Club event. âWouldnât it just be easier to believe a Black man when heâs telling you the truth?â |
- In the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman frames the race as a clash between the CTU and the FOP, with police union president John Catanzara acting as a drag on Vallas. Catanzara predicted âblood in the streetsâ and a mass exodus of cops if Johnson prevailed; one day later, Vallas called those comments âabsolutely irresponsible.â Previously, in an interview with Semafor, Vallas emphasized that heâd been endorsed by the FOPâs ârank and file,â not its president, whoâs not an electoral asset in a Democratic city.
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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie returned to the state where his presidential dreams ended to rally voters against a Donald Trump comeback. âIâll be honest with you. We all made a strategic error,â said Christie, explaining why he became the first ex-Trump challenger to endorse his campaign. âI stayed with him in 2016 because I didnât want Hillary Clinton to be president.â |
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| YouTube/Rebecca For Philadelphia |
Friends of Brandon Johnson, âDifference.â Johnsonâs campaign has tried to turn Vallasâ crime-centric campaign against him, portraying him as obsessed with an unrealistic police hiring number and little else. Here, Johnson says that he alone has âa plan to make Chicago safer by finally going after the root causes of crime,â and he alone has pledged not to raise property taxes, highlighting how Vallas has promised only to âcapâ them. |
Vallas for Mayor, â911 Unanswered.â Under pressure from Johnson, Vallas has stuck with his theme: The election is about crime, and his opponent would make it worse. Thatâs dramatized with a gimmick previously seen in Donald Trumpâs 2020 campaign, playing the sound of a 911 call to evoke what might happen after âBrandon Johnsonâs deep cuts to the police departmentâ â specifically, that âresponse times will get worse.â |
Rebecca for Philadelphia, âTwo Mayors.â John Street and Michael Nutter, who both served two terms as Philadelphiaâs mayor, left office with plenty of enemies. They appear in city controller Rebbeca Rhynhartâs campaign ad for mayor as symbols of the good old days, when crime was lower. Nutter praises her âcommon sense plans to tackle violent crime,â while Street promises that she can âget illegal guns, trash, and abandoned cars off our streets.â |
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Last weekâs thumb-sucking discussion of whether âwokeâ could be defined, or whether it had become a meaningless catch-all GOP insult, didnât really reach a resolution. But this is a good snapshot of something Republicans are comfortable mocking and defining as âwokeâ: using preferred gender pronouns. Just one in five Americans say they like doing it, and even fewer, 17%, say that transgender athletes should be âable to play on teams that match their current gender identity.â Republicans havenât gotten the electoral bounce they expected from opposing this, but they donât see an electoral downside, either. A question about broader transgender rights suggests one hurdle: Only 43% of respondents said society had gone âtoo farâ in accepting transgender people, versus 56% who thought the level of tolerance was âabout rightâ or had ânot gone far enough.â |
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Democratic voters continue to be worried about the oldest-ever president winning a second term, and uninterested in any particular alternative candidate. When asked who theyâd support if Biden opted not to run again, 51% of Democrats have no idea; just 13% say Vice President Harris, who consistently polls worse than Biden in trial heats against Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. Just 1% favor Marianne Williamson, the only declared candidate for the Democratic nomination, and just as many favor Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman who left the party last year. |
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Details on the motive and biography of the shooter in Mondayâs attack in Nashville on a Christian school are still unclear. But Nashville police chief John Drake described âherâ as transgender and officials pointed to a social media post using masculine pronouns. |
That prompted Vivek Ramaswamy to denounce âtransgenderismâ and promise to treat it like a âmental disorderâ if elected. |
âWe spend $80 billion per year through the U.S. Dept of Education that helps fund radical gender and racial ideology to create psychopaths,â Ramaswamy said in a statement. âWhen someone identifies as a gender different from their biological sex, more often than not, that is a sign and a symptom that they are suffering from a mental illness.â |
In an interview earlier this month, Ramaswamy had told Semafor that âa plain readingâ of how courts have interpreted anti-discrimination law protects gender identity, even though he did ânot think it should be included.â |
Other Republicans, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, made the same Nashville linkage as Ramaswamy, part of a broader movement towards open antipathy toward transgender identity thatâs been growing more prominent on the right. Major national medical institutions â the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Associationâ do not categorize gender dysphoria as a mental illness, and have criticized efforts to restrict medical treatment for it. |
Pushing back on Greene, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. told reporters that itâs âabsolutely disgusting and she should be looking into a mirror as to why sheâs defending and posing with the same weapons that are being used to kill children, teachers and educators.â |
Other 2024 candidates didnât make the connection. In New Hampshire, Nikki Haley responded to the shooting with another call for security at schools: âItâs okay if there are metal detectors.â |
Donald Trump didnât respond and followed his weekend rally in Waco, Tex. with a friendly Sean Hannity interview. He used it to embellish the story of his 2017 tweet endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, saying that the candidate, then a congressman, had begged him with âtears in his eyesâ to endorse his campaign, recalling that challenger Adam Putnam âwas beating Ron by 30 points or something.â |
In reality, Trump endorsed DeSantis before he got into the race, in December 2017; DeSantis entered the race weeks later, initially led Putnam, then slipped behind him in May and June 2018. In his memoir, DeSantis argues that his late June debate victory propelled him to the nomination, after an early assist from Trump. |
California Rep. Ro Khanna wonât run to replace retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, endorsing fellow Bay Area Rep. Barbara Lee in an appearance on CNNâs âState of the Union.â Khanna, whoâd previously said that it was important to have a Black woman in the Senate, added that Lee would be an âanti-warâ voice; Rep. Adam Schiff, who started the race with the largest war chest of any Democrat, voted for both the 2001 authorization of war in Afghanistan, and the 2002 authorization of the invasion of Iraq. |
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⊠seven days until Chicagoâs mayoral runoff and Wisconsinâs state Supreme Court election |
⊠49 days until primaries in Kentucky |
⊠222 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia |
⊠588 days until the 2024 presidential election |
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