Chicago's mayoral race is not a fight. It is a succession

BEFORE anyone else had even filed a name, the signal was unmistakable. On Sunday, Illinois's secretary of state, Alexi Giannoulias, announced his candidacy for mayor of Chicago. He had already raised nearly $22m for a contest that had not yet formally begun. His campaign's opening line was "restoring basic competence to city government". It was not a challenge to the incumbent, Brandon Johnson. It was a succession.

Mr Johnson has still not said whether he will run for a second term in the election on February 23rd 2027. That silence is itself a message. Three years into a first term elected on a wave of progressive idealism, the mayor's approval rating has collapsed to 23%, according to a poll commissioned by the University of Chicago's Mansueto Institute and released in July. Just 14% of Chicagoans want him to run again. Mr Giannoulias, by contrast, generates enthusiasm among 52% of voters. At least eight other candidates are already in the field; the Democratic Party is not ready to oust Mr Johnson so much as it has already done so and is now arguing over who gets the keys.

The trouble is not merely personal. Mr Johnson's tenure reveals a more familiar problem about what happens when political ambition outstrips administrative capacity. He entered office with a mandate to reduce violence, reform policing and tax the wealthy. His administration has delivered on none of these objectives in anything close to the promised form-and has made the city's finances worse along the way.

The budget numbers are the most disquieting part. Chicago ended 2025 with a $146m deficit. Mr Johnson's proposed $16.6bn budget for 2026, which relied heavily on one-time revenues and cut the city's advance pension payment from the planned $238m to $120.2m. Those advance payments were one of the few policies that had earned the city praise from credit-rating agencies; cutting them was a retreat from the very fiscal discipline that had lifted Chicago's credit profile. KBRA, a rating agency, downgraded the city's general obligation bonds to A-minus and put them on negative outlook. Moody's left its rating stable at Baa3 but removed its positive outlook. The language of the ratings agencies is measured, but the direction is clear: the market sees less fiscal credibility than it did three years ago.

To be sure, the city's finances were inherited, not created by Mr Johnson. Chicago's pension system is deeply underfunded; the state of Illinois has for decades set contribution levels that leave cities short. And the mayor has at least proposed new recurring revenue, including a monthly head tax on large employers, even if his more inventive ideas-a tax on social media-are legally precarious. The deeper problem is one of scale: Mr Johnson's policy ambitions require sustained revenues that the City Council, still controlled by the aldermanic machine, has repeatedly refused to deliver. His first term is a case study in the limits of mayoral power when the council holds the purse strings.

Then there is crime, the issue on which Mr Johnson's administration has its best claim to success. Homicides fell from 587 in 2024 to 416 in 2025, the lowest number since 1965. Shootings dropped by 35%, robberies by 36%. But the credit is harder to assign. Jens Ludwig, who runs the University of Chicago Crime Lab, notes that the decline is a national pattern, visible in Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia as well. Part of it is the hangover from the pandemic peak in 2021; part may be pandemic-era stimulus money flowing into violence-interruption programmes. That extra funding is expiring. And the early data for 2026 are already less reassuring: homicides were up 8% in the first four months of the year compared with the same period in 2025. A police officer was murdered in April in a shooting that has reignited tensions between the Fraternal Order of Police and city officials. The improvement was real, but it was not all policy-and it may not last.

What the electorate is responding to is not any single failure. It is a sense that the machinery of government has been neglected. Mr Johnson's revolving-door senior staff, his clashes with the Chicago Housing Authority over its leadership, and his inability to get a budget through the council without a show of rebellion have combined into a narrative of chaos. The poll that shows his disapproval is not confined to white voters or suburbs; it crosses racial and geographic lines. When even the core progressive coalition loses faith, the politics become existential.

Mr Giannoulias is the obvious successor because he represents something other than what Mr Johnson did. He is a Democrat who has cultivated unions, business donors and the broader electorate. Real-estate magnate Neil Bluhm gave him $500,000; unions representing carpenters and electricians each contributed $1m. He is not a radical, nor is he a member of the city's old machine. His platform-universal pre-school, higher wages, affordable housing, a "fairer" tax system-is moderate Democratic fare. It is the politics of a city that wants to move on without moving far to the right. His campaign has $22m on hand. Ms Susana Mendoza, the state comptroller who entered the race first, has $1.6m. Mr Johnson reported $631,000 in June. In Chicago politics, fundraising is not just about media buying. It is about organisational capacity and the signalling of viability.

The broader lesson is about Democratic governance in American cities. The progressive wave of the early 2020s produced mayors who promised to redistribute, defund, criminalise less and confront inequality head-on. The result in Chicago is not a policy failure so much as an institutional one. Progressives can win primary elections by mobilising a passionate base. They govern, however, in coalitions that include neighbourhood associations, ethnic leaders, aldermen with their own fiefdoms, unions with their own priorities and a middle class that votes on whether the streets are safe and the trains run. Mr Johnson's coalition could not hold together. The politics of redistribution require a revenue base that the city's structure does not allow a mayor to build alone. The result is a familiar one: rhetoric outpaces authority, and voters blame the person in charge.

The better answer for Democrats is not to swing back to the machine politics that produced the Richard Daley era, with its patronage, corruption and suffocating centralisation. Nor is it to persist with the idea that a sufficiently virtuous mayor can remake a city without the council's cooperation. The first task is to reform the aldermanic system that gives each ward a veto over the mayor's agenda. The second is to build coalitions broad enough to generate revenue, not narrow enough to depend on grants and federal stimulus. Chicago's fiscal future depends on whether its next mayor can convince the council-or change the rules that keep the council in control.

The 2027 election will almost certainly go to a runoff on April 6th. The most likely final two will be Mr Giannoulias and Ms Mendoza. Whoever wins will inherit a city that is less violent than it was but more financially fragile, and a Democratic Party that has learned, if reluctantly, that governing a large city is not the same as organising one. That lesson, at least, is worth something.