BRANDON JOHNSON and everybody else
BRANDON JOHNSON and everybody else
On Tuesday, February 28, Chicago voters will cast ballots for candidates for city offices. There is a lot to know and a lot to be said about all the many people running in all these many races. It is honestly straight wild how many candidates the average well-intentioned voter could be forming an opinion about let alone volunteering for right now.
My social media bubble is telling me that everybody knows and feels and believes the same things I do about these candidates, but my real-life conversations are telling me a lot of folks are undecided or unclear on their decisions. So I’m writing this for two reasons:
1) If you’re not sure who to vote for, but we share a lot of the same core values, I got you!
2) If you’re already clear on your votes, I’m here to urge you to do everything in your power to boost Brandon Johnson and the progressive slate in the next 72 hours.
Let’s do this.
If you’re not sure who you’re voting for
For the time being I’m going to assume that you, like me, believe in things like racial, economic, gender, disability, and environmental justice, and support progressive policies like affordable housing, fully-funded public schools, equitable job creation & access, safety for queer and trans people, abortion rights, solutions to public safety that aren’t about cops and prisons, a plan to prevent climate disaster, funding for the arts, and so forth.
If that’s the case, I urge you to look to United Working Families, The Triibe, the Reader, and the People’s Unity Platform, among others, to choose your candidates. The leftist darling Girl, I Guess guide has also really blown up this year and I find its explanations/citations useful to keep handy (though it won’t tell you why Vallas is bad and the tone won’t always be useful for persuading the persuadables as opposed to loling with fellow leftists).
At the end of the day, endorsements say a lot - and honestly on this shit I’m almost anti do-your-own-research. Just trust the organizations that have been doing the work forever! Like UWF and CTU and the Treatment Not Trauma organizers and all the ward/neighborhood progressive groups.
Relatedly (or unrelatedly? lol), I know a lot of folks receiving this are fellow artists and maybe signed up because I often talk about dance stuff in this newsletter. I am deeply inspired by the folks who organized Chicago Artists for Brandon Johnson and would urge you to read their statement and sign on if you are moved to do so. Don’t take my word for it - trust the 200+ fellow working artists who are here to tell you that it’s Brandon or bust.
If you have further questions about making these decisions, please email, DM, or text me. Really!
If you’re good on your votes: it’s time to talk to others about Brandon Johnson
My focus is on Brandon because there is a trickle-down from him for progressive city council candidates (and to some extent abolitionist or at least less-shitty police district council candidates), and because I feel like we will just be fucked if he doesn’t win. That said, if you’re going hard for city council folks or otherwise, shoutout to that as well.
This section is broken into 3 categories: 1) talk to your people, 2) talk to strangers, 3) some talking points to support those convos.
Caveat to the below: this is not the be-all-end-all; it’s just where I’ve landed in this moment for the conversations I’ve been having. I might be wrong or really missing something, or simply not as strategic as I could be. It’s a process!
1. Talk to your people
The impact of talking to your personal contacts (or relational organizing, as it’s known in the organizing world) cannot be underestimated. My challenge to myself and everyone reading this is to bring up the election in every conversation you have with a Chicago resident between now and Tuesday. Bring it up over drinks, send texts, hit the DMs. This can be simple: “By the way I’m checking in with all my loved ones about this - have you thought about who you’re voting for in the election on Tuesday, or already cast your vote?” From there, bring up Brandon Johnson. Urge them to vote for him. Just try it!
Some core things that will help make these conversations easier are to balance curiosity with personal sharing - to alternate between questions like “What’s most on your mind as you’re deciding who to vote for? What issues do you care about?” and sharing statements like “I’m really excited about Brandon because…” Share honestly and personally about how you got to your decision and why you’re compelled to talk to others about it - but also get them talking! All the research from methodologies like deep canvassing and voter turnout best practices show that conversations are stickier when we 1) get others to share the personal stories that will shape their decisions - not just share our story or talking points, and 2) say explicitly how they’re going to activate on their decisions (aka what’s their plan to vote).
