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Tag: paul vallas

  • Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics

    Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Chicago voters will choose Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner backed by the powerful teachers union, as the city’s next mayor, CNN projects.

    Johnson will win Tuesday’s runoff election over Paul Vallas, a moderate former city schools superintendent who had campaigned on a pro-police message in a race where concerns about violent crime were central.

    Johnson told supporters his victory had “ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city” and demonstrated a “bold, progressive movement” that he said should be a blueprint for the country.

    “Now, Chicago will begin to work for its people – all the people. Because tonight is a gateway to a new future for our city; a city where you can thrive no matter who you love or how much money you have in your bank account,” he said.

    Vallas said at his election night event that he had called Johnson to concede the race.

    “This campaign I ran to bring the city together would not be a campaign that fulfilled my ambitions if this election is going to divide us more. So it’s critically important that we use this opportunity to come together, and I’ve offered him my full support on his transition,” Vallas said.

    Vallas and Johnson were competing to replace Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose bid for a second term ended when she finished third in the nine-candidate February 28 first round – failing to advance to the top-two runoff.

    Lightfoot had sparred with two of the most powerful forces in this year’s mayor’s race: the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Vallas, and the Chicago Teachers Union, which backs Johnson – a former teacher and union organizer.

    The clash between those two unions is part of a larger battle over how the city handled the Covid-19 pandemic – a period during which violent crime increased and schools were shut down.

    Vallas campaigned on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He vowed to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department, and said he would emphasize community policing and place officers on public transit, after a recent violent crime spike at the Chicago Transit Authority’s trains and stations alarmed many commuters.

    He also highlighted Johnson’s history of supporting calls to “defund the police” – a message that became popular with progressives in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd but that has since receded amid violent crime increases in Chicago and other cities. Top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have long rejected the slogan.

    Johnson said during the campaign that he did not want to slash police spending. He said he would promote 200 new detectives, arguing that solving more crimes would increase Chicago residents’ trust in police and deter crime.

    In his victory speech Tuesday night, Johnson nodded to his clashes with Vallas over crime and policing. He said he envisions “a city that’s safer for everyone by investing in what actually works to prevent crime. And that means youth employment, mental health centers, ensuring that law enforcement has the resources to solve and prevent crimes.”

    Vallas and Johnson spent the weeks leading up to the runoff courting the approximately 45% of the electorate that did not vote for either candidate in February.

    They were particularly focused on Black and Latino voters outside of Johnson’s progressive base and Vallas’ support in White ethnic neighborhoods and the northwestern portion of the city.

    Vallas featured Black mainstays of Chicago politics, including former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and former US Rep. Bobby Rush, in his closing television advertisement touting his Democratic credentials.

    Johnson had argued that Vallas was too conservative for the electorate of a city where 83% of voters backed the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. He highlighted donations Vallas’ campaign received from business interests and Republicans, as well as digital ads paid for by a PAC with ties to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

    “When you take dollars from Trump supporters and try to pass yourself as a part of the progressive movement – man, sit down,” Johnson said at a rally in Chicago with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders last week.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Takes Swipe At Chicago Mayoral Candidate Paul Vallas

    Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Takes Swipe At Chicago Mayoral Candidate Paul Vallas

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    Paul Vallas, one of two finalists in the race for Chicago mayor, has often been critical of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D).

    The Pritzker policies with which Vallas took issue included an election-year tax cut that Vallas saw as an effort to “fool” voters, a reduction in a tax credit for low-income private school parents and, most of all, the progressive governor’s cautious approach to reopening public schools and lifting mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Speaking on a conservative talk-radio show in December 2021, Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, argued that Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot were relying on executive orders to implement public health policy because it “gives them the ability to act like dictators” by circumventing their respective legislatures.

    Pritzker has remained neutral in the Chicago mayoral runoff, which is due to conclude on April 4. In that contest, Vallas, a centrist, faces off against Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a progressive.

    HuffPost nonetheless asked Pritzker’s political staff whether he had any response to Vallas’ most striking criticism of the governor.

    Pritzker campaign spokesperson Natalie Edelstein replied with a statement that both defended Pritzker’s conduct and took a subtle jab at Vallas, homing in on his affinity for right-wing talk radio.

    “Throughout the pandemic, Governor Pritzker spent every day fighting to save people’s lives and livelihoods,” Edelstein said. “He did it by following the advice of the nation’s best virologists and epidemiologists, many of whom are at Illinois’s world-class research institutions and hospitals.”

    “Leadership requires making tough choices and not pandering to the loudest voices driven by politics,” she added. “The next mayor of Chicago may be called upon to lead in a similar type of emergency and residents deserve to know if their next Mayor will listen to experts or instead to right wing talk show hosts when making decisions about people’s lives.”

    HuffPost sought a response from the Vallas campaign.

    “Paul Vallas looks forward to working with state leaders in tackling all the issues facing Chicago, from making the city safer to improving education to confronting crisis situations whenever they emerge,” Vallas campaign spokesperson Phil Swibinski said in a statement. “As a lifelong Democrat, Paul respects Gov. Pritzker’s leadership and voted for him in the past election.”

    The two mayoral candidates competing in the runoff ― Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson (left) and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas ― campaign in Chicago in February.

    Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

    Vallas, a charter-school proponent backed by Chicago’s main police union, has run on a message of restoring public safety. He proposes filling the city’s more than one thousand person police backlog and reviving community policing without raising any taxes.

    Johnson, a former school teacher and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, previously embraced the idea of cutting police funding to fund social programs. He is now running on using efficiency savings to add 200 detectives through promotion, as well as raising an array of taxes to finance youth jobs and comprehensive mental health care.

    Liberal cities’ prolonged school closures and other non-pharmaceutical efforts to limit the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have elicited criticism from across the ideological spectrum as even some progressives second-guess the tradeoffs of these policies.

    But Vallas’s criticism of Pritzker is part of a pattern of bashing prominent Democrats and cozying up to right-wing activists, pundits, and even politicians, that has helped Johnson in his quest to define Vallas as a Republican ― and apparently even irked Pritzker.

    In other appearances on right-wing radio in recent years, Vallas has suggested that certain left-wing methods for teaching Black history create an “excuse for bad behavior,” and disparaged former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden.

    Vallas has had a consistently frosty attitude toward Pritzker, whom he dissed in the same interview where he spoke critically about Obama and Biden.

    Vallas even encouraged the leader of a right-wing parents’ rights group to run against Pritzker. He has since apologized for associating with the group after learning of its views on LGBTQ issues.

    Vallas led Johnson by six percentage points in the only public poll conducted since the runoff got underway.

    To close that gap, Johnson is hoping to convince enough moderate Democrats ― especially moderate Black Democrats ― that he is the only real Democrat in the race.

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  • Chicago mayoral candidates Johnson and Vallas clash over policing in debate | CNN Politics

    Chicago mayoral candidates Johnson and Vallas clash over policing in debate | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Chicago mayoral candidates sparred over public safety in a televised debate Thursday night ahead of the April 4 runoff, which has become the latest big-city mayoral race to test voters’ views on crime and policing.

    Paul Vallas accused progressive rival Brandon Johnson of backing the “defund the police” movement, while Johnson charged that Vallas’ plans to ramp up hiring of police officers would be slow and unrealistic.

    Vallas and Johnson, both of whom say they are Democrats and are competing in a nonpartisan contest, advanced to the runoff after the February 28 primary, when incumbent Lori Lightfoot finished third, dashing her reelection hopes.

    Chicago is an overwhelmingly Democratic city: 83% of its voters backed President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. But Vallas and Johnson are on opposite sides of the party’s divide over police policies.

    Vallas, a more conservative former public schools chief backed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, has focused his campaign on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He has vowed to stem an exodus of city police officers and put more cops on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains.

    Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner who is endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, has at times backed the “defund the police” movement. He now says he would not cut police spending but would seek to invest more in impoverished areas.

    In Thursday night’s debate, broadcast on ABC 7, Vallas repeatedly highlighted Johnson’s previous comments in which he had broadly backed shifting public dollars away from policing and toward community-based programs.

    “I’m not going to defund the police, and you know that. You know that. I have passed multi-billion dollar budgets, over and over again,” Johnson said.

    Johnson has said he would promote 200 new detectives to solve more violent crimes. He also said he would seek to crack down on gun violence by more vigorously enforcing “red flag” laws, which allow courts to temporarily seize firearms from anyone believed to be a danger to themselves or others.

    “The best way to engender confidence in public safety, you’ve got to catch people,” Johnson said.

    Vallas said he would rapidly fill thousands of police vacancies, and put those officers on public transit and in communities.

    “There is no substitute for returning to community-based policing,” Vallas said. “You can’t have confidence in the safety of public transportation when there are not police officers at the platforms and police officers at the stations.”

    The race has focused largely on crime. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – increased last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.

    In their previous debate, Vallas had largely sought to remain above the fray while Johnson went on the attack. But on Thursday night – in a move that portended a more contentious turn in a race with at least three more debates and three candidate forums remaining – Vallas went on the attack in the debate’s opening minutes.

    Vallas criticized Johnson’s proposals to increase several taxes, including hotel and jet fuel taxes, a $4-per-head business tax and a higher sales tax on high-end properties.

    Johnson responded that Vallas is proposing spending increases on public safety without detailing how he would pay for them.

    “You can’t run a multi-billion dollar budget off of bake sales,” Johnson said.

    The two also butted heads over school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and the role schools play in combating crime.

    Vallas said he would seek to open public schools to students during periods they would typically be closed – including weekends, summers and holidays – to “give kids a safe place to go.”

    He also lambasted Johnson, who is a teacher and is backed by a union that publicly fought with Lightfoot over when to return to in-person learning, for school shutdowns.

    Fifteen months of closures, Vallas said, is “not investing in people.”

    Johnson said that Vallas was using a “Republican talking point” in criticizing school closures during the pandemic.

    “That’s a part of your party,” Johnson said, showing how he has tried to cast Vallas as too conservative for the overwhelmingly blue city.

    Biden and other top Democratic officials, including Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth and Gov. J.B. Pritzker, have stayed out of the runoff.

    Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn are among the rare national voices to wade into the mayoral race, all endorsing Johnson. In a statement this week, Sanders said Johnson “has been a champion for working families in Chicago.”

    Vallas has influential local endorsements, including several city aldermen and former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, who four times was the top Democratic statewide vote-getter. Meanwhile, Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County board president, endorsed Johnson.

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