As Democrats meet in Chicago to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as their candidate for president, the party’s historical tension between its moderate wing, led by President Joe Biden, and its left flank is never far from the surface. And there is no one more emblematic of that rift than the mayor of the convention’s host city, Brandon Johnson, who was elected last year.
On the first night of the convention, Johnson delivered an energetic speech, lavishing praise on both Harris and Chicago, which he called “the greatest freakin’ city in the world.” But in an interview with Mother Jones magazine published shortly before the convention, Johnson went off the script of the Democratic establishment, calling Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza “genocidal.” The two messages gestured in very different directions.
A Democrat, Johnson, now 48, a former public school teacher and union activist, emerged from a crowded nonpartisan primary last spring, propelled by initial optimism among some that he might forge a new path for progressive governance. A little more than a year later, though, Johnson’s administration is “floundering,” as a recent Chicago Sun-Times editorial put it. He has a low 28% approval rating, according to a poll conducted this spring, far lower than even Biden’s before he dropped out of the presidential race. Many residents, even those who supported Johnson, are frustrated by a leader they say is more interested in ideology than pragmatism. His missteps range from lackadaisical responses to crime and the migrant crisis to an uncomfortably close relationship to the unapologetically activist Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) — as well as disputes with key constituents over how to deal with protests against the war in Gaza.
Those protests are getting a national audience this week at the convention. For months, Democrats have worried that the party’s divisions over the Middle East and other issues would dominate the halls of the United Center, the sports arena on the city’s west side, and create chaos in the surrounding streets, akin to the scenario that unfolded when Chicago hosted the party’s national convention in 1968.
Months before that historic event, with protests mounting against the war in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson had stunned the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection. In contrast to 2024, though, at the time the Democrats arrived in Chicago 56 years ago, they had still not yet settled on a nominee. Inside the convention hall, party pooh-bahs fought with anti-war activists. Outside in the streets, police clashed with anti-war protesters. The Democratic Party emerged from Chicago in tatters and, in November, lost the election to Republican Richard Nixon.
Democrats are hoping this history will not be repeated — or even evoked. So it was fortuitous when the party unified behind the vice president, a former prosecutor, attorney general and senator who has shifted between progressive and moderate positions. With a detente in place, she appears to be moving closer to the center even as Republican Donald Trump attempts to portray her as a radical.
Yet the battle for the party’s soul isn’t over. The left flank is bound to make a reenergized push for influence — if not during this high-stakes election season, then when it ends. Harris’ selection of Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who has championed progressive policies during his time in office, may tamp down some of the frustration with the dominance of Biden-style moderates. But Walz — with his long record of centrist pragmatism in the House of Representatives — may not be the answer the left has been looking for, especially when it comes to seeking young leadership that could compete for the presidency in 2028 or 2032.
Johnson should be in that conversation. He could have been a rising star to be feted at the DNC, introduced to a national audience ahead of a broader political rollout. But between high crime, the migrant crisis and persistent questions about Johnson’s leadership, he has been relegated, at best, to second-tier status as the Democrats set up on the shores of Lake Michigan. And if he serves as an example, it is more for his critics than his supporters, a case study in progressivism undone by its own contradictions.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Johnson, who is Black, won a contentious runoff over a white law-and-order centrist by courting a coalition of Black residents on the south and west sides of the city as well as white liberals in the city’s north. He promised to be an energetic reformer who would create a fairer, more equitable city.
I had the chance to watch him up close in the final days of the runoff. He was not always clear about his policy proposals but was a rousing speaker with a charismatic presence, allowing him to overcome withering attacks from the police union and skepticism from the city’s business elite.
“Progressive values are deeply tethered to Black liberation,” he told me at the time. “I’m committed to making investments — investing in schools and investing in transportation, investing in public housing, investing in a pathway to home ownership.” (He has curtailed his press availability since taking office and declined numerous requests for comment for this article.)
Johnson’s victory fueled hopes among progressives that their policies could thrive in the Midwest, pushing the rest of the party further to the left. “There are elements of Brandon Johnson that feel very transformational,” the prominent Chicago-based political consultant Tracy Mayfield told me last year. If Johnson could unite social justice activists, public sector unions and pro-immigrant groups with more established liberal voters, he could forge a new progressive coalition.
“Working people are going to elect one of their own,” Mayfield told me in the closing days of the campaign, when many in the city thought his opponent would win.