See below for more talking points on stuff that might come up in these convos, but my big picture encouragement here is just start these convos in the first place - go out of your way to do it, even if it feels tricky at first.
2. Talk to strangers
If there is one thing I wish more people in my general community knew was an option for how to spend their time and then would at least give it a try once or twice to see how it feels, it’s the process of talking to strangers about locally impactful issues by knocking on their doors or calling them on the phone, generally as part of a coordinated campaign for change led by local organizers.
I particularly love door-knocking, aka canvassing, because it is a physical experience out in the world, and because the highs and lows of it enrich my life with so much to reflect on, appreciate, learn about myself, build as skills, and tell as weird/funny stories (e.g. that one time I canvassed my 8th grade boyfriend’s parents, that one time a woman in deeply rural Virginia yelled “run! run! get back in your car!” as her dog leapt toward me). In short: even when it’s difficult, it’s net meaningful - and for most social change organizing, it is a central tool for moving hearts, minds, and votes. One day I should write a whole newsletter about it. But anyway:
You have endless opportunities to talk to strangers about Brandon all over the fucking city or from the comfort of your own home between now and Tuesday. That’s a link to the listing of allllll the canvassing and phonebanking shifts available. Most of them start in the late morning or early afternoon, and they’re truly all over the city - I guarantee there’s one reasonably close to where you live.
The average canvassing shift is about 3 hours - you arrive at the campaign office or staging location, get a brief training, take a rah-rah photo, and go knock a preset list of voters’ doors for a couple hours, paired up with another volunteer if you’re new or if you prefer (you can also bring a friend). The spoiler alert is that most people aren’t home, so you’re also just taking a walk around a beautiful Chicago neighborhood. You’ll probably have 5-10 actual conversations in your shift. The first 1 or 2 might be awkward because you’re figuring out your script and how it fits in your mouth, but then it gets smoother.
Some people will close the door immediately, many will think you’re Amazon, and a few will talk forever (in my last shift I had a lovely conversation that I finally had to wrap up when it wandered into chit chat about the local dispensary and whether I had any pets) - but along the way you will be building name recognition for Brandon and moving votes in his direction. I find I often fumble when a voter tells me they’re supporting the other guy, but so often people are eager and open to the conversation and the candidates I’m talking about. It also feels authentic: I am coming to them as a volunteer, as a fellow resident of their city or even their ward, with shared concerns if different life paths that brought us to those concerns. Yes, the responses can occasionally be discouraging and tiresome - but often they’re inspiring, reassuring, and at times a huge fuck-yeah.
In summary: give it a try and see what you find. There are a lot of ways to take action on behalf of our values in this world, and I'm not here to prescribe what path is right for you - but it's worth trying this one if you haven't before.
If Brandon makes it to the runoff you’ve got another month to fit in a shift if this weekend is already booked. My last canvassing shift before election day is Sunday at 1pm with United Neighbors of the 35th Ward if anyone would like to buddy up.
Middle of the road option: hit up the organizations, small businesses, and community networks you’re part of and ask them to endorse. I can share the kinds of language I’ve been using for these reachouts! It hasn’t worked all the way lol, but I’m still giving it a shot.
3. Talking points for these convos
Tbh, this is the section I am least confident about, because I’m a human with a healthy sense of self-doubt and there’s also just a lot you could include here. This is also the least-edited section because I’m adopting it directly from some info I threw together for friends and family recently. If you want more refined or expert explanations they are all over the voter guides at the top. Overall: Grains of salt scattered generously!
Also, if you’re knocking doors or phonebanking, the organization running the event will have a script. Use it!! They probably know what conversation points working best right now, and they have details and framing strategies galore. Trust the people doing the work and take advantage of the effort they’ve put into figure out what to say.
Okay, caveats aside, here are my current go-to points:
Bad things about Vallas
I sometimes start off using the language that Vallas is basically as close to voting to Trump as we get in Chicago, or that he is essentially right-wing in Dem clothing. For people who don't know a lot about what's going on but are typical blue-state folks, they'd be horrified at the notion of voting for someone Trumpy, so that will probably make them recoil as a baseline.
