The city has risen up yet again to scream that they don’t want to be ruled by a union flack-turned-bumbling hack anymore.

Readers of National Review have become well familiar with Brandon Johnson’s reign of error as mayor of Chicago over the past year and a half, if for no other reason than I happen to live here — his ineptitude is part of my daily life. But the list of his achievements has been genuinely newsworthy — whether it’s axing ShotSpotter (and doing it so ineptly it cost the city millions of dollars), ridiculously calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza as the mayor of a midwestern American city, trying to introduce “slave reparations” into the Land of Lincoln, or blaming that SOB Nixon for 2024’s violent crime numbers — and even at times, properly history-making: Johnson is now the most unpopular mayor in the city’s 187 years of existence.

And it looks like for once Chicago’s voters have actually had enough of it. Back in March, during Chicago’s Super Tuesday primary, they delivered a clear warning to Johnson by sending his proposed property-sales tax increase — basically a plot to milk the city’s businesses for money like a dairy cow to fund his ultra-progressive pet projects — down to ruin by a 51-46 margin. Last Tuesday, they kicked back even harder in our city’s first-ever school board elections, which were expected to provide Johnson with a free hand to give the Chicago Teacher’s Union a back-breakingly expensive new contract.

Allow me to briefly explain the rotten situation (which I covered in far greater detail in October): The CTU is the most powerful public sector union in the United States, a political behemoth of the city that, quite literally, elected Brandon Johnson — a former schoolteacher and union lobbyist of theirs — as mayor back in March of 2023 by a few thousand votes. There has never been any doubt in voters’ minds — or Johnson’s mind, for that matter — that he is the union’s creature pure and simple, acting specifically for their benefit while in office. This was proven when Johnson tried to force his own Chicago Board of Education to fire CEO Pedro Martinez, because Martinez refused to take out a high-interest loan to fund the union’s salary and pension demands.

Instead, Johnson’s own hand-picked school board resigned en masse rather than accede to the pressure, and Johnson immediately appointed a second set of more pliable board members to swing the axe for him. On top of that, the first-ever elections for the positions were coming in November — and the CTU and its money were expected to triumph on a ballot line that many voters simply skip altogether.

Then the election came. With ten seats up for grabs (one per district), the CTU only managed to win a shocking four of them. Three of the other seats went instead to charter-schools advocates, and three more to independents who refused to take money from either the CTU or charter school interests.

It would be dangerous to celebrate too much — Johnson will still have control over the Board of Education because while these ten are elected, he gets to appoint the other eleven himself — and he is clearly desperate to complete his mad giveaway to the union. But given how closely identified Johnson is with CTU (you could simply insert an “=” sign between them to clarify the relationship), the city has risen up yet again to scream that they don’t want to be ruled by a union flack-turned-bumbling hack anymore. Johnson will not survive his primary in 2027 — the only question is how much damage he can do before he is ejected from office.