Almost as soon as he was elected, a crisis began to test Johnson’s young administration. For months, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas had been busing migrants to Chicago and other liberal cities as a way to challenge progressives’ assertions that they welcomed all immigrants and to call attention to law enforcement problems on his own state’s porous border with Mexico. Johnson inherited that crisis from his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. But by many accounts, he made it only worse.
By a 2-to-1 margin, Americans disapproved of the Trump administration’s harsh treatment of immigrants, in particular its policy of separating children from their parents at the border with Mexico. But the rapid influx of newcomers with nowhere to live and no way of supporting themselves heightened existing fears over crime, housing and jobs.
As Johnson’s tenure began, thousands of migrants were already sleeping in police stations across the city. The number kept rising (it is now about 46,000), but Johnson remained steadfast.
“Immigrants are welcome here,” he wrote on social media. “Chicago must lead with and live by the promise to be a sanctuary city.” And yet he offered only vague plans and rhetoric about food and shelter.
The mayor wanted to erect large tent cities, including one in the mostly Latino neighborhood of Brighton Park, which ferociously opposed his proposal. Residents there wondered why the mayor had made no such plans in, say, Lincoln Square, a largely white area where signs declaring that “no human being is illegal,” among other progressive convictions, peered from manicured lawns.
In an attempt to resolve the crisis, Johnson and J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, sent a joint letter in August 2023 to the Biden administration, asking for expedited work authorization permits for asylum seekers. Behind the scenes, however, Pritzker was growing increasingly frustrated with the pace and depth of Johnson’s planning, according to news reports. No mayor or governor had a perfect solution. But Johnson’s critics felt he lacked the urgency the situation demanded and failed to understand why his constituents were so upset.
“What the leftists and the progressives are not getting is that people are not happy about the migrants,” the Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told New Lines. “They see that as a threat to their basic lifestyle.”
Then, in late 2023, an environmental sampling revealed toxic elements in the soil of one of the proposed tent city sites. Johnson pivoted to disperse thousands of migrants to 28 shelters across the city. In these shelters, however, stays are limited to 60 days. Over the past several months, Johnson has been forced to evict 966 migrants, which he did while arguing, “We are still living up to our values.”
Between his welcoming overture and eventual decision to evict these migrants, Johnson managed to infuriate nearly all his supporters: Latino alderpeople (elected members of the city council) who saw the evictions as cruel and contrary to his promises; Black alderpeople who were being forced to sell Johnson’s plans to their own skeptical constituents; and even progressive supporters who felt the mayor was unable to get anything done. As Jeanette Taylor, a progressive South Side alderperson and, at the time, an ally of the mayor, put it in a December radio interview with the Chicago Reader’s longtime political observer, Ben Joravsky: “We look real stupid right now.”
Things only worsened in the new year as the migrant crisis exacerbated the city’s long-standing problem with homelessness. The number of people living on Chicago’s streets varies wildly, but one 2023 count found that 42% of shelter residents were asylum seekers. Whatever the exact figure, there was little disagreement across the political spectrum: Far too many people were sleeping on the street, and far too many of them were migrants.
To alleviate these problems and reduce income inequality, Johnson had proposed a plan called Bring Chicago Home, which would have used a real estate transfer tax to allocate $100 million per year for homeless services. In March, the measure was defeated 52%-to-48% in a referendum, which most political observers saw as a huge defeat for the mayor’s agenda.
“I’m still here,” Johnson said at a news conference afterward. “Still standing.” Standing and governing, however, are not the same thing.
Johnson isn’t Chicago’s first Black progressive mayor. That was Harold Washington, who was first elected in 1983. The two men couldn’t be more different. Washington was a veteran political insider who spent his first term confronting reactionary white alderpeople in the now-legendary series of bitter political skirmishes known as the Council Wars. He won reelection, only to die of a heart attack in 1987 — worn down, according to his friends and aides, by the political game he loved so deeply.
Johnson was new to that game when he took office. Raised in a large family in the Chicago suburbs, he was the son of a preacher, and you can hear some of Andrew Johnson’s churchly cadence in his son’s voice. He attended Aurora University, a small college in rural Illinois. After graduation, he moved back to the city and taught public school for five years.
In 2011, in his mid-30s, Johnson joined the CTU as an organizer. At the time, the union was in the middle of a transformation led by its new president, Karen Lewis, a tough, smart and ambitious leader who had been one of the first Black women to attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
The following year, in 2012, the CTU went on strike for the first time in 25 years. The strike was a means to pressure the city into better pay and benefits for teachers as well as less onerous performance measures. But there was a broader goal, too. Lewis wanted public school teachers to be on the vanguard of a resurgent progressive movement that pushed back against Bill Clinton-style neoliberalism. Affordable housing, racial equity, fair wages: These all became part of the union’s expansive remit. “Their ambitions are global,” Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, told New Lines, pointing out that only 17% of the union’s spending today goes toward advocating for teachers. Much of the rest is for political advocacy.
