Chicago is slipping ever further into an abyss.
S even months ago, Chicago hosted the Democratic convention that nominated Kamala Harris as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate. Since then, events haven’t been kind to either. Kamala’s electoral bid was a failure, and Chicago has continued its relentless slide into a slow suicide.
Chicago’s government appears determined to become the municipal equivalent of a failed state. That’s only a slight exaggeration.
Voters are certainly noticing, and it seems a lifetime ago that Mayor Brandon Johnson was elected with just 51 percent of the vote — in April 2023. A new poll, by M3 Strategies, finds that Johnson has an eye-popping 6.6 percent approval rating and that just 8 percent want him reelected. His disapproval rating is 80 percent.
As National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar notes,
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.
A mayor and a city government that have completely lost public confidence could be expected to stop digging. After all, there is precious little margin for more error. Chicago’s credit rating is one step removed from junk-bond status, and it faces a yawning budget deficit and a population (see: taxpayer) exodus.
But Mayor Johnson and his stooges on the city council appear determined to drive the city over a fiscal cliff and enact their astonishing spending agenda. Last week, the city council narrowly voted to pass an insane “infrastructure” bond of $830 million, pushed by the mayor. No payments on the new borrowing will be made in the first two years after its enactment, and no payments will be made on the principal for 18 years after that. This back-loaded payment schedule means that the total cost of Johnson’s deal is over $2 billion. Future generations of Chicagoans — assuming enough residents remain in the city to pay taxes — will shoulder the burden.
The bond measure almost didn’t pass. A city council motion to postpone voting on the issue until May deadlocked, 25–25. It was Mayor Johnson who broke the tie to prevent the delay.
When challenged on his record, Johnson lashes out and deflects blame on “racist” and “right-wing” forces. Last year, he dismissed his fiscal critics by blatantly claiming that they “are making the same argument [as] when our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country.” He added: “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.”
It must be said that the narrow majority of voters who elected Johnson in 2023 had plenty of warning that he could become the city’s undertaker. John O. McGinnis, in City Journal, reported: “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.”
Chicago’s next mayoral election is two years away. There is no provision in city or state law for a recall election. It’s not clear how much of a city will be left to repair once Johnson leaves office.