The mayor is now quite possibly the Most Unpopular Man in America. (And we have two years to go.)

I’ve lived long enough to know what it looks like when a politician truly craters in the polling. I’m not talking about “Donald Trump after January 6”–level unpopularity — those are rookie numbers. I’m talking about that swooning, sickeningly dizzying feeling when you see the bottom just truly fall out from underneath a pol (maybe one you like, maybe one you loathe), and he simply no longer has many public friends. I remember George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina, Barack Obama after Obamacare went online, Karen Bass after the Los Angeles fires, and Joe Biden after That Debate. My reflexive response is to mutter, almost with pity, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

But I’m all out of grace at the moment, so let’s pause and gawk at what must be the most extreme political auto-destruction I have ever seen in my American political life, this one right out of my own hometown of Chicago. Yes folks, a new poll is out and making waves in the landlocked Midwest: With a record-breaking 6.6 percent approval rating, Mayor Brandon Johnson is now quite possibly the Most Unpopular Man in America. I periodically mention how toxically unpopular Johnson is among the Chicagoans who (narrowly and stupidly) elected him in early 2023, but I now realize that polls from January showing him sporting a nifty 21 percent approval were not a floor and that there was a trapdoor yet to open underneath them.

M3 Strategies, the pollster, is a GOP-affiliated group; its track record is decent, however, and nothing about the numbers it is reporting here is shocking save for the extreme depths to which Johnson has sunk. Eighty percent of Chicagoans have an unfavorable view of him, up from 70 percent in a different January poll. And you really need to understand what it means when 80 percent of a city as Democratic and racially polarized as Chicago hates your guts: His favorable/unfavorable rating among Latino voters is an utterly staggering 2/88. (You read that right.)  Among white voters it’s 5/84. Among his “base,” black voters? Why he’s practically at home, with a gangbusters 16/67 set of approvals. No politician in Chicago history — I daresay no politician in modern American history, including several who were successfully recalled — has ever been less popular than Johnson. (Two years to go!)

What’s more interesting is how potential 2027 challengers for the mayoral office rate among voters. When I write about Johnson here at NR, my commenters often snark something like “yes, but he’ll be reelected anyway, won’t he?” No. Under no possible circumstances will Johnson survive, not with a 6.6 percent approval rating and an 8 percent “releect” number. He will be bounced even harder in the first round of voting than Lori Lightfoot was two years ago. The question is who takes his place. Paul Vallas nearly won against Brandon Johnson last time . . . but it’s important to recall that he still lost. That doesn’t inspire confidence in a rerun, but then again it’s still probably a better choice than “Sexy” Alexi Giannoulias, the current Illinois secretary of state who is himself infamous as the only Democrat in Illinois who could have possibly lost the 2010 Senate race for Barack Obama’s old seat to Representative Mark Kirk — which he did.

Either way, we have to suffer though two more years of Brandon Johnson, so I promise to do my part to drive his approvals down even further. Maybe we can get him to 3.3 percent by spring break.