Lewis taught Johnson how to see himself as more than just a union organizer. As Joravsky, the longtime Chicago political observer, wrote in the Chicago Reader last year, “Karen Lewis laid the groundwork for Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory,” teaching him how to build “coalitions with community groups on housing, economic development, and other issues outside of wages and benefits for teachers.” After Trump’s election in 2016, the CTU became a more ambitious and sophisticated political organization, one of many groups on the left, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, that now saw confronting the MAGA agenda, in all its local and national manifestations, as part of its mission.
In 2018, Johnson left the CTU to run for the Cook County Board of Commissioners. He won, thanks in part to the union’s massive organizing and get-out-the-vote operation (today the CTU has 20,000 members). It was the same operation that later helped him become mayor.
“The CTU,” Berg said, “is the reason Brandon Johnson is mayor.”
From the start of Johnson’s political ascent, critics worried that the former CTU activist would be beholden to the union. And the Chicago Tribune seemed to confirm at least some of those fears when it revealed that the union had written some of Johnson’s official letters to state legislators in Springfield, the state capital.
The mayor may share the CTU’s progressive ideas, but Chicago is a historically pragmatic city. Its most famous (adopted) son, Barack Obama, practiced a politics of conciliation when he came to Washington, an approach that alienated him from national progressives who would have favored a more to-the-barricades approach.
Perhaps one of Johnson’s most unusual moves has come in the recent battle over the potential move of the Chicago Bears, whose owners declared that they would be leaving the team’s legendary but outdated home, Soldier Field, for new digs in the suburbs. During the initial part of the campaign, Johnson had opposed using public funds to renovate the stadium and keep the Bears from leaving. But once he was mayor — and after the teachers union indicated that it wanted the Bears to stay put — Johnson switched positions. He now supports using $1.5 billion to persuade the Bears to remain in the city.
This decision “to stand with billionaires” like Bears owner Virginia Halas McCaskey seemed to surprise even Johnson himself.
“You could not have convinced me a decade ago,” he told NBC Sports, “that I would have the opportunity to do that.”
In his inaugural address, Johnson referenced “the soul of Chicago” more than a dozen times.
“I’m talking,” he said as the speech concluded, “about a revival in the city.”
Residents were ready for revival after the city’s long struggle with COVID and the sense of anxiety and disorder that came with it.
“People were excited when he got elected,” said Pete Giangreco, one of Chicago’s top political consultants. Some moderates were willing to overlook Johnson’s ties to the CTU and the support he had expressed for “defunding the police” in the summer of 2020. Now that he was about to take power, many assumed he would move toward the center.
Then, in April 2023, hundreds of teens, many of them Black, converged in downtown Chicago as part of a flash mob organized on social media. It quickly got out of hand. “Viral videos show large groups of people disrupting traffic, dancing on cars and getting involved in fights,” Chicago’s local ABC affiliate reported. Two teenagers were shot.
Johnson was still only mayor-elect at the time. He could have said nothing, letting Lightfoot, the outgoing mayor, deal with the public outrage. But he didn’t.
“It is not constructive,” he said in a statement, “to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” If this wasn’t justifying violence, it was at least excusing it, his critics declared. They have not forgotten it. “You’re not vilifying the kids by holding them accountable for bad behavior,” said Jackie Paige, a Black Chicago resident who strongly opposes Johnson and is disenchanted with the Democratic Party. “Will he encourage his children to do what those children are doing?”
Crime remains a powerful issue in Chicago. On the positive side, homicides are down by about 9% in 2024, in keeping with national trends. But robberies and property crime continue to plague the city (they’re up 16% and 12% respectively, according to figures from earlier this summer available through the Chicago Data Portal). Carjackings are down from a high of 1,851 two years ago but on track to once again easily exceed pre-pandemic levels. And a few high-profile incidents in neighborhoods not known for crime have left some residents uneasy. In November 2023, a group of armed carjackers and robbers assaulted people and businesses for eight hours in the usually calm Lincoln Square neighborhood. And last month, the police arrested a 14-year-old suspect in what was described in news reports as a “violent crime spree” across several North Side neighborhoods.
