The morning after. Chicago dodges a bullet. Big win in Wisconsin. Trump indicted.
Congratulations to Brandon Johnson on his win yesterday to be Chicago’s next mayor.
Reporters like Mary Anne Ahern on the local NBC channel were saying all week that we might not know the results for days or weeks.
It was done by 8:30.
It was close, to be sure. Chicago definitely dodged a bullet.
A Vallas win would have been a disaster for Chicago.
Once again, the Black votes saved the city. Although the turnout in the Black wards was very low, so was the vote city-wide.
Yet Brandon was able to build a winning coalition of lake-front liberals, votes from the Latinx wards that Chuy Garcia won in the primary and the Black wards that Lightfoot won. An uptick in votes by 18-35 year-old voters and a gender divide with women favoring Brandon all served to put him over the 50% mark.
Paul Vallas was unable to expand his votes beyond his base of white voters on the northwest and southwest side.
While Vallas tried to distance himself from the right-wing positions of his past, voters were not buying what he was selling.
Even the life preservers thrown to him by establishment Democrats like Dick Durbin, Pat Quinn and Jesse White couldn’t save him.
Brandon also moved some to the center. But in a funny way, in spite of that, the attack on him as a radical by Vallas only served to solidify and energize his base, while the early framing of Vallas as a closet Republican worked.
In Brandon Johnson’s victory speech he said ,"There's more than enough for everybody in the city of Chicago."
Sure enough.
It’s going to take some work by us to get our share of it.
All in all, it was a busy day yesterday.
But a good one.
It started out with Trump sitting hunched over at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan court room surrounded by his team of lawyers and charged with 34 felony counts.
Then there was the news from Wisconsin that Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz crushed her opponent on Tuesday in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election. The outcome of the contest will likely determine the fate of abortion rights and other key issues in the top presidential battleground.
It was good news for 2024.
You speak for yourself. There’s no “we” here. You want to send your kids to private school? Go for it. Don’t ask me to pay for it.
My wife and I sent our kids to a Catholic school in the most densely Hispanic zip code in the US. Because the school was well run, my kids grew up multiculture, but the test scores were off the charts, both for the school and for our kids.
The nearby publuc schools were failing then and are still failing now. My daughter and her husband simply could not afford the Catholic school. There was no choice for them, as there had been for my wife and I.
I voted based on the issues circumstance forced me to confront. You've read what Johnson said about us. This was a clear signal that he did not believe he needed our vote and that if he were elected, our issues would never be attended to.
It simply wouldn't have made any sense to support someone who took such a stance. We should vote for those who mean us well. These are our friends.