Chicago Mayor Manages to Unite 80% of His City

2024: Let’s Go Brandon!  

2025, in Chi-town anyway: Get Out, Brandon!

Give it up for Brandon Johnson, though. Not too many politicians can unite nearly 80% of his/her electorate. Yet that is exactly what Mayor Johnson has done with Chicago voters, who overwhelmingly agree that Johnson has to go:

Just under 80% of respondents in a new poll said they disapprove of the job that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is doing.

The overwhelming disapproval comes from a survey of nearly 700 likely Chicago voters in a poll conducted between Feb. 20 and 21 by M3 Strategies.

So the other 20% approve, right? Right? Er, not exactly. According to the poll results, Johnson managed to achieve a whopping 6.6% favorable response, perhaps one of the lowest ever achieved by a significant politician holding public office at the time. That means that less than a third of the respondents who don’t explicitly view Johnson unfavorably view him favorably. 

Heck, Richard Nixon at least made it into double digits even after resigning the presidency over Watergate. You could probably find seven percent of Chicagoans to claim belief in a flat earth — and there would likely be a lot of overlap between that cohort and those who view Johnson favorably, too. Worth noting too — Donald Trump voters only make up 18% of the polling sample, so this isn’t just a sampling error. 

Of course, this is just one survey. It’s an outlier, right? Right? Nope. A month ago, M3 also conducted a similar poll for the Illinois Policy Institute, and found very similar outcomes:

The poll, conducted from Jan. 21 to Jan. 23, surveyed 798 voters and asked, “Do you have a favorable opinion of Mayor Johnson?” 

Only 14% of respondents expressed a favorable view, with 80% reporting an unfavorable opinion, and the rest offering no opinion.

The poll also gauged public opinion on the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). 

About 28.8% of respondents had a favorable view of the CTU, while 60.2% held an unfavorable opinion, and the remainder had no opinion.

Johnson won office with the enthusiastic support of the CTU. Now the teachers are threatening to strike, and Johnson thus far can’t get a deal with his political allies. Not that it would matter much; with these ratings, any deal Johnson cuts with the CTU is likely to make matters worse for both sides with Chicago voters. 

What has Chicagoans so unhappy? Majorities cite crime (67%) and high taxes (54%) as the biggest issues facing the city. Interestingly, immigration comes in fourth at 24%, although it’s not clear in which context the issue exists. Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker have pledged to obstruct Trump’s efforts to round up criminal aliens for deportation; that doesn’t appear to have done anything for Johnson’s standing, so presumably Chicagoans want crime addressed through cooperation with ICE. 

About the only good news for Johnson in this poll is that he’s not due to face voters for another two years. His four-year term runs out in May 2027, and it’s tough to see how his political standing could possibly get any worse between now and the election. He replaced an unpopular Lori Lightfoot, whose approval ratings looked comparatively fabulous at the midway point of her single term four years ago:

Halfway through her term and faced with challenges on multiple fronts, Chicago voters lean toward approval of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s performance in office, according to a new WGN-TV/Emerson College poll.

By a 48 to 39% margin, Chicago voters approve of the overall job Lightfoot is doing. Thirteen percent (13%) are unsure or have no opinion.

That flipped to 42.5/45.9 two months later and slowly declined over the following two years. By the time Lightfoot ran for re-election in 2023, she finished third with just 16.8% of the vote in the primary. She got soundly beat by both Johnson and Paul Vallas, who actually came in first but lost the runoff when the progressive Left banded together behind Johnson. 

And now Johnson can’t even get to Lightfoot’s disastrous level of support in two successive polls … and there’s still two more years left in which Chicagoans will experience Johnson’s radical incompetence. Caveat emptor, Windy City!