“Black people have been dealing with violence in their neighborhoods for 50 to 60 years,” says Giangreco, the Democratic consultant. “But now there’s carjackings on the North Side and white people are freaking out.”
The mayor won praise from political elites for appointing Larry Snelling, who is Black and a widely respected veteran of the force, to head the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Johnson had also promised to boost the number of detectives, arguing that not solving crimes posed a danger to public safety, especially in Black neighborhoods where clearance rates — the percentage of crimes actually solved — were especially low. Yet the number of CPD detectives actually decreased in Johnson’s first year, mostly because of retirements.
At the same time, Johnson has disappointed progressives who expected him to follow through on his campaign promise to root out police officers with ties to the Oath Keepers, an extremist group, according to a recent investigation by the Sun-Times and Chicago Public Radio. Though an inspector general called it “an issue of profound importance and pressing public concern,” the police department has not disciplined a single officer. In a rare instance of blunt political calculation, Johnson did not push the CPD to do so, likely fearing a prolonged battle with the powerful police union over First Amendment rights.
Then there is the fiasco over ShotSpotter, a technology that uses AI-powered sensors to tell police officers where gunshots have been fired. Progressives oppose it, arguing that the technology amounts to excessive and potentially unconstitutional surveillance. During the mayoral race, Johnson’s campaign called ShotSpotter “unreliable and overly susceptible to human error.” In February, he said Chicago would terminate its ShotSpotter contract — only to backtrack and end up overpaying to extend it through September — “to make sure that there’s time for this orderly transition,” as one of his advisers explained to the Sun-Times. Then, in a humiliating move, the city council voted in May to give itself the authority to enter into its own contract with ShotSpotter, effectively robbing Johnson of power.
David Orr, a veteran Chicago politician who briefly served as mayor in 1987 following Washington’s death, says that Johnson has failed to come up with a plan for better public safety and other issues, let alone execute a legislative strategy. As he put it in an interview with New Lines: “There’s been far too much ideology and speechmaking.”
Perhaps no issue has confounded the Democratic Party quite like the war in Gaza, revealing divisions between the left and center that had been in the making for decades. And here, too, Johnson found himself at once standing on principle and sinking into a political quagmire.
Late last year, Chicago Alderperson Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez introduced a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It was, as the Chicago Council of Global Affairs noted, part of a sharp increase in resolutions related to world politics, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This one, though, came with especially strong passions attached. Although Chicago has a large Jewish population, the 50-person city council has a single Jewish member, Debra Silverstein, who represents part of the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park. Silverstein opposed the cease-fire resolution and was heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters in response. Johnson ultimately cleared the chamber but otherwise did little to remove the demonstrators from the building. They waited for Silverstein outside the elevators, chanting, screaming and accusing her of genocide, according to firsthand accounts and social media posts.
The cease-fire resolution ultimately passed but only after Johnson expended considerable energy to whip council votes in its favor. He cast the tie-breaking vote himself. Pro-Palestinian groups celebrated, but many observers felt it was yet another instance of Johnson putting ideology over practicality, using what little political capital he had to pass a measure that didn’t improve the lives of the people who live in his city.
Johnson is an avid supporter of Harris and Walz. But some Democrats worry that the mayor’s ideological affinity with the pro-Palestinian movement will mar Harris’ moment at the Democratic convention. After protesters rejected a site for planned demonstrations far from the event, Johnson conceded, allowing them to rally near the United Center. If violence erupts, many fear that the chaos will only help Trump, as it helped Nixon in 1968.
“You’ve got a convention coming here that could destroy Brandon Johnson,” warns Orr, the onetime mayor. At the same time, he believes that Johnson has an opportunity to emerge from the summer in a stronger place.
“It’s not too late for there to be some comebacks,” he told me. “But I think some of the tunes have to be changed.”
If Johnson wants an example of how this could work, he needs to look no further than Harris. In briefly running for president in 2019, the then-senator from California seemed to clumsily court progressives who were always more likely to support Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. In doing so, Harris ignored the moderates desperate to defeat Trump.
Since becoming this year’s Democratic presumptive nominee, however, she has run a campaign that has eschewed identity politics and verbiage that caters to academics. She has instead offered straightforward, moderate positions on issues like crime, immigration and fracking. And in roughly a month, she has pulled ahead of Trump in some national polls and across key swing states.
Critics say she has shape-shifted to ascend to power. Supporters, however, counter that she has simply embraced what Johnson and other Democrats tempted by ideological purity might consider if they want to spur actual change: pragmatism.
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