Mayor Brandon Johnson
Rocked by a migrant crisis that has many concerned about the city’s future, only 21 percent of Chicago voters approve of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s leadership during his eight months in office, according to a recent poll.
Among the unhappy voters are Black males. Only 14 percent of them approve of Johnson’s leadership in his first term in office.
The poll was conducted by Tulchin Research, a Democratic pollster whose clients include County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and California Governor Gavin Newsom. The poll was first published in the Chicago Sun-Times.
The poll was conducted January 4-9. It was the second poll taken regarding Johnson’s leadership since November, when 28 percent of registered voters approved the mayor’s leadership in office. But that poll was conducted by the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, and the latest poll was reportedly paid for by “Stand For Children,” which the Chicago Teacher’s Union dismissed as “right wing,” and the Union’s president reportedly further mockingly calls the polling entity “Stand On Children.”
While Johnson won over 52 percent of the vote against Paul Vallas in the runoff, he won over 80 percent of the vote in Chicago’s 17 Black wards.
Last September, in a one-on-one interview at the Economic Club in Chicago, Johnson announced he planned to run for re-election in 2027.
But some Blacks in Chicago already believe Johnson will become a one-term mayor because of the migrant crisis that is straining the city’s resources at Chicago’s 28 shelters.
Both polls cite the migrant crisis as a big problem and reveal disappointment under Johnson’s leadership. About 34,000 migrants live in Chicago, and the city is running out of money and resources to support them.
In the latest poll, voters were asked, “how do you feel each of the following is performing?” The list included “Brandon Johnson as Chicago Mayor.”
Only 7 percent of those surveyed rated Johnson’s performance as mayor as “excellent,” with another 14 percent rating it as “good.” About 69 percent either rated Johnson’s performance “only fair” (27 percent) or “poor” (43 percent) or said they “didn’t know” (10 percent).
Among registered voters, 14 percent of Black men rated Johnson’s performance as “excellent or good,” with 67 percent branding the work he’s done as mayor as “fair or poor.”
Johnson got a “fair or poor” job rating from 75 percent of white registered voters surveyed and 69 percent of Latino voters.
The poll has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.38 percentage points.
Johnson’s campaign spokesman Bill Neidhardt told the Sun-Times, “We don’t take any stock in skewed polls commissioned by those opposed to the mayor’s agenda. This is the same kind of poll that showed Brandon Johnson wouldn’t be mayor. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.”
The other poll by the Illinois Policy Institute gave Johnson a 28-percent approval rating. That rating is just one point above former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s following the Laquan McDonald scandal. Last February, where she lost her re-election bid for a second term, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot also had an approval rating of just 27 percent.
When broken down by age, Johnson’s approval rating in the Illinois Policy poll was highest among those ages 18-29 at 32 percent and lowest among those ages 40-49 at 24 percent. His disapproval rating is highest among those ages 50-64.
One year after he began his first term in office, Emanuel received a 52-percent rating in 2012, while Lightfoot received a 75-percent rating.
On political issues in the Illinois Policy poll, 66 percent of voters disapprove of Johnson’s handling of crime and public safety in Chicago. About 64 percent of voters disapprove of the mayor’s handling of the migrant crisis, and 63 percent of voters disapprove of the housing and homeless crises.
That same poll said that while Lightfoot, Emanuel and Johnson’s low scores were all below 30 percent, Mayor Michael Bilandic’s approval rating was 33 percent after the 1979 blizzard, when many streets went unplowed and CTA trains on the Green Line (the A train) and other CTA stations on the South Side didn’t stop to pick up passengers and instead provided service to riders waiting at train stations on the North Side.
Two years after he was elected, Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, received a 54-percent approval rating during the infamous “Council Wars,” where a group of white aldermen formed a group to stop the City Council in an effort to reject Washington’s ordinance proposals. During Washington’s second term in 1987, he received a 64-percent approval rating.
