In Brief:
- Chicago’s mayor has so far not been able to get city council approval for a new tax on big businesses.
- It’s a cornerstone of his plan to fill a $1.15 billion budget hole.
- Mayor Brandon Johnson has weathered a string of crises and low approval ratings.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is not having an easy time.
Johnson’s proposed “head tax,” a per-employee tax on Chicago’s largest businesses that he’s promoted as the centerpiece of a plan to plug the city’s projected $1.15 billion budget gap, appears this week to be headed for defeat. That’s after Johnson pared back the plan to make it more palatable to the 50-member City Council. Another element of his proposed budget plan, a tax on social media companies, also seems to be going nowhere.
That the City Council is going its own way is not too surprising considering Johnson’s track record in his first couple of years as mayor. One of his first big initiatives, a ballot measure to raise the real estate transfer tax to fund homeless services, was defeated by voters last year. The Chicago Public Schools declined to go along with his plan to approve a loan to cover a pension payment — even though Johnson had named a majority of the board’s appointees. Most Chicagoans disapprove of his performance as mayor, according to every recent poll.
What does Johnson’s struggle to pass his progressive agenda mean for newly elected lefties like Katie Wilson in Seattle and Zohran Mamdani in New York? It’s certainly a reminder that turning a campaign against organized business interests into a governing program is no easy feat. But Johnson’s struggles may say more about his own political style than about the viability of his agenda.
A former teacher and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Johnson edged out incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the 2023 general election. He then beat Paul Vallas, a school reformer running a law-and-order campaign, in the runoff. It was in many ways a rough time to be elected mayor. Chicago and other cities were reeling from pandemic-era crime waves, downtown vacancies and rising homelessness. Financial crises were looming for public transit systems as well as municipal budgets.
Johnson benefited from an election system that allowed him to get into a runoff after earning only 21 percent of the vote in the general election. The Chicago Teachers Union, his biggest financial backer, had been a powerful force in local politics prior to his campaign, but its role had never been as decisive as it was in 2023.
Johnson as mayor hasn’t focused much on expanding his coalition, either within the government or outside it. Even with some high-profile staff departures in the early months of his administration, Johnson said early this year that he should have “cleaned house faster” and fired more people from the Lightfoot administration. He’s been faulted for putting people he’s close to in leadership positions regardless of their experience. In one recent instance, the committee selecting the next head of the Chicago Housing Authority said it hadn’t seriously considered Johnson’s preferred candidate, an allied alderman, because he wasn’t qualified for the job.
Critics continue to say he’s too closely aligned with the teachers union. After Johnson pushed the school board to fire its CEO, Pedro Martinez, one councilmember referred to the CTU as Johnson’s “overseers.”
Johnson has continued to describe his policy agenda and his battles with the city’s business community and other powerful people in moral terms. In some instances this has helped him. Johnson’s approval rating actually rose after his outspoken opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Chicago neighborhoods. And the news in Chicago is not all bad: Violent crime is down significantly since Johnson took office, as it is in much of the country, and the mayor has expanded a summer jobs program for kids. But his baseline rhetorical pose — in recent weeks he has suggested that opponents of his budget proposals are “immoral,” or “wicked” or “cowards” — doesn’t seem to be winning him any extra votes on the City Council.
The lesson for other left-leaning city leaders isn’t necessarily, “Surrender your agenda.” Both Mamdani and Wilson have already struck a more conciliatory note without backing away from their campaign pledges. Mamdani notably met with Trump, whose policies he spent most of his campaign decrying. Seattle’s Wilson says she’s committed to raising more revenue from big businesses to support social programs, but has also vowed she’s “not going to be stupid about it.” Their terms will test whether a mayor with a cooperative political touch can enact a more progressive agenda.
The budget impasse in Chicago comes at a pivotal time for Johnson, who recently crossed the halfway mark in his first term. He has dug in his heels on the head tax, framing it as a critical element of his agenda, even though in its current form it would cover only a fraction of the city’s budget gap. Whether or not he gets a version of it through the City Council — the city is headed for an unprecedented shutdown on Jan. 1 if Johnson and the council don’t make a deal — candidates are going to start lining up to take his job over the next few months. Even if there’s time to build the kind of coalition needed to get an agenda approved, Johnson hasn’t indicated he’s focused on doing that.
Some fellow progressives diagnosed the challenge early in Johnson’s tenure, even before his approval ratings sank to historic lows. At the end of 2023, Jeanette Taylor, a progressive councilmember, suggested that progressives had not been “ready” to take over the mayor’s office with Johnson’s win and should instead have built their numbers on the City Council and developed a strategy for running the city government. “We’re pretending like now we got the power,” Taylor said. In fact, they hadn’t taken the trouble to acquire it.