Some other details you can share:
Esp for parents w kids in CPS: he has a history of damaging public school systems (I believe largely through privatization and pushing charter school models) in Chicago, New Orleans, and Philly.
If the person you're talking to is solidly not into cops or at least cop-skeptical: just tell them he is endorsed by FOP (the Fraternal Order of Police) and that'll say everything they need to know. This is basically a guarantee that he will pursue/support nothing in the way of police reform or accountability in his tenure, and that he has no interest in addressing the root causes of crime/public safety issue but just thinks more cops is the answer (if cops were all we needed, Chicago would be the safest city in the world - we spend over $4 million a day on cops here).
Another thing on the cop front is the Triibe story about how his son, a cop in TX, murdered a Black person during a foot chase last year, and Vallas even after that proceeded to criticize the Chicago policy to reduce foot chases that went into place after 13-year-old Adam Toledo was killed. In short: Vallas is totally unapologetic about the violence that police and policing systems do. It's disgusting, it's racist, and people need to know about it so they don't vote for him.
He also recently was outed as having liked a bunch of racist content on twitter and has gotten on board with the whole right-wing "anti-CRT" attack on talking about race/racial history in schools - saying stuff like "When you introduce a curriculum that is not only divisive, but a curriculum that further undermines the relationship of children with their parents, with their families, that’s a dangerous thing. And for white parents, I mean, how are you going to discipline your child when your child comes home and your child has basically been told, you know, that their generation, their race, their parents, their grandparents they have discriminated against others and they have somehow victimized another person’s race.” This kind of content is truly straight out of Republican/MAGA playbook of the past few years. It's dangerous, and white people need to actively have conversations with other white people to organize them away from these harmful and racist attitudes - inclusive of not voting for Vallas.
Kind of a messaging-nerdy rabbit hole to close: If you're talking to someone who's really concerned about public safety and thinks Vallas is the answer, it will be a good idea to acknowledge the legitimacy of that concern while pointing out explicitly how Vallas is using dog-whistle racialized fear-mongering to mislead voters about what public safety really is (read: using racially-coded references to "crime" to appeal to white people's racism while having the cover of not having said anything overtly racist, and meanwhile supporting policies that decimate our communities and negatively impact all Chicagoans including his supporters themselves). I'm drawing heavily on Race-Class Narrative messaging research when I offer that to these folks, you might say something like:
"Most of us who live in Chicago - whether we’re Black or white or brown, whether we’re on the north side or south side or west side - we want to feel safe in our neighborhoods. But in this year’s election, people like Vallas are putting all of our families at risk. Vallas would defund the very things that build real public safety, like affordable housing and public schools and job creation programs, just to please his greedy donors. Then he turns around and points the finger for people's hard times at 'crime' and the over-policed Black and brown communities that simply don't have the resources that other neighborhoods in Chicago have - even taking endorsements from the FOP and speaking against the foot chase restrictions that might have saved Adam Toledo's life. When we reject this kind of scapegoating and come together across racial differences, we can make this a city we’re proud of and part of - whether we’re from Englewood or Lincoln Square. And this year, that means voting for Brandon Johnson."
(RCN research shows that explicitly naming race and racial scapegoating - rather than common Democrat race-blind centrist messaging - addresses what is already on voters' minds and also moves them toward supporting a vision of how inclusive policy benefits everyone. There are whole books and websites about this work, but that's my [to be clear, non-vetted] stab for now.)
Good things about Brandon
My long story short: Brandon is the candidate that all the organizations who push for good social change in Chicago (unions, United Working Families, racial and economic justice focused neighborhood groups) have come together to support. And he also comes from that world - after he was a CPS teacher he was an organizer for CTU (tho most recently he's been a Cook County Commissioner which I feel like has given him just the right amount of experience of working as an elected official without being too distant from the work on the ground or too much inside the machine). So what this means is: he's a coalition builder, he has the trust of all the people I personally trust, and he's also more likely than other supposed progressives running to actually be accountable to those organizations and try to push forward what they are working for, rather than fighting them like Lori has.
