By Illinois Review
A new poll commissioned by Democratic members of Chicago’s City Council shows embattled Mayor Brandon Johnson with an unprecedented 15 percent approval rating – the lowest of any mayor in history as his office faces scrutiny after his former top communications advisor is confronted with multiple complaints of racism, sexual harassment, misogyny and intimidation.
The poll also indicated that the mayor’s revised $150 million property tax increase proposal was dead on arrival and that 78 percent of Chicagoans would vote against their alderman if they supported Johnson’s latest tax increase.
A few weeks ago – in a stunning and unprecedented rebuke, the Chicago City Council rejected a $300 million property tax increase proposed by Mayor Johnson by a vote of 50-0 – leaving the mayor and his team humiliated and struggling to come up with alternative solutions to address the nearly $1 billion budget shortfall.
The mayor is in dire need of a solution to avoid having to lay off city workers, including police officers and firefighters as he struggles to find ways to fund his budget, but the city council were all in agreement: that he wasn’t going to fund his budget by increasing property taxes on a constituency that’s already hurting under the Biden-Harris economy.
The mayor’s office is also dealing with a scandal and includes multiple complaints of racism, sexual harassment, intimidation and misogyny involving his former communications director Ronnie Reese, who was fired earlier this month. The irony is that the mayor often invokes race and plays the racism card whenever he’s asked uncomfortable questions by the press – including questions about the city’s high crime, his administration’s slow start and his recent trip to London that included a Bears game – telling a local reporter, “I have to be very honest with you, it’s pretty jacked up the way you framed that. It is. It is. It’s disrespectful and condescending that the black man is going to London for a game. And people get away with that too much.”
Mayor Johnson also bizarrely compared those who disagreed with him recently about school spending to slavery, saying, “When our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country, the argument was, ‘you can’t free Black people because it would be too expensive. They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people.”
And following President Donald Trump’s historic victory and his upcoming return to the White House, Johnson once again invoked racism by claiming that the president-elect is a “threat” to Black families despite Trump earning more support from Black voters than any Republican in nearly 50 years.
Fox 32 political reporter Paris Schutz has been tracking the complaints involving Ronnie Reese – one of the mayor’s most trusted advisors and closest confidants who was terminated earlier this month. In one complaint, “Reese says he makes all decisions because I’m the man.” In another disturbing complaint, it was reported that Reese walked into a colleague’s “office, closed the door, sat down, and without any context, said ‘Jews…'” And according to Schutz, city records reveal that multiple women filed complaints against Reese that outline a “pattern of xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Latino behavior.” Earlier this Summer, Reese was ordered to enroll in online sexual harassment and discrimination courses.
The city council has until the end of the year to approve a 2025 budget – and if they can’t do that, the poll reveals that 67 percent of Chicagoans would blame the mayor, while 67 percent already believe that he’s “irresponsibly managing” the city’s budget process.
Just a year and a half into his term and Johnson is already viewed as a lame duck and ineffective mayor – and the numbers prove it. And it’s clear that he’s losing the support of his fellow Democrats on the city council – representing a very bad sign for the embattled mayor as he struggles to find solutions to the city’s most pressing issues.
