Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas Advance To Runoff For Chicago Mayor

Composite image courtesy of Yahoo images.

The Top Two Vote Getters in Chicago's Mayoral Election Now Go Head To Head in a run-off election to be held on April 4, 2023.

Paul Vallas, the ex-CEO of the Chicago Public School garnered the highest vote total of the candidates with 37% and Brandon Johnson, a Cook County Commissioner who gathered 20% of the vote, both short of the required 50.1% needed to win outright.

The candidates offer starkly different visions for the managing of Chicago and of policing/crime issues. Vallas is for a more heavy-handed crime approach, which has little rehabilitation and more prison, and is backed by the CPD FOP, while Johnson favors a more commulity-based, rehabilitation approach along with police accountability reforms.

There is also of course an undeniable, yet palpable racial component to the contest, as Vallas is White and Johnson Black.

Johnson did no doubt help split the Black vote, which led to now ex-mayor Lori Lightfoot becoming the first incumbent Chicago mayor to lose since the city's first female mayor, Jane Byrne lost to the city's first Black mayor, Harold Washington back in 1983.