Some specific things Brandon supports (this is copied directly from Artists for Brandon Johnson):
Instituting a citywide youth hiring program, prioritizing youth ages 16-24
Passing the Treatment Not Trauma ordinance, which would create a 24-hour non-police crisis response hotline for mental health emergencies and halt the implementation of Mayor Lightfoot’s police co-responder program
Fully funding the Burge Torture Survivors Memorial, a permanent public memorial and one of the final pieces of the unprecedented Reparations for Burge Torture Victims Ordinance passed by Chicago City Council in 2015 that Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to follow through on even after recommendation to fully fund it by her Arts and Culture Transition Team
Ending the use of all gang databases that punish Black and Brown
communitiesConducting cumulative impact assessment to advance comprehensive environmental regulations in public schools
Protecting 65,000+ unhoused Chicago residents, creating stronger protections against evictions, and passing the Real Estate Transfer Tax on multi-million dollar property sales
He also has full platforms on Gender Justice, LGBTQ Rights, and Disability Justice, which I don't think anybody else has.
And Girl I Guess has SO much more detail analyzing his platforms.
Why not Chuy?
If someone is curious about or warm toward Chuy, I tend not to want to shame that because he's got a complex and certainly at times/in ways positive history in Chicago and I personally have supported him in the past. I usually say stuff like:
(soft, generous start) "You know, I've always been a fan of Chuy myself, but I feel like he's been doing great work in Congress and we need him there. He doesn't feel as invested or tapped in on what's going on on the ground in Chicago these days as Brandon is." (This is genuinely how I felt at the start of the cycle.)
(if I'm gonna get a bit more critical) "And to be honest, I don't fully understand why Chuy is running given that he's already leveled up to federal office. He hasn't built the kind of citywide coalition of progressive support that Brandon has, and it makes me wonder if he's just the classic career politician who wants to win his next office - unlike Brandon, who right now feels more invested in people and issues here in Chicago."
(if I'm really going negative) "I'll also admit that I started feeling a lot worse about Chuy after I saw he endorsed Rossana Rodriguez's challenger. Rossana represents the 33rd ward and has led on or even written most of the progressive legislation that a lot of candidates are running on right now, like Treatment Not Trauma and the bodily autonomy ordinance. I was honestly shocked and really dismayed that Chuy would endorse her opponent, who is backed by the FOP. It's like, what is he going for here? Felt like a betrayal. So that was the nail in the coffin for me and I'm voting Brandon."
Why not people like Kam or Ja'Mal?
They're not terrible but they're just not viable candidates polling/percentage wise right now, and it's a shame that votes to them could otherwise go to Brandon.
Why not Lori?
Just gonna copy from GIG for this:
"We all know Lori’s Greatest Hits. She met with Ivanka Trump in 2019 and then spent the rest of her administration claiming she “stood up to Trump” on various issues when clearly she didn’t stand up to him enough to not take a picture with his daughter. She reneged on her campaign promises, forcing CTU to strike less than six months into her administration, and almost made them do it again two years later. She raised the bridges downtown during the George Floyd Rebellions, then doubled down on that decision, and sicced the cops on people protesting a Columbus statue (this is how we found out she has the biggest dick in Chicago!). She gave 60% of Chicago’s Federal COVID relief money to CPD. She campaigned on supporting an elected school board, and then opposed the bill that eventually passed through the General Assembly. The list goes on and on. I think we’ve had quite enough of Lori, and we clearly can’t trust a damn word that she says. She cannot have a second term as Mayor."
And then add in anything else you've been disappointed by personally.
Alright friends. Get out there. Vote for Brandon and everybody else on the left. Talk to your people. Try talking to strangers. It’s not too late. We got this. Thanks for reading and see